The chapter considers Pirandello’s unsuccessful attempts to establish a national theatre in Italy. Influenced by examples of national theatres in other countries such as the Comédie Française in France and disappointed with the lack of financial resources to sustain his own very successful Teatro d’Arte, Pirandello tried to use Mussolini’s influence and the rise of Fascism to create a national theatre run by himself with full state sponsorship. He developed elaborate plans for a national theatre that would operate in three major cities and house ensemble casts, some of whose members would travel between the cities to facilitate touring productions. The plans would have involved considerable expenditure, including the costs of establishing the technical infrastructure for the three theatres as well as of maintaining three ensembles of actors. Despite initial encouragement and support from Mussolini, Pirandello encountered competition from other entrepreneurs and artists and political opposition, and eventually failed to achieve his goal.

In this essay, retired Major-General Jonathan Shaw, who served as commander of the allied forces in southern Iraq in 2007, gives a vivid account of his role as military adviser during the rehearsals of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. Shaw explains why he focused his briefing of the actors on the dynamics of garrisoning, on how ‘command’ operates, and what the stresses and strains for soldiers are in these circumstances. Shaw’s first-hand experience as a military leader stationed in the Middle East during the Iraq War gave the actors fresh insight into how the play’s wartime setting, as much as Othello’s racial diversity, shapes his reaction to Cassio’s disorderly and drunken behaviour and to Iago’s accusation of infidelity against Cassio and Desdemona.

This interview with Nicholas Hytner concentrates on his 2003 production of Henry V at the National Theatre, which opened a few months after the US–UK coalition invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Hytner reflects on the production decisions that responded to the immediacy of the conflict and the strong public opposition to it witnessed in the historic 15 February protests. The interview considers whether theatre can influence public opinion during wartime and how our use and understanding of Shakespeare’s plays has changed over time and through different conflicts.

This article illustrates the paradoxical position that Molière occupies in contemporary English-speaking culture: at once absent and omnipresent, little known by the general public but enjoying a select place on the British stage. Molière’s success in Britain over the last few decades has been due to the use of strategies to reduce the gulf that sometimes separates the original plays and the expectations of the English-speaking public. Numerous translators have sought to accentuate their socio-political relevance. However, their relocalisation and the addition of modern cultural references have often been merely a pretext for increasing their burlesque content and introducing quips and puns, thereby making them more commercial. Domestication can be seen also in the transformation of the alexandrine into a verse form that emphasises rhyme to add still more verbal humour. Of the ten adaptations produced by the National Theatre in London, each in its own way contributes to the debate surrounding the ethos of translation. Should Molière translations preserve the original or endlessly reinvent themselves to make the public laugh, as the dramatist himself sought to do? Most translators from the second half of the twentieth century knew to which camp they belonged.

Piotr Olkusz and Dobrochna Ratajczakowa’s Polish Enlightenment constellation not only discloses the processes contributing to the construction of modern Poland, but also how, in the atmosphere of postwar hopes, many Polish scholars focused on the eighteenth century, visibly expressing animosity towards the Romantic paradigm dominant in prewar Polish culture; it was much easier to set functionalism and political involvement against traditionalism and nineteenth-century realism in an atmosphere backed up by declarations of objectives shared by authorities. Ratajczakowa links the theatre and the press as crucial processes of social transformation from the broader public sphere to ‘concrete audiences present in physical places’, and shows how Wojciech Bogusławski and dynamic forms of audience reception in the late eighteenth century paved the way for a highly politicized and engaged forms of spectatorships in the twentieth century. Olkusz charts the clash between public and national theatre, articulated in the dialectical tensions between the Enlightenment outlook and the Romantic paradigm.

Acting in Stoppard requires verbal dexterity, great emotional intelligence, and clarity of thought. The original production of Arcadia, in which the essay’s author played Valentine, marked a particularly productive combination of text, actors, and cultural and intellectual history that highlighted the genius of Stoppard’s writing for the theatre.

Stoppard arrived in England as an eight-year-old child and soon came to identify with his adopted country, although after his initial success as a playwright this identification was largely with the arts establishment and the metropolitan cultural elite.

This chapter traces Ibsen’s family background and childhood in Skien (1828–43), his youth as an apprentice to a pharmacist in Grimstad (1843–50) and his years in Kristiania and Bergen until he left Norway in 1864. Ibsen’s literary activity started before he left Grimstad and it continued in Kristiania. After failing the university’s entrance exam in 1850, Ibsen was offered a full-time position at the new Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. The theatre was dedicated to the training of Norwegian actors, the introduction of spoken Norwegian on the stage and the promotion of national dramatic writing. In 1857 Ibsen left Bergen to take up a position at the corresponding Norwegian theatre in Kristiania. The theatre experienced economic difficulties that also affected Ibsen’s finances, and more and more he came to experience the theatre as a restriction on his literary ambitions. These negative aspects have to be balanced, however, against the exceptional training these years offered the young playwright. Furthermore, Norwegian theatre by the middle of the nineteenth century was fully integrated in the European theatre business, and by the 1860s Ibsen had become acquainted with and had started to articulate his ambitions against the contemporary, French-dominated, repertoire.

This chapter explores what we mean by ‘adaptation’ when discussing classic Greek tragedy in performance and to what extent terms such as translation, version, (re)writing, (re)imagining, etc. can or indeed should be distinguished from one another. Examining the nomenclature attached to four different recent theatrical adaptations of classic Greek tragedy, namely Medea, Phaedra, Iphigenia, and The Persians, this chapter establishes that the differentiation between adaptation and related modalities such as rewriting, translation, and version, is intrinsically linked to processes of reception. Elucidating the difficulty of establishing boundaries between original writing and rewriting, or indeed adaptation for performance, this chapter takes the position that the act of (re)writing asserts the validity of an established dramatic text; it confirms that a text belongs to the category of classic drama. At the same time, it promises an often radical (re)investigation of its premises.

Chapter 2 explores the productivity of performance through two adjacent, but very different sites on London’s South Bank: the collection of monumental arts centres clustered along the River Thames – especially the National Theatre – and the tunnels under Waterloo Station that have more recently been refashioned as performance venues. While the South Bank has for decades been defined by its massive, purpose-built vestiges of Britain’s welfare state, since 2009 it has been supplemented by a site only partly repurposed from its former use as a store for railway equipment. As this chapter discusses, live performance has historically been seen as unproductive in classical and contemporary economic thought. But if we observe performance through its socio-spatial infrastructure rather than its labour process, a more productive theatre emerges. This chapter suggests that contemporary London theatre has salved its productivity problems by spatialising and socialising them. And the South Bank suggests that London’s own productivity problems – made significantly worse by the financial crisis of 2008 – might in turn be solved, even if only temporarily, by theatricalising them.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.