A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).

Lloyd Newson has worked in Europe for some twenty-three years with DV8 Physical Theatre, creating powerful socio-political pieces which address sexuality and interpersonal relationships. These works are generally created with performers through workshop processes and collaboratively with composers. London's experimental dance and theatre scenes in the 1980s and early 1990s provided a challenging context for Lloyd Newson's early creative endeavours. Here, Janet Lansdale takes one work, Strange Fish, as the locus of her discussion on narrative positions in relation to dominant forms of modern dance and issues of sexuality, homophobia, and politics within physical theatre. She conceptualizes and contextualizes ‘voices’ as ‘authorial’ and ‘ancestral’, and traces their manifestation in readings of the work. Complementary and sometimes competing voices from author, text, reader, and cultural history are articulated through a range of intertextual perspectives. This is the second in a series of articles on this work. Janet Lansdale is Distinguished Professor in Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she was Head of Department, and later Head of the School of Performing Arts. She is the author and editor of four books on dance theory, history, and analysis, the most recent being Dancing Texts: Intertextuality in Interpretation (1999).

Stanislavsky's first production of The Seagull is well documented in English, in The Seagull Produced by Stanislavsky, edited by S. D. Balukhaty in 1952. But little is known of his exploratory work on an intended second production almost two decades later amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period, and the rehearsal notes made by Stanislavsky's assistant Pyotr Sharov remained unpublished even in Russian until 1987. Here, Laurence Senelick provides the first English translation of these notes, contextualizing them with an account of the difficulties under which Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre were working at the time. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, and a long-time contributor to TQ and NTQ, which published his articles on the Craig–Stanislavsky Hamlet, serf theatre in Russia, and Wedekind and Lenin at the music hall. His last book, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, won the George Jean Nathan award as the best work of dramatic criticism of 2000–01, and his previous book, The Chekhov Theatre: a Century of Plays in Production, won the Barnard Hewitt award of the American Society of Theatre Research. He is currently translating and editing the complete plays and dramatic fragments of Anton Chekhov for Norton Publishers.

This essay is concerned with the history of wild animal training between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, specifically with circus acts involving ‘big cats’. The author, John Stokes, is sympathetic to the view that such performances are inhumane, degrading to animal and human alike, but rather than simply rehearsing familiar attitudes, he subjects the ‘big cat’ act to a performance analysis based on established criteria, in the belief that, if performance theory is to have the widespread application that its advocates claim, then it should be able to elucidate many different kinds of theatrical event. His primary materials are the myriad biographies and autobiographies of wild animal trainers that were produced during the heyday of their art, and which he finds to be frequently characterized by an unexpected thoughtfulness and breadth of experience, besides being highly informative about performance aesthetics. John Stokes is Professor of Modern British Literature in the Department of English, King's College London. He is a regular theatre reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and co-author, together with Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, of Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time (Cambridge, 1988) and Three Tragic Actresses (Cambridge, 1996).

Twenty-five years after the landmark publication of Theatre of the Oppressed, there is no denying the continuing influence of Augusto Boal on theatre practitioners, community workers, and political activists worldwide. To judge by the number of recent publications by or about Boal (including five best-selling books from Routledge in little more than a decade), the ‘Boal Boom’ shows no evidence of decline. There is also, however, an emerging culture of critique around various aspects of the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed; and in the following article, Paul Dwyer argues that a reflexive, critical approach to using Boal's techniques should begin with an acknowledgement that they are not based on a stable theoretical foundation. Rather, the underlying principles, articulated by Boal in the many anecdotes that fill his books, lectures, and workshops, appear to have shifted over the years to become more closely aligned with the expectations of his audience. The theory of Theatre of the Oppressed should thus be seen as a co-creation for which the readers and propagators of Boal's work share a significant responsibility. Paul Dwyer is a lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.

Much interest has recently been shown in the contributions of the actor in the performance of Tudor comedy. Lesley Wade Soule's subject is the larger performative framework of such contributions. Focusing on the main action of The Taming of the Shrew, she finds revealing examples of the characteristic presentational structures found in Tudor comedy, including direct audience address, mimesis as a pretext for presentation, a ritual/project structure, the use of stage personae, and a concluding ceremony of celebration. Her essay describes the nature of these structural elements, and offers examples of their functions in the play's performance as bodied forth in the text. Lesley Wade Soule is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter, where she teaches directing and the staging of Shakespeare. She has written articles on performance in the medieval and Elizabethan theatres and is the author of Actor as Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Devil, and the Boy Rosalind (Greenwood Press, 2000).

This essay is a reflection on the site-specific performance You are Here, created by Charles Campbell and Steve Epley on the roof of the University of Minnesota Tate Lab of Physics in May 2002. Scott Magelssen treats the production within the context of the previous site-specific work of Campbell and Epley, and their Minneapolis-based theatre company Skewed Visions, exploring the project's themes of knowledge-production and memory, the company's unique use of space, and the actor-object mode of performance. Scott Magelssen is Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois, where he teaches theatre history and dramaturgy, advises the student-run experimental theatre group, and occasionally directs productions. His current research focuses on the performative and historiographic practices employed by outdoor ‘living history’ museums in Europe and the US.

Plans for the celebration of Odin's fortieth birthday, September–October 2004

Report on the ‘Genet in Performance’ symposium held at the University of East Anglia on 17–18 October 2003