Female Jewish stereotypes such as the ‘Jewish Mother’, the ‘Jewish American Princess’, and the ‘Radical Bitch’ are often closely associated with sexuality. Roberta Mock proceeds from Riv-Ellen Prell's premise that these stereotypes are a projection of male Jewish fears of a changing secular society which yet must sustain religious continuity. She links a discussion of theoretical transgression of women's social roles to the physicalization of this transgression by female Jewish comedians who embody an explicit rebellion against function. Through the comic mimesis of established stereotypes, often combining more than one in a single characterization, female Jewish comedians typify themselves (to excess) from another's point of view, transforming themselves from the object of a gaze to subjects who redirect its focus. The appeal of these comedians moves away from a localized female (perhaps Jewish) audience to a more inclusive acceptance by applying Bakhtin's theories of ‘the grotesque body’, creating a subversion which embodies the ‘normal’ by being ‘abnormal’. The Jewish woman comedian is placed in the difficult position of being estranged from the community which ‘created’ her by being associated with the dominant culture, while being tolerated but not accepted as ‘one of them’ by that dominant culture. Roberta Mock teaches Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth. She is a co-founder of Lusty Juventus theatre company, and is currently editing a book entitled Performing Processes, which explores the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response.

In the south-west German village of Hayingen, the playwright-director Martin Schleker presents large open-air productions of politically sensitive yet entertaining plays to mass audiences on an annual basis. This article explores the element of risk in Schleker's work: his use of purely amateur performers; his job-creation schemes for young people; and his left-wing and often anti-Catholic stance on issues such as racism and nuclear arms before often deeply conservative, culturally Catholic audiences. Schleker's work is situated in the wider context of the state-funded, civic theatres in Germany, and of the tradition of open-air ‘Naturtheater’ which is particularly strong in the Swabian region. Some assumptions surrounding such binary divides as amateur-professional and high art-entertainment are also explored. Data for this article was collected in the Hayingen ‘Naturtheater’ during a period of ethnographic research supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Having completed her doctorate at Sheffield University, Alison Phipps has been working as a lecturer in the Department of German – and in particular in the Centre for Intercultural Germanistics – at Glasgow University since October 1995. She has published in the areas of her research interests, which include contemporary German theatre and performance research, Ethnographic approaches to language education, and popular German culture and intercultural studies.

In ‘Artaud at Rodez’, published in the sixth issue of the original Theatre Quarterly, Charles Marowitz pursued an investigation into the nature of the alleged madness of Antonin Artaud, for which he was confined during the Second World War – eventually being transferred to the asylum at Rodez where he was subjected to electric shock ‘therapy’. Marowitz's article, which later formed the basis for his play of the same title, explored the motivations and responses of those involved: here, Nigel Ward focuses rather on the nature and effects of the treatment itself, inflicted on Artaud no less than fifty-one times – a treatment which, however controversial, was ironically appropriate for the creator of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ which itself claimed to purge its audience of weaknesses and to heal through shock. Nigel Ward is a tutor on the MA in Performance Studies course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

In Desdemona, Paula Vogel's revision of Shakespeare's Othello, we have a Desdemona who is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of lago's fiction into reality. Why has Paula Vogel created a Desdemona who, though ostensibly inside out, still appears to be Othello's projection? Sharon Friedman argues that although Paula Vogel's raucous Desdemona draws on many of the conventions of feminist revisioning, it marks an important shift in the feminist critical perspective in drama – as characterized by Lynda Hart, ‘from discovering and creating positive images of women … to analyzing and disrupting the ideological codes embedded in the inherited structures of dramatic representation’. In a deconstructive parody, Vogel dislodges the convention of the intimate scene between women in Shakespeare's theatre and expands it into an entire play. Decentering the tragic hero, she foregrounds and enacts the threat of female desire that incites the tragic action, and disrupts the familiar categories of virgin, whore, and faithful handmaiden by forging links with gender ideology and class status. The author, Sharon Friedman, is an Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of New York University, and the author of several articles on American women dramatists, including Susan Glaspell and Lorraine Hansberry.

Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Ian Watson's article looks at two separate but interrelated subjects – the role of the arts in remedying urban dereliction, now a global phenomenon; and the development of one specific arts gathering in healing the larger wounds of Peruvian society after years of civil warfare and economic chaos. It was from the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, in the late sixteenth century, that the first noteworthy revolt against the Spanish Conquistadors was launched, by the legendary Inca leader Túpac Amaru. It was to this city that Mario Delgado, founder of the Lima-based group Cuatrotablas, invited the Third Theatre gathering, just two years after its inauguration from Eugenio Barba's initiative in 1976. The use of the city as a base for the most prominent of the guerrilla groups made a decennial return of the Third Theatre gathering impossible – and the reasons for holding the 1998 gathering in Ayacucho all the stronger, not least because of the choice of the city by the state-funded agency PromPeru as a focus for national cultural regeneration. Ian Watson, an Advisory Editor and regular contributor to NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey, knits together the threads of the story.

Edward Bond's The Sea was first presented at the Royal Court Theatre under William Gaskill's direction in 1973, and later confirmed as a modern classic in its revival in 1991 at the National Theatre– where it was claimed that it could only have been written by an Englishman. But, as La Mer, it was chosen to open the Thėâtre de la Citė in Toulouse, where Bond scholar and editor Ian Stuart saw Jacques Rosner's production in October, and here reports on the resultant meeting between an English comedy and ‘French serenity’.

Jill Davis, Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, ‘spins off in other directions’ from what began as a review of Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997).