The playwright Simon Gray died of lung cancer on 7 August 2008 at the age of seventy-one. He also found success later in life as a diarist, at first in wryly comic records of the disaster-prone productions of his plays – but with tragic irony most recently in The Smoking Diaries, reflecting on his lifelong addiction to cigarettes (and much else besides). Here, his friend the actor and writer Simon Callow pays a personal tribute.

Philip Ridley is one of the most imaginative and sensational playwrights working in Britain today. Born in 1964, he began by studying painting at St Martin's School of Art in London and wrote the highly acclaimed screenplay for The Krays (1990). He made his theatre debut at the Bush Theatre in 1991 with The Pitchfork Disney. Since then, other plays have included The Fastest Clock in the Universe (Hampstead, 1992), Ghost from a Perfect Place (Hampstead, 1994), Vincent River (Hampstead, 2000; Trafalgar Studios, 2007), and the highly controversial Mercury Fur (Paines Plough/Plymouth, 2005). This was followed by Leaves of Glass (Soho, 2007) and Piranah Heights (Soho, 2008). He's also written five plays for young people and many books for children, as well as directing two films from his own screenplays, The Reflecting Skin (1990) and The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995). Ridley continues to divide opinion: depending on your point of view, he's either Britain's sickest playwright or a singular, prolific, and amazingly visionary genius. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz talking to Philip Ridley in one of the ‘Theatre Conversations’ series at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London, on 25 October 2007. Aleks Sierz, a Contributing Editor of NTQ, is theatre critic of Tribune and author of the seminal study In-Yer-Face Theatre (Faber, 2001).

Charles Marowitz's Silent Partners, based on Eric Bentley's book The Brecht Memoir (1989) and on the author's subsequent interviews with Bentley, premiered under Marowitz's own direction at the Scena Theatre in Washington, DC, in 2006. Here, he describes the genesis of the play and the working relationship with Bentley which in turn explored Bentley's working relationship with Brecht. Charles Marowitz was a close collaborator with Peter Brook in the RSC's experimental work in the 1960s, and was founder and director of the Open Space Theatre in London, but now works permanently as a writer, director, and critic in the USA.

The familiarity bred by the notoriety in its own times of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi has been accompanied by neglect for his other work, especially that which seems of peripheral interest to the theatre practitioner. In this article, Kimberly Jannarone argues that his earlier Caesar Antichrist falls into the unusual category of ‘a piece of theatre not intended for the stage’ – apparently unstageable, yet not a closet drama since, in Jarry's scrupulous care for its published form, he created his own ‘theatre of the book’, anticipating the later modernist use of collage while also demonstrating in words and pictures his ‘pataphysical’ interest in the dialectics of opposites. Kimberly Jannarone received her MFA and DFA from the Yale School of Drama, and is currently teaching in the Department of Theater Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She wrote on ‘Puppetry and Pataphysics: Populism and the Ubu Cycle’, in NTQ67 (2001).

When Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre travelled to Britain in 1988, performing Stars in the Morning Sky at the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), it was their first tour abroad. Since then, this repertory ensemble has had an enormous impact on audiences across the world because of its powerful artistry, sustained by the unique training methods, emotional and philosophical as much as technical, developed by Dodin and his collaborators. This article is an account of the three productions directed by Dodin since King Lear (St Petersburg, March 2006, and performed at the Barbican in London in October that year). They are Life and Fate (2007) after the novel by Vasily Grossman, Long Day's Journey into Night (2008) by Eugene O'Neill, and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (2008, its premiere in April preceding that of Long Day's Journey in December). Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Against the received wisdom, Mark Howell-Meri argues here for a continuing tradition between Elizabethan and Restoration (or ‘long eighteenth-century’) playhouses. He bases his argument in part on measurements which suggest the common use of traditional building methods and relationships between measurements and spaces based on ad-quadratum geometry, as shared by theatre builders across the centuries; but also on his own experience as a performance-practitioner specializing in an historiographical approach to making sense of eighteenth-century plays for today's audiences in surviving (or reconstructed) eighteenth-century spaces. He was the first director to restore a three-sided stage front to the Georgian Theatre (now Theatre Royal) in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1987 with his hit production of Garrick's Miss in her Teens (1747), and other research productions have included Robert Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737), Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), Inchbald's The Midnight Hour (1787), again at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, and Lillo's The London Merchant (1731). He is now completing his doctoral thesis, ‘Theatre and Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Play Production on the Three-Sided Stage’.

In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific artists/performers Wrights & Sites, and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance. The paper describes four main features of the proposal for ‘actors as signposts’ – pointing to specificity, movement from anti-character to collective subject, performance as trajectory, and the restoration of corporeality – illustrating these with reference to the work of Punchdrunk, Francis Alÿs, and geographer Michael Zinganel, among others. Phil Smith is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Art and Media, University of Plymouth and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Dartington College of Arts. Author and co-deviser of over a hundred plays or performances for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Tams Theater (Munich), and New Perspectives (Nottingham), he is company dramaturg for TNT (Munich) and a core member of Wrights & Sites. His solo walking-based performances include The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside (texts published by Intellect, 2009).

Recent performances of female roles in Shakespeare's plays by adult males help to perpetuate the myth that this was the practice of Shakespeare's time. This article attempts to reinforce the view that all female roles were played by boys – i.e., young males with unbroken voices – by analyzing the demands made by the plays. Shakespeare regularly had available to him up to four boy actors, perhaps more. Yet some plays have as few as two female roles, and few have more than four. The conclusion is that Shakespeare would have been highly unlikely to waste the resources of his company by calling upon adult males to play parts that make use of the talents of his boys. Stanley Wells is Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. A former editor of Shakespeare Survey and director of the Shakespeare Institute, he is author of numerous books on Shakespeare, general editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.

A defining characteristic of ‘Theatre for Development’ is its ‘unfinished’ quality, whereby plays or scenarios remain more or less ongoing dialogues. In the following article, Samuel Ayedime Kafewo discusses the relationship between the fiction of the performance and the reality of the performed issues in one drama based on this technique, concerned with the divisive issue of citizenship rights in Nigeria. What is the role of processing and intervention in encouraging new attitudes towards the citizenship issues tackled in the project? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the methodologies adopted? And what was the overall impact of the project, ‘Citizenship, Participation, and Accountability’, as undertaken by the Theatre for Development Centre and the Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance in 2001–2002 in Kaduna State, north-western Nigeria? Samuel Ayedime Kafewo is an active member of the Zaria Popular Theatre/Theatre for Development movement. He is Reader in the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, and has published extensively in both local and international journals.

The festival season in Stratford, Ontario, was fraught with an offstage drama which seemed to reprise that of thirty years ago, when an experiment with a triumviral directorate ended in dissension and near disaster. However, once the dust had settled, an interestingly balanced season emerged, mixing Shakespeare and Shaw, ancient Greek and modern tragedy, Beckett and balletic Moby Dick. Here Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin offer their assessment of a wide-ranging repertoire. Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist and long-time theatre critic for the monthly journal Canadian Forum. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Toronto's York University. Don Rubin is the founding editor of the quarterly Canadian Theatre Review, General Editor of Routledge's six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies at Toronto's York University.