Marketing strategies today often rely on creating an emotional connection to the brand through personalizing or humanizing the business. This article explores how both the American Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey and the British Bertram Mills Circus used this strategy in the early twentieth century to encourage audiences to attend their circus rather than any other. John Ringling and Bertram Mills may best be remembered for totemic images but their celebrity was constructed through a reiterative performance process. In this article Kate Holmes examines the shifts in their representation performed in press, publicity, and anecdote to explore how each iteration of their public identity functioned to publicize their respective circuses at significant points. She also explores how these circus celebrity identities, focused on achieving financial success for a commercial enterprise, activated and perpetuated national self-identities linked to class. Kate Holmes, who has previous experience as a qualified marketer, recently completed a PhD in Drama at the University of Exeter. Her research on circus performance has been published in Early Popular Visual Culture and is forthcoming in Stage Women, a collection of essays on early twentieth-century female performers.

Further to his enquiries into ‘Shakespeare and the Three Bears’ (NTQ 106), Nick de Somogyi here turns his attention from Harry, Hunks, and Sackerson to another celebrity triumvirate of fighting bears at Paris Garden, likewise stabled some few hundred yards away from the playhouses Shakespeare knew. Jeremy, Sampson, and Daniel may have bequeathed a lower profile to posterity, but the endurance implicit in their Old Testament naming lends perspective to the enigma of Bankside's parallel entertainments – between blood sport and high art. In particular, it is argued here that the briefly documented life of Sampson-the-Bear enduringly informs the ‘ancient grudge’ with which Romeo and Juliet begins. A Contributing Editor to NTQ since 2003, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and works as an independent scholar, textual consultant, freelance editor, and illustrator. The founder editor of both the Globe Quartos and Shakespeare Folios series for Nick Hern Books (1997–2015), he has lectured at Cambridge University, the Museum of London, and for the Rose Trust, and has curated four exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–16). His publications include Shakespeare's Theatre of War (Ashgate, 1998), Shakespeare on Theatre (Nick Hern Books, 2011), and (as Consultant Editor) Shakespeare in 100 Objects (V&A, 2014).

The commemoration of sacrifice and martyrdom in the Iran–Iraq war led to dissemination of the ‘sacred defence’ culture and its theatre progeny – the Arzeshi genre, which is rooted in Shi’i religious values, Persian culture, and Iranian performance traditions. In response to this, Iranian anti-war theatre practitioners have intervened through a counter-conduct theatricality made up of characters, stories, reasoning, embodied emotions, and scenic languages. A thematic and aesthetic analysis of three stagings of the anti-war play The Whispers Behind the Front Line by the prominent Iranian playwright/director Alirezā Nāderi shows that there has been a shift over two periods of time regarding ‘disguised counter-hegemonic dramaturgy’, alternative characterization, and the ethical engagements of artists with the narrative of war. In this study Marjan Moosavi shows that theatre counter-conducts have shifted since 1995 from a realist aesthetic, reflecting a specific event – the Iran–Iraq war – to a universal, abstract aesthetic practice that sees war as a global phenomenon. Marjan Moosavi is an Iranian-Canadian PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. She has published articles on Iranian dramaturgy and diasporic theatre in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, TDR, and Critical Stages.

Between 1975 and 1988, the Korean Public Performance Ethics Committee (KPPEC) censored obscene language, body exposure, and extreme violence, as is common in all forms of theatre censorship. However, the KPPEC focused in particular on depictions of the President of South Korea, and proscribed any work that challenged or even questioned the public image of the President as a strong leader for a nation in crisis. Despite the official abolition of censorship in 1988, it was discovered in 2016 that a blacklist had been in operation that excluded ‘left’ and ‘pro-Pyongyang’ theatre directors and actors from accessing public funding. By exploring the process of censorship, Seong-kwan Cho in this article interrogates the relationship between the theatre and the nation. Seong-kwan Cho is a lecturer at the School of Global Communication at Kyung Hee University. With Jae-beom Hong, in his current research he has been exploring North Korean performance, and his article on this subject is forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal.

Focusing on the hadra ritual of the ‘Issawiya Sufi community, in this article Dia Barghouti explores how the narrative of the Prophet Muhammad's ‘night journey’ is performed within the Tunisian socio-cultural context. Drawing on the philosophical writings of the twelfth-century Sufi saint Muhyidin Ibn ‘Arabi, the author examines how re-enacting narratives of transcendence, and particularly of myths associated with the patron saint of the order, Sidi Ben-’Issa, allows members of the ‘Issawiya community to explore the ontological principles of Sufi cosmology by experiencing them directly in the body. Dia Barghouti is a playwright and PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her plays have been performed at Ashtar Theatre and the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah in Palestine.

In this article, Michaela Antoniou offers a close analysis of Nikos Karathanos's 2016 production of Aristophanes’ The Birds, which was staged at the Epidaurus Festival with the support of the Onassis Cultural Centre. She argues that the context embodies Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the ‘invented tradition’, and examines its often problematic relation to the Centre, which, as a powerful and economically independent organization, occupies a dominant position in the field of theatre in Greece. The essential parameters and scope of Karathanos's performance aesthetics are analyzed through the lens of Michel Foucault and Kornelius Kastoriadis, while attention is also given to the media discourse surrounding the work. Finally, the article historicizes Karathanos's The Birds in relation to Koun's renowned 1959 production in order to examine Karathanos's intention to interpret the play as a production for his and our time. Michaela Antoniou is Teaching Fellow in Acting at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is also an actress, playwright, author, and translator, and has previously published articles on the work of Karolos Koun.

In this article Eva Urban describes a historical tradition of Breton enlightenment theatre, and examines in detail two multilingual contemporary plays staged in Brittany: Merc’h an Eog / Merch yr Eog / La Fille du Saumon (2016), an international interceltic co-production by the Breton Teatr Piba and the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh-language national theatre of Wales); and the Teatr Piba production Tiez Brav A Oa Ganeomp / On avait de jolies maisons (2017). She examines recurring themes about knowledge, enlightenment journeys, and refugees in Brittany in these plays and performances, and presents the argument that they stage cosmopolitan and intercultural philosophical ideas. Eva Urban is Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. She has held a Région de Bretagne Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of Rennes 2, a research lectureship in the English Department, University of Rennes 2, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and has published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and chapters in book collections.