The 250th anniversary of the opening of the Bristol Old Vic, the country's longest-serving theatre, was celebrated on 30 May 2016. In this article David Roberts considers the repertory choices of the opening night, the way the occasion sought to address anxiety in the city about the presence of a professional theatre in its midst, and the precarious means by which the theatre itself came into being. Where previous historians have emphasized the legal context for objections to the theatre, it is argued here that discourses arising from the Jeremy Collier controversy informed local opposition and were specifically addressed both through programming and through writing for and about the event. David Roberts is Dean of the Arts, Design, and Media at Birmingham City University. His recent publications include Thomas Betterton and Restoration Plays and Players, both for Cambridge University Press. This article is based on a lecture given to celebrate the anniversary of the Bristol Old Vic.

In this article Natalia Yakubova explores the interactions between theatre and literature as between an actress on one side and a man of letters on the other. The interactions discussed here came at a particular historical moment, when the transition from an actor-centred to a director-centred hierarchy was taking place, and the article deals with the letters written by actresses to the men who were playwrights and/or theoreticians of the new theatre: Eleonora Duse writing to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vera Komissarzhevskaya to Valery Bryusov, Irena Solska to Jerzy Żuławski, and Gertrud Eysoldt to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In each case study, attention is paid to the characteristics of the relationships between a given actress and a particular writer, their attitudes towards theatre reform, the way in which the actresses evaluated the literary status of their letter writing, and, significantly, the stylistic features of their writing. Natalia Yakubova is a senior researcher of the State Institute of Art Studies in Moscow, and was Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences between 2013 and 2015. She is author of O Witkacym (2010) and Teatr epokhi peremen v Polshe, Vengrii i Rossii 1990-ye–2010-ye (2014), and has published numerous articles in Russia, Poland, the USA, and Canada, among other countries.

In this article Ziad Adwan examines the relationship between the Opera House in Damascus and the Al-Assad dynasty. Hafez Al-Assad ordered the building of the Opera House but it remained unfinished at his death. His son Bashar opened it after three decades of construction. Leaving the institution unfinished was, it is argued here, due to uncertainty regarding its identity, place in the bureaucratic hierarchy, and meaning in a totalitarian regime. Theatre institutions were driven to take oppositional positions against one another, and the Opera House intensified the enmity. No theatres were built during the reign of Hafez Al-Assad, and while the Opera House was a hope for many Syrians, it also played a role in dividing them. Adwan concludes that the exceptional design features and location of the Opera House have marked its activities and that in relation to the Al-Assad dynasty it has become a critical focus in the Syrian war. Ziad Adwan is a theatre practitioner, who completed his PhD in Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He taught at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus (2009–2013) and has acted in plays and films, as well as working as a director. He was the artistic director of Invisible Stories, a series of street theatre events in different places in Damascus. Adwan is currently affiliated with the Global Theatre Histories research project at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

The distinction between fictionality and actuality takes on a special significance in the theatre, which contains two frames simultaneously: a fictional and an actual. Although the presence of these frames is integral to performance, the demarcation between them often becomes blurred. Both Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1982) and Sam Holcroft's Edgar and Annabel (2011) problematize the relationship between an actor and the character that he or she portrays. While Stoppard's characters sometimes indulge in fictional portrayals, Holcroft's embody additional characters out of a sense of duty and commitment to a political cause. Although the stakes of keeping the illusion in place are seemingly much higher in Holcroft's play, both suggest that the blurring of the line between the actual and the fictional is not only inevitable, but also potentially dangerous. Lida Krüger is a senior lecturer in English Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Her current research interests include fictionality in theatre, the position of the audience in performance, and theatre archiving.

Drawing on a close reading of Theodor Adorno's essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, in this article Eva Urban develops the argument that an analysis of the reification that reduces human relationships to mere business interactions has been a central concern of modern drama. The article offers an analysis of some of the ways in which this theme continues to be represented, interrogated, and challenged internationally in contemporary political plays and theatre performances across a range of genres and grounded in a variety of dramaturgical principles. It asks how drama, theatre-making, theatre-spectating, and theatre-participating can create dynamics necessary to enable a move from reified consciousness towards the development of critical autonomy and solidarity. A negotiation of the principles of critical consciousness and solidarity is problematic within economic structures that cause social, ethnic, and religious atomization and divisions. Her argument concludes with an outline for a manifesto for political drama and theatre practice to work against reification. Eva Urban is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department and an Associate of the Irish Studies Research Centre, CEI/CRBC, at the University of Rennes 2, France. She recently completed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011), she has also published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and edited book collections.

In this essay Michael Dobson considers the evolution of certain habitual cuts to the text of Hamlet between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, identifying in particular a tendency to increase the abruptness with which the play's last act interrupts its otherwise digressive movement. Looking in particular at the fate of Fortinbras, he examines changes to the ways in which these cuts have been indicated to readers, arguing that a decisive separation between the play as read and as acted makes itself felt at the turn of the nineteenth century. He concludes with a discussion of when and why it became desirable to advertise not manageably edited stage versions, but ‘uncut’ marathons. Michael Dobson is Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. His publications include the co-editorship of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance, Performing Shakespeare's Tragedies Today, and The Making of the National Poet.

A report by Maria Shevtsova on the 2016 edition of the biennial Craiova International Shake speare Festival, continuing her coverage of the event in NTQ 112. She pays special attention here to the pièce de résistance of the latest festival – Richard II with the Saitama Arts Theatre, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, whose death occurred barely a month later: this article is also a tribute to a world-renowned man of the theatre. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts in the Department of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Bernard Ince here surveys insolvency and bankruptcy in the theatres of England and Wales during the period 1830 to 1913. His methodology analyzes failures in absolute and relative terms, using aggregate and disaggregated data. The annual pattern of failure shows a marked volatility in the aggregate, with the absolute number of failures tending to increase towards the 1880s before declining thereafter. When the data are expressed as a rate relative to annual theatre population change, the trend is, however, reversed, failures being much higher in the 1830s and 40s than in the later decades. When annual failures are analyzed alternatively in terms of the number of theatres actually managed or owned by bankrupts, and the data disaggregated between the London and provincial theatres, different patterns of failure emerge, London theatres experiencing higher risk during those early decades, while the provincial Theatres Royal on the other hand are especially vulnerable during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, and other theatres in the provinces are exposed more during the 1860s. From an analysis of over 200 cases it is clear that factors contributing to theatrical failure are diverse and often complex. Rarely is failure the result of a single catastrophic event but is more often caused by a combination of events, or from the cumulative impact of insolvencies carried over from previous years. While a correlation between annual fluctuations in theatrical failures and cycles in the general economy cannot be firmly established, anecdotal evidence suggests that regional or local conditions play a more important role. It is concluded that while the financial situation of many theatres operated on the limits of financial viability, bankruptcy on a significant scale was uncommon, indicative of remarkable resilience in the face of profound economic, social, political, and legislative change. The author is an independent theatre historian.