One of Berlin's most prominent streets, named after the East German workers' uprising of 1953 (in which Brecht was controversially implicated), serves as the performative location for Nicolas Whybrow's topographical interrogation of the politics of German nationhood. Particular attention is given to the new parliament building, the Reichstag, which has been out of action for the majority of its troubled history. The article considers attempts to perform democracy and unity since the fall of the Wall through various mediations, including Norman Foster's refunctioning of the Reichstag, Christo's facilitation of its rebirth, and a permanent installation by Hans Haacke which rewrites the building's prominent inscription of 1916, ‘For the German People’. Finally, Whybrow places the annual ‘Love Parade’ in the context of the long history of mass marches and demonstrations on this particular street, and analyzes its claims to be a unifying political event. Based loosely on the Benjaminian flâneur figure's practice of a first-hand experience of the street, incorporating both subjective immersion and detached observation of the revealing ‘detritus of modern urban life’, various tensions and superimpositions are rendered visible as the city undergoes transformation since reunification. Nicolas Whybrow, whose book Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin, and Berlin is forthcoming, is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at De Montfort University, Leicester.

The rapid acceptance in America of Stanislavsky's approach to actor training is often presented as an unexpected and unaccountable imposition of foreign culture. But Keith Walden argues that, while the ‘method’ may have been an innovation in acting schools, its goals and techniques were already familiar in other spheres of American life – particularly in the voluminous advice literature directed at salespeople. The similarities are not surprising, since both attempts to shape performances were inspired by the erosion of older notions of coherent, stable selfhood. Though the cultural purposes of acting and selling remained sharply different, the transgressive potential of modern theatre was dependent on a widespread belief that the roles required in ordinary work should be competently enacted. Keith Walden is a member of the History Department at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He is a former editor of the Canadian Historical Review and author of Becoming Modern in Toronto: the Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late-Victorian Culture.

Western consciousness of Sri Lanka tends to be limited to bracketing the secessionist ‘Tamil Tigers’ among the ‘terrorist threats’ facing the world community. In truth, tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of Sri Lanka go back two millennia, and Syed Jamil Ahmed argues here that the conflict is reflected in the myths of origin of both communities and the rituals through which they are still re-enacted. He believes that one of these, the ritual of Devol Māduā, offers a possible resolution to the problematic relationship between religious and moral law, or dharma, and the pragmatics of statecraft in Sri Lanka. After examining the historical context of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the myths of origin associated with the three key deities in the ritual, he offers an episode-by-episode description of the event, and goes on to suggest that the function of the ritual in Sinhalese–Buddhist society is revealing in terms of the dialectics of pacifism and violence that Buddhism faces in Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā’ in NTQ 74, and his full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

Should we suffer boredom in the theatre so long as it can be properly theorized? Dare performance stand alone, without hermeneutical crutches? What are the practicalities of practice-based research? And should we be scared of scare quotes? These are some of the questions asked by Martin Welton, tongue not so much in cheek as brazenly challenging some of the new orthodoxies of theatre studies. Martin Welton is a lecturer in Performance in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests include perception and performance, theatre and performance theory, actor training systems, and the South Indian martial art kalarippayattu. He also works as a performer, most recently with Sound and Fury Theatre Company, Emilyn Claid, and with his own company Darwin's Beard.

In early twentieth-century England the general recognition among dramatists and theatre practitioners that the theatre had reached a crisis or turning point – that as an institution it no longer answered the social and moral requirements of a modern industrialized society – resulted in a profusion of books and articles which addressed alternative modes of theatrical production or proposed institutional restructuring. Simultaneously with these discussions of the social utility of the theatre as an institution, a broad debate about theatrical aesthetics was continuing under the influence of new European and avant-garde movements such as symbolism and expressionism. Examining the shift from the actor-manager system in conjunction with these campaigns, Cary DiPietro here considers the recurrence of Shakespeare in the theatrical tracts of the period, variously regarded as a cultural authority at the intersection of issues of class, new modes of mechanical reproduction, aesthetic value, and old versus new modes of theatrical production. He sees the making – and the wilful destruction – of the film of Beerbohm Tree's Henry VIII as paradigmatic of the ways in which the period tried to distinguish popular, mass forms from what was ‘authentically’ artistic. Cary DiPietro currently lectures at Kyoto University, Japan.

In this article Otto G. Schindler provides an overview of research into the Castle Theatre at Český Krumlov, where theatrical entertainments are first recorded in the late seventeenth century, and adds some contributions of his own. After a short period of renewed activity in the rebuilt theatre inaugurated in 1768, benign neglect has preserved for us intact an authentic monument of late baroque theatre building. In the Castle Theatre, Hanswurst, traditionally the sole comic performer, formed part of a commedia-derived comic ensemble, and pantomimes regularly accompanied birthday celebrations until the late eighteenth century, when major travelling companies were visitors to the theatre, and opéra comique was also in vogue. Otto G. Schindler was University Assistant, Lecturer, and Head Librarian at the Drama Department of the University of Vienna, and has been a Research Fellow at the State University of New York. He was active in the Theatre Collection of the Austrian National Library and the Institute for Audience Research at the Austrian Academy of Science, where he is a member of its Commission for Cultural Studies and Theatre History. He has published extensively on Austrian and Central European theatre history with special reference to early modern theatre companies and the reception of commedia dell'arte. The festschrift Theatre am Hof und für das Volk (Vienna: Boehlau, 2002) was recently published in his honour.

Reports in The Stage of an ‘American invasion in the theatre’ and the New Statesman writing of ‘our Americanized theatre’ expressed widely shared fears that transatlantic values were adversely affecting the British theatre in the wake of the First World War. In this article, Paul Marshall examines the strategies employed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office as it carried out its duties of censorship in dealing with plays from or about the United States. The Censor perceived it as his duty to defend public morals from elements that would threaten and challenge the values associated with ‘Englishness’, and, drawing on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence now available in the British Library, Paul Marshall explores how the Lord Chamberlain of the time, Lord Cromer, his readers, and his advisory board viewed the threat of the American ‘invasion’ – their shared values, sometimes disputed verdicts, and the formal and informal influences that could be brought to bear upon them. Five ‘case studies’ look at their attitudes to particular plays about and from the USA. Paul Marshall presently teaches history at Bromley High School, Kent, having studied for an MA in Text and Performance Studies at King's College and RADA.