In recent years, melodrama has increasingly been recognized not only as an important element in popular theatre studies, but for the intrinsic importance of the form itself. Less considered has been the relationship of the material of melodrama to the ‘real life’ it reflected in a highly conventionalized yet ultimately (for its audiences), recognizable fashion. Here, Jim Davis looks at one major category, nautical melodrama, setting the images of the navy and of sailors that it created alongside factual and critical accounts of life at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conveys both the pressures that existed for redress of abuses, and the consequent balance between coercion and subversion in the melodramas themselves – drawing in particular on the memoirs of Douglas Jerrold to explore aspects of the ambiguity to be found in contemporary attitudes. Jim Davis, who is the author of several books and articles in the area of nineteenth century theatre history, is presently teaching in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Paget's interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Reading's 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.

In this article Stephe Harrop combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy's contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. She focuses on Athenian tragedy's competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles's structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy's spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle – as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a recent case study, Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and the Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016–17, proposing that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. It is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe's terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics. Stephe Harrop is a Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool Hope University, where her research focuses primarily on performances and texts adapted from, or responding to, ancient tragedy and epic. She is co-author of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Council estates, otherwise known as British social housing estates, have been subject to media scrutiny since their inception, and widespread criticism of social housing remains a prominent feature of British Welfare State discourse. In recent media coverage, for example of the 2011 riots, these spaces remain central to discussions of class, economics, and crime in the UK. This article draws on postcolonial theory to explore contemporary representations of the council estate on the Royal Court stage – with a focus on narratives of ‘authenticity’. Here, two plays, Off the Endz (Agbaje, 2010) and The Westbridge (De-lahay, 2011), are studied to assess how narratives of authenticity work in theatrical representations both to reinforce and to resist popular impressions of council estate spaces. Charlotte Bell is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University, where she is currently writing her PhD thesis on the urban social housing estate and the contemporary cultural economy. Katie Beswick is a Research Associate in Applied Theatre at the University of Leeds, where she has recently completed her PhD on the representation of the council estate in theatrical performance practices.

One of Britain's foremost directors, Katie Mitchell's career embraces a formidable repertoire of play and opera productions. She has a taste for Greek tragedy – her Phoenician Women (1995) won the Evening Standard Best Director Award – and takes in Gorky, Chekhov, Genet, and Beckett, as well as such contemporaries as Kevin Elyot, whose Forty Winks she directed at the Royal Court in 2004. She has worked in Dublin, Milan, and Stockholm, and is an Associate Director at the National Theatre. This interview with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova shows Mitchell's lucid and passionate engagement with her craft. It took place in London in several stages from December 2004 to July 2005, during a period of intense activity for Mitchell. Maria Shevtsova wishes to thank her for so generously giving her time.

The appearance of a succession of controversial and attention-catching new plays on the British stage in the 'nineties has led to considerable public discussion – and not a little ostensible outrage. In ‘an interim report’, Aleks Sierz examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence – notably Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo, and Shopping and Fucking – by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock. After showing how Cool Britannia's manifestation on the national stage has provoked arguments for and against this ‘in-yer-face’ drama, he outlines some of the common themes – such as the crisis of masculinity and the postmodern sensibility – that characterize much contemporary new writing. He argues that while these young writers are certainly gifted and mature, only subsequent theatrical revivals of their work will show whether it has anything lasting to say. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune, and currently writing a book about ‘in-yer-face’ drama.

John McGrath died from leukaemia in January 2002, having put the final touches to his last book, Naked Thoughts That Roam About: Reflections on Theatre, 1958–2001, edited by Nadine Holdsworth (Nick Hern Books, 2002). The following article forms the conclusion to this collection of essays, lectures, interviews, theatre reviews, 7:84 company documents, programme notes, letters, and poems, for which McGrath provides a contextualizing commentary. Like the other pieces in the book, it testifies to McGrath's faith in theatre's ability to contribute to humanity through its engagement with people, communities, and political processes – a commitment he maintained and developed to the end of his life. In ‘Theatre and Democracy’ he drew on the work of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis to frame his hopes for theatre in the twenty-first century – a theatre which would operate in public dialectical debate with the society from which it evolves, and, by asking hard questions about the social processes that construct that society, provide a voice for oppositional opinion and the marginalized. The essay was reworked from a keynote address to the ‘European Theatre, Justice, and Morality’ conference held at the University of London in June 1999, and in its earlier form appeared in the conference proceedings, published as Morality and Justice: the Challenge of European Theatre, edited by Edward Batley and David Bradby (Rodopi, 2001).

The creation of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, argues Adrienne Scullion, has the potential to change everything that has been understood and imagined or thought and speculated about Scotland. The devolved parliament shifts the governance of the country, resets financial provisions and socio-economic management, recreates Scottish politics and Scottish society – and affects how Scotland is represented and imagined by artists of all kinds. The radical context of devolution should also afford Scottish criticism an unprecedented opportunity to rethink its more rigid paradigms and structures. Specifically, this article questions what impact political devolution might have on the rhetoric of Scottish cultural criticism by paralleling feminist analysis of three plays by women premiered in Scotland in 2000 with the flexible, even hybrid, model of the nation afford by devolution, resetting identity within Scottish culture as much less predictable and much more inclusive than has previously been understood. An earlier versions was delivered by the author on 5 March 2001 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in receipt of the biennial RSE/BP Prize Lectureship in the Humanities. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she is also the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research.

In this article Andy Kempe discusses how a nationwide project has marked a significant step forward in improving access to the theatre for UK audiences who have hitherto felt largely excluded from theatre by mounting a number of ‘relaxed performances’. He makes particular reference to autistic spectrum disorders to illustrate how, in order to widen participation, theatres need to cater for a diverse range of individual needs. The article explores the challenges of catering for children and young people who may be, variously, under- or over-sensitive to sensory stimuli, in both the way performances are adapted and how the front-of-house is organized. A case study is offered of how one small regional theatre sought to address these challenges by giving a ‘relaxed performance’ of its annual pantomime. The impact of the production is considered as well as insights that have emerged from the enterprise. Andy Kempe is Professor of Drama Education and a Teaching Fellow of the University of Reading. His work with students of all ages and abilities has informed his numerous publications on a variety of issues in drama and arts education, including Drama, Disability, and Education (Routledge, 2012).

Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in NTQ50, Paul Warwick gave an account in the following issue of its previously undocumented role during the thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence, describing the efforts of the freedom fighters to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only deployed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating the people in matters ranging from women's rights to the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods: and with victory came measures further to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Jane Plastow, in this third and concluding article, takes up the story with the invitation issued by the new government to her and her colleagues to initiate the ‘Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project’, in an attempt both to widen the perspectives of Eritrean actors and to draw upon all relevant traditions, African and European, in developing a popular but distinctive theatre for the people. In addition to her role as director of the project, Jane Plastow is a lecturer at Leeds University, having worked in theatre for some years in a number of other African nations.

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 this article, Erika T. Lin explores theatrical performance as a material medium by considering which elements might have been privileged in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of Robert Weimann’s influential concepts of locus and platea, she offers an alternative model for understanding the authority of performance in early modern England, in which stage geography and actor–audience interactivity, two key components of Weimann’s formulation, are less important than the interplay between representation and presentation. Through an analysis of specific scenes from a number of Shakespeare’s plays, she argues that the moments most privileged in the early modern playhouse were those that foregrounded the semiotic system through which actions presented onstage came to signify within the represented fiction. Erika T. Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Louisville. She is currently writing a book entitled Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, and is also beginning work on a new project which examines seasonal festivities, folk drama, and professional theatre in early modern England.

The issue of globalization has recently been exercising many minds in the field of theatre studies as elsewhere, resulting in various calls for approaches to theatre history that are less nationalistic or eurocentric. Yet of all art forms theatre appears to be, by its nature, the most parochial, tied to the needs of distinct social, ethnic, or other interests within constituencies limited by the economics of touring. Here Jo Robinson places arguments about globalization and theatre in a broader context of the current debate within the social sciences, and argues that exploring the ways in which performing cultures are truly interconnected may best be achieved by an exploration of neglected local histories. The author is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Nottingham, and is currently leading the AHRC-funded three-year project, ‘Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857–67’, which is exploring the use of maps and mapping to recuperate performance history within the area. She is also Co-convenor of TaPRA's Theatre History and Historiography Working Group.

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret, and more recently with the International School of Theatre Anthropology, has always been substantiated by a body of developed critical theory, and in NTQ he has specifically developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual. In NTQ1 (1985), he outlined the problems involved in analyzing theatre-works rooted in performance rather than the written word; in NTQ4 (1985) he discussed his concept of the ‘dilated body’, through which the performed taps the wellsprings of art and experience; and in NTQ16 (1988), he expanded his idea of the ‘body-in-life’, describing the balance of energies which is essential for the actor to be fully realized. Here, he looks at the way in which the body is falsely perceived as the ‘actor's instrument’, as somehow separate from himself, and discusses the processes of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ – which give the actor a true ‘second-nature’, and distinguish his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’.

Invited by NTQ to review two recent books on performance studies – Jon McKenzie's Perform or Else: from Discipline to Performance and Richard Schechners's Performance Studies: an Introduction – Baz Kershaw found himself in a Catch-22 situation: given the vast territories they claimed for the discipline, how could a short survey do them justice? Yet more perplexing, how might a close analysis of their diffusive visions proceed, even in a longer essay? Struck by their common use of air disasters as denouements and their respective publication dates just six months before and after 9/11, he uses these and other homologies as a route into exploring the ethical and political implications for the new century of the arguments employed by the two texts. Drawing on the philosophical innovation of ‘dialetheism’, which deploys paradox to stretch the bounds of classical logic, he also considers the books' differences and suggests a kind of de-territorialized reconciliation through his notion of a ‘paradoxology’ of performance. He offers the resulting search for depth in surfaces, beginnings in endings, presence in absences, and truth in contradictions as an exemplification of philosopher Po-chang's aphorism about the quest for Buddha's nature: ‘It’s much like riding an ox in search of the ox.’ Baz Kershaw holds the Chair of Drama at Bristol University. His many publications include Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1990), The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1992), and The Radical in Performance (Routledge, 1999), and he is editor of The Cambridge History of British Theatre: Volume 3, Since 1895 (CUP, 2005). He is also Director of the AHRC-funded major research project PARIP – Practice as Research in Performance.

Video recording has recently become an accessible, unobtrusive, and increasingly inexpensive way of making a permanent record of theatrical performances. This might seem to anticipate a revolution in theatre studies, once the theatre of the present has become the object of study by future generations: yet little thought has been given to the dramaturgical or the pedagogic implications of this new tool. How, for example, will the medium affect the message it transmits, by the way in which it makes permanent what is in essence ephemeral, and ‘fixes’ what is constantly changing? Marco de Marinis here offers some tentative thoughts about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the audiovisual recording of theatre, intended not so much to present a definitive methodology as to clear the ground of some prevailing mistakes and misconceptions. His paper was first presented to a round-table at the Prato Centre for Theatre Semiotics in February 1983.

In this article Tom Cornford examines the policy of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare's Globe for each new production, as pursued by Dominic Dromgoole since the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director in 2006. The article responds initially to John Russell Brown's equation in NTQ 102 of a particular kind of ‘intimate’ acting with ‘small theatres’. Cornford resists this conflation of acting and building, seeing in it a tendency to obscure both the role of reconstructed theatres to challenge contemporary notions of the ‘rightness’ of theatre spaces and the role of directors and actors to convert their apparent problems into opportunities. He explores the transformation of the Globe since 2006, using interviews given by Dromgoole and the directors working with the Globe's research team to critique the theory underpinning the ‘permanently temporary’ alterations to the theatre, and takes the evidence of performances to examine their use of the space in practice. Cornford offers a selection of staging solutions to the apparent ‘problems’ identified by Dromgoole and his team, and proposes an alternative model of reconstruction: not the rebuilding of the theatre, but the constant reviewing of theatre practice, including training. Tom Cornford is a freelance director and teacher of acting for the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota BFA Program, the Actors' Centre in London, and Globe Education at Shakespeare's Globe. He was, until recently, Artist in Residence at the CAPITAL Centre in the University of Warwick, where he is undertaking PhD research.

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment – film, theatre, and television – have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the ‘spectatorial gaze’, as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the ‘ways of looking’ currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery – with or without its sexual-political connotations – and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on Beckett and Ionesco.

The explosion of new theatre writing in Britain during and since the 'nineties contrasted with a dearth of original plays on continental Europe, east and west. Sanja Nikcevic attributes this in part to the dominance over the previous decades of the role of leading directors, who increasingly sought out raw materials to shape productions conforming to their own or their company's ideas. She traces the attempts in a number of countries to correct the imbalance by encouraging new writing through workshops and festivals—yet also how the explosion and importation of the British ‘in-yer-face’ style then affected the kind of new writing that was considered innovative and acceptable at such events. She argues against the claims made for the political significance of plays such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, suggesting rather that the acceptance of the normality of violence without reference to its social context negates the possibility of remedial action. A former Fulbright Scholar, Sanja Nikcevic is Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her full-length publications include The Subversive American Drama: Sympathy for Losers (1994), Affirmative American Drama: Long Live the Puritans (2003), and New European Drama: the Great Deception (2005). She was the founder and for eight years the president of the Croatian Centre of the International Theatre Institute.