The term ‘psychophysical’ in relation to acting and performer training is widely used by theatre scholars and practitioners. Konstantin Stanislavsky is considered to have been an innovator in developing an approach to Western acting focused on both psychology and physicality. The discourse encompasses questions of practice, of creativity and emotion, the philosophical problem of mind–body from Western and Eastern perspectives of spirituality. In this article, Rose Whyman attempts to uncover what Stanislavsky meant by his limited use of the term ‘psychophysical’ and suggests that much of the discourse remains prone to a dualist mind–body approach. Clarification of this is needed in order to further understanding of the practice of training performers. Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. She researches the science of actor training and is the author of The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge, 2008) and Stanislavsky: the Basics (Routledge, 2013).

The potential and the problems of multicultural theatre have frequently been described and debated in this as in other theatre journals, but discussions of its value and viability have generally been in ethical terms – over how far it is possible for the West to ‘import’ or otherwise employ the theatrical traditions of other cultures without resort to an imperialist appropriation of what is found ‘consumable’, to the detriment of the culture thus despoiled. While not ignoring the moral arguments, John Russell Brown here deals also with the practical issues – notably, how far different kinds of theatre depend on being ‘site-specific’ not only in terms of the performers involved, but also in terms of audiences and their responses. He argues that, paradoxically, truly intercultural theatre is more often to be found where western influences from Hollywood films or pop music have become part of the lived experience of eastern cultures, or in western communities where (for example) British and West Indian or ‘Anglo’ and Latino-American traditions have become intertwined. He suggests that rather than trying to embrace the substance of ‘other’ traditions, western theatre might better benefit by exploring the conventions that modulate the relationship between actors and audience, or the approach of the actor to different kinds of ‘text’. He concludes: ‘By using overseas research to develop its own inheritance, a theatre might discover what it alone needs to create and encourage a more active and imaginative response from its local audience.’ A widely published writer on drama and theatre, John Russell Brown was first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and was subsequently an Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. Currently he is visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.

Théâtre du Soleil’s latest production, Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravanserai), staged the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers from around the world. In this article, William McEvoy argues that the company was motivated both by a political agenda to make migrants more visible and a concern to investigate the ethical implications of its own creative processes. This led to a potential conflict between representing migrants directly on stage and a performance that reflected the company’s worries about turning migrants’ traumatic narratives into theatre and spectacle. Focusing on the concept of balance in the production, the article shows how Théâtre du Soleil presented the ethical negotiations between creative self and represented other through exploring the links between text and performance, writing and the body, and manipulation and resistance. William McEvoy is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Sussex, specializing in contemporary theatre and performance. He has published work on Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, and his current research deals with the shifting role of the text in experimental and physical theatre.

In this article Steve Wilmer discusses adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight the plight of the displaced and the dispossessed, including Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, Marina Carr's Hecuba, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen, which is notably emblematic among appropriations of ancient Greek plays in referencing the problems facing refugees in Europe. He considers how this latter play has been directed in a variety of ways in Germany and Austria since 2013, and how in turn it has been reappropriated for new dramatic performances to further investigate the conditions of refugees. Some of these productions have caused political controversy and one of them has even been physically attacked by a right-wing group. Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-editor of ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016), and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He also edited a special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies in 2015 titled ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’.

Eritrea is a newly independent country whose performing arts history, based on the music and dance of her nine ethnic groups, is only just beginning to be systematically researched. Western-influenced drama was introduced to the country by the Italians in the early twentieth century, but Eritreans only began to use this form of theatre in the 1940s. The three-part series here inaugurated is the first attempt to piece together the history of Eritrean drama, beginning below with an outline of its history from the 1940s to national independence in 1991. The author explores the highly political role drama played from the outset in Eritrea's struggle towards independence and the effort to mould this alien performance form into a public voice at least for urban Eritreans. Later articles will look at the cultural troupes of the Eritrean liberation forces and at post-independence work on developing community-based theatre. The research took place as part of the continuing Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project, which is involved with practical theatre development as well as theatre research. Although this opening article is written by Jane Plastow, she wishes to stress that it is the upshot of a collaborative research exercise, for which Elias Lucas and Jonathan Stephanus were research trainees. Most of the information used here is the result of interviews they conducted and of translations of articles in Tigrinya or Amharic which they located. Training in interview techniques and collaboration over translation of material into English was conducted by the project research assistant, Paul Warwick. Jane Plastow is the director of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project and a lecturer at Leeds University. She initiated the project at the invitation of the Eritrean government, after working in theatre for some years in a number of African countries, notably Ethiopia. She supervised the research for this project, and used her experience of African theatre and of the politics and history of the region to draw the available material into its present state as a preliminary history of Eritrean drama.

The public nature of their work should seemingly have ensured that children employed in the Victorian theatre enjoyed better conditions than their brothers and sisters, so often suffering on one of those treadmills at which the virtuous Victorians set their offspring to work. Yet little is known of the actuality of their experiences, and the present article represents a pioneering investigation into the area. Drawing on the researches of contemporary social reformers as well as on the reminiscences of the children themselves and of their employers and colleagues, Tracy C. Davis, who teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen's University, Kingston, Canad, presents an intriguing picture of exploitation mixed with adulation, and a pervasive muddle of defensive indifference, gradually brought within the bounds of well-intentioned legislation.

The concept of the performing body consists of two elements: the performer's and the spectator's performing bodies. The performer's body is an active and creative body on stage, while the spectator's body is considered an uncreative body, passive in his or her seat. In this article, findings regarding the duality of the performing body, its interchangeability, and its intertwinement, derive from researching Via Negativa, a Slovenian-based (yet international in its nature) theatrical project established almost a decade ago by theatre director Bojan Jablanovec. The mission of Via Negativa is to investigate the relationship between the performer and the spectator exclusively through theatrical means. Tomaž Krpič is a sociologist of the body with particular interest in postmodern theatre and performance. He was until recently Lecturer in Cultural Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana University, Slovenia.

Aeschylus, father of Greek tragedy, was also the first to realize the potential of drama taking place ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – a change from his earlier plays which is quite clear from the Oresteia onwards; and although the Elizabethan theatre was unconcerned with the literal representation of place, exits and entrances were no less crucial to its dramaturgy. Along with the proscenium arch came the stage doors actors fought hard to preserve until the nineteenth century, when first the box set and then the dominance of naturalism required doors to be literalized – as essential for slamming in Ibsen as for the complex avoidance strategies of a Feydeau farce. In the following article, Arnold Aronson discusses the role of the door, actual, assumed, and iconic, in world theatre – and takes a lateral look at its significance in the TV sitcom. The author is Professor of Theatre at Columbia University in New York, and author of American Avant-Garde Theatre: a History (Routledge, 2000), American Set Design (TCG, 1985), and The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (UMI Research Press, 1981). Arnold Aronson served as President of the International Jury for the Prague Quadrennial in 1991 and 1999, and will be Commissioner General of the 2007 Quadrennial. A version of this essay was presented at Brown University at the conference held in 2003 in honour of Don B. Wilmeth.

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning ‘high art’ poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).

In his essays and speeches, Harold Pinter addressed issues that are central in political and philosophical debates: national identity and the other, the ethics of responsibility, the relational nature of human rights, the politics of death. Discussing his treatment of these issues, Maria Germanou sees Pinter as a Foucauldian intellectual engaged in the politics of truth, and argues that in these texts the postmodern writer enables the political activist. Pinter subjects to scrutiny naturalized political rhetoric, discloses the affinity between meaning and power, and challenges the legitimacy of established hierarchies and their practices. His ultimate purpose is to restore ethics to politics. To this end, he places responsibility for the other at the core of his problematic in ways similar to Emmanuel Levinas, and invites western democracies to redefine ‘humanity’ and the ‘international’ community by taking into consideration accountability for those allowed to die in the name of an alleged justice. Maria Germanou is Professor in English Drama at the University of Athens. She has published in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Gramma, and elsewhere. Since 2008 she has been co-editor of Synthesis, an e-journal of comparative literature.

Mojisola Adebayo and Valerie Mason-John are two distinctive voices in contemporary writing and performance, representing an Afro-Queer diasporic heritage through the specific experience of being black, British, and lesbian. Creating continuities from contorted or erased histories (personal, social, and cultural), their drama demonstrates both Afro-centric and European theatrical influences, which in Mason-John's case is further consolidated in her polemic, poetry, and prose. Like Britain's most innovative and prominent contemporary black woman dramatist, debbie tucker green, they reach beyond local or national identity politics to represent universal themes and to centralize black women's experiences. With subject matter that includes royal families, the care system, racial cross-dressing, and global ecology, Adebayo and Mason-John have individually forged a unique aesthetic and perspective in work which links environmental degradation with social disenfranchisement and travels to the heart of whiteness along black-affirming imaginative routes. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets, including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lennie James, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams. She is the editor of Hidden Gems (London: Oberon Books, 2008), a collection of plays by black British dramatists.

In this article Michaela Antoniou gives an account of the two prevailing acting schools in ancient Greek tragedy in the twentieth century, as formed and developed by Dimitris Rontiris at the National Theatre and Karolos Koun at the Theatro Technis (Art Theatre). She discusses how these two great theatre masters directed, guided, and taught their actors to perform tragedy, arguing that Rontiris's approach stemmed from a text-based perspective that focused on reciting and pronunciation, while Koun's developed from a physical and emotional approach that prioritzed actors and their abilities. Her article summarizes each director's philosophy regarding the Greek tragedies, and discusses the position of the genre within modern Greek theatre, mapping the process employed by the actors, and analyzing their method in order to illustrate the different perspectives that the two great directors had with regards to approaching and performing a role. Michaela Antoniou completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently working as an external collaborator of the Department of Theatre Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also worked on the stage as an actress and playwright, and is a published author.

The following interview is intended is a companion piece to the preceding article by Carl Lavery, ‘The Pepys of E11: Graeme Miller and the Politics of Linked’. The interview took place in East London in late August 2004.

Though little remembered or honoured today, Mary Kelly (1888–1951) was one of the more enlightened among those who, between the wars, encouraged the then-booming amateur theatre into attempting more than the limp reproduction of West End successes. She had a strong belief in the intrinsically dramatic potential of the country dweller, imbued with generations of traditional lore: but unlike many of her more nostalgic contemporaries, Mary Kelly well recognized the class conflicts and history of deprivation of the rural poor, and blended such elements into the pageants she devised not only for her own village but for other rural communities – and which she encouraged others to emulate through her instructional writings. Mick Wallis, Reader in Performance Studies at Loughborough University, has written on modern-day pageantry in his two-part article on ‘Pageantry and the Popular Front’ in NTQ 38 and 41 (May 1994 and February 1995), and in ‘Delving the Levels of Memory and Dressing-up in the Past’ in Inter-War Theatres, edited by Clive Barker and Maggie Gale, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His millennium show, In the Twenty-First Century Everyone Will Be Stelarc for Fifteen Minutes (Rehearsal for a Ceremonial Event), with Jan Overfield and Movements in Mayhem, was premiered at Loughborough in December 1999.

In this article Dominika Laster examines the embodied-memory work undertaken by the Polish theatre director and performance researcher Jerzy Grotowski. While Grotowski approached work with memory – which in his practice necessarily implied body-memory – in a variety of ways, it was often as a mode of inquiry. For Grotowski, there were at least two different types of memory work, which emerge in two distinct phases of his research. The first was the use of body-memory undertaken during the Theatre of Production phase. Here, the work with body-memory was used as a tool in the actor's process of self-penetration and opening, serving as an instrument in the rediscovery of impulses and intentions of a past moment. This process of rediscovery is integral to the freeing of creativity and tapping into the obstructed internal resources of the actor. Another use of memory work, which became articulated in the phase of Grotowski's research known as Art as Vehicle, is that which facilitates the rediscovery of essence. Grotowski's practice of ‘active remembering’ functioned as a tool in the search for one's essence, understood as the most intimate, pre-cultural aspect of the self, which precedes difference and is at once the most singular and universal aspect of being. Dominika Laster is a Lecturer in Theatre. Her book A Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing, and Transmission in the Grotowski Work and her edition of Loose Screws: Nine New Plays from Poland, are forthcoming from Seagull Press (distributed globally by the University of Chicago Press).

What political theatre may be in contemporary times and in what sense it is ‘political’ are the core issues of this article. Maria Shevtsova discusses examples from within a restricted period, 2007 to 2014, but from a wide area that begins in Eastern Europe – Russia, Romania, Hungary, Poland – and moves to Germany and France. Her examples are principally productions by established ensemble theatre companies and her analysis is framed by a brief discussion concerning independent theatres, ‘counter-cultural’ positions, and institutional and institutionalized theatres. This latter group is in focus to indicate how political theatre in the seven years specified has been far from alien to, or sidelined from, national theatres, state theatres, or other prestigious companies in receipt of state subsidy. Two main profiles of recent political theatre emerge from this research, one that acknowledges political history, while the other critiques neoliberal capitalism; there is some unpronounced overlap between the two. Productions of Shakespeare feature significantly in the delineated theatrescape. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored) is The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

Music hall has only recently been treated to ‘serious’ as distinct from anecdotal study, and the ‘turns’ of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators – whose ancestry in ‘legit’ performance had been a long one, yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and ‘pre-Freudian innocence’. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley, whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the ‘messages’ they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Aleks Sierz examines Look Back in Anger not as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. After showing how the anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, he goes on to show how John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in making Look Back in Anger part of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. He then questions the prevailing assumption, common in radical drama, that culture can be revolutionary, and asks whether radicalism in culture is a substitute for political radicalism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune.