In April 2014, Michael Walling, Artistic Director of Border Crossings, worked in Palestine with a company of actors drawn partly from the UK and partly from the Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre on a production of This Flesh is Mine, by Brian Woolland, Using the Iliad as a starting point, the play was set partly in a classical and partly in a modern world. In this article Michael Walling discusses how the production engaged with the contemporary Palestinian situation in terms of space, voice, and the body. He describes how the rehearsal process in Ramallah informed staging and textual decisions, and how questions of design, casting, and acting style came to carry political significance in relation to the Palestinian context, both as performed in Ramallah and in London. This Flesh is Mine was a coproduction by Border Crossings, Ashtar, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and was funded by the Anna Lindh Foundation, Arts Council England, and the British Council.

Charles Macklin, the celebrated eighteenth-century actor and playwright, is now remembered as a comedian and a comedic writer; however, his first produced work as an author was the historical drama Henry VII, or the Popish Imposter. This was immediately condemned as a flop and, although it was published, it was never again produced. In this article Michael M. Wagoner examines the nature of the play’s failure by questioning the accepted narratives of theatrical success. Specifically, he engages issues of audience reception as well as the playwright’s persona to understand the combined relationship between the two dynamics that can result in a play’s failure. Ultimately, both Macklin’s persona and his later work secured the flop narrative in order to temper the subsequent expectations of his audiences. Michael M. Wagoner is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University, and he holds an MFA in Shakespeare and Performance from Mary Baldwin College. His research examines the performance and dramaturgy of early modern drama, and his essay ‘Imaginative Bodies and Bodies Imagined: Extreme Casting in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage’ will appear in The Bear Stage: Shaping Shakespeare for Performance (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015).

The Holstebro Festuge (festival week), which marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014, is a huge undertaking organized by Odin Teatret every three years that involves the participation of many local people and a significant number of town and regional organizations as well as numerous international artists in a cultural extravaganza of performances, screenings, art exhibits, and barters that takes place over nine days in the city and surrounding region. In this article, Ian Watson examines the implications of the Festuge for Odin’s connection to and relationship with the city it has called home for a little under fifty years. As Watson points out, the tacitly accepted narrative, embedded in much of Eugenio Barba’s considerable body of writings, Odin’s performances and workshops as well as much of the material written about Barba and/or his company by scholars, is that the pursuit of an aesthetic is Barba’s primary if not sole preoccupation. Watson challenges this limited reading as he draws upon the sociologist Marcel Mauss’s study of ‘gifting’ in particular traditional societies, and the political scientist Robert Putnam’s parsing of social capital in Bowling Alone to examine the Festuge. Ian Watson is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. Among other publications, he is author of Towards a Third Theatre and Negotiating Culture: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate.

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).

In 2015 the concept of live performance as having efficacy to instigate political change is contested, yet some politically motivated performance has demonstrably facilitated change, and critical frameworks have been developed that account for performances that hold clear political stances. However, even where arguments exist for the enduring relevance of political performance, certain models of practice tend to be represented as more efficacious and sophisticated than others. In this article, inspired by her recent experiences of making political theatre, Rebecca Hillman asks to what extent prevalent discourses may nurture or repress histories and futures of political theatre. She re-evaluates the contemporary relevance of agitprop theatre made in British contexts in the 1960s and 1970s by comparing academic analyses of the work with less well-documented critiques by the practitioners and audiences. She documents also the fluctuation and transformation, rather than the dissipation, of political activism in the final decades of the twentieth century. Rebecca Hillman is a director and playwright, and is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter..

Due to the lingering aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe being mostly out of sight, the peripheral victims of the Fukushima disaster were no longer able to discern the boundary between the here of the safety zone and the there of the afflicted area. What ensued after this geographical unification was psychological unity in which the harmony-conscious ethics of the Japanese were excessively fortified, formulating what is often called the code of wa (harmonious integration), which implicitly coerced all to speak from hisaisha no tachiba (the standpoint of the afflicted people). Kyoko Iwaki, a doctoral student at Goldsmiths, University of London, after fourteen years as a theatre journalist in Japan, provides in this article a socio-psychological analysis on how the code of wa materialized as the unwritten law after the catastrophe, and argues how in Current Location (Genzaichi), playwright-director Okada Toshiki grapples with this code by developing a post-Fukushima aesthetic. By pertinently using the apparatus of ‘fiction’ as a guise for relieving the audience of the code, Okada develops a theatre language that voices discord in content, yet accord in form, permitting the characters to speak both from the here and the there.

Simianification is the practice of humans inhabiting the simian body on stage. Because Asians have lived with monkeys and apes, several Asian theatre traditions have long legacies of representing monkeys on stage. In Europe and North America, where non-human primates did not exist, they are not a familiar feature in performance until nineteenth-century music hall and circus and twentieth-century film and television. In some recent performances in Asia dancers and actors have expanded their understanding of monkey roles by incorporating scientific discoveries, modern movement techniques, and global pop culture. On the British and American stage, actors experiment to ‘impersonate’ the humanized ape bodily and mentally, without the aid of the disguises and prosthetics usual in film. These performers ‘embody’ the philosophical inquiry of what it means to ‘be monkey’ by inhabiting a monkey’s body while still performing ‘art’ for a human audience. Catherine Diamond, a Contributing Editor to NTQ, is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is also the director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.