This issue of TRI opens with four articles which, in rather diverse ways, address the present stakes and states of feminism in and of performance. Some of the issues these articles take up and the ‘state of the field’ are introduced by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, the editorial secretary of the journal. The two additional articles in this issue, besides the many book reviews, including those that were left out by mistake in the previous issue are by Min Tian and Gabriele Brandstetter. They are both examples of theatre/performance historiography, the former dealing with a very short but decisive moment for modern theatre history, concerning a meeting between Gordon Craig and Mei Lanfang that ‘hardly’ can be said to have taken place but still happened, and the second dealing with the longue durée of the fascinating notion of virtuosity. F.R

In the past decade and a half, feminism and gender studies have undergone a process of critical self-scrutiny and re-assessment. Presently, the fields of theatre and performance studies are undertaking a similar project of self-evaluation, as evidenced by recent calls to assess the ‘state of the field’ as well as its future directions. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harrison suggest in their recent co-edited volume, Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory, that any attempt to envision the future must begin by examining the present, which in turn entails looking to, and reflecting on, the legacies and remains of the past. In her article for this issue of TRI, ‘A Critical Step to the Side: Performing the Loss of the Mother’, Aston does precisely this, asking, ‘in what ways it might be critically productive to come back to the maternal as a subject for feminism’.

Reacting to the concerns expressed by Sue-Ellen Case and others that Greek tragedies were written by men and for men in a patriarchal society, and that the plays are misogynistic and should be ignored by feminists, this article considers how female directors and writers have continued to exploit characters such as Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra and Electra to make a powerful statement about contemporary society.

Greek tragedy served as a disciplinary state apparatus that displaced women's public performances of the lament. Yet, in spite of its displacements and regulatory structures, the tragedy has been adopted by Euro-American playwrights and performers for political and even feminist political purposes. From Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to readings of the comedy of Lysistrata, the structures of the Greek stage are currently deployed to stage the relation of gender to state practices. While these examples may seem to be in contradiction to the Greek structures, they actually further the use of the classical dramaturgical devices for their purposes within the tradition. However, certain Arabic revisions of Lysistrata reveal the assumptions in the model that prevent its adoption.

This essay sets out to ask in what ways it might be critically productive to come back to the maternal as a subject for feminism. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's desire to ‘loosen’ the antiessentialist drive to get ‘beyond’ gender, and her consideration in this respect of a non-dualistic idea of ‘beside’, I locate my analysis in three performances, examined ‘beside’ each other. Each of these performances is a solo show: Anna Yen's Chinese Take Away (1997), SuAndi's The Story of M (1994) and Kazuko Hohki's Toothless (1998). Moreover, each solo is located in different inter-national, maternal geographies: Asian/Australian (Yen), black British (SuAndi) and Japanese/British (Hohki), and each performs the loss of the mother by the daughter. Working also with Judith Butler's proposal that grief and loss afford a political, transformative means of ‘becoming undone’, I ‘read’ these three international geographies of the maternal side by side as different from each other, but all connected to the critical project of rethinking the maternal.

This paper examines Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 as examples of unconventional solo performance, and argues that these personal narratives can be read as a type of embodied performance that might otherwise be denied Satrapi. The traditional novel is regarded as an outlet for women denied a public presence; the graphic novel goes a step further, allowing presence both vocally and physically through repeated self-portraiture, which deals frankly with distinctly corporeal issues of visibility, sexuality and identity. These are threaded through the narrative and dealt with frankly in both word and image. Drawing on comic and performance theory to discuss how Satrapi uses the interplay of visual and narrative languages to perform herself, I contend that graphic novels may best be understood as occupying a middle ground between the novel and the theatre, where their formal liminality frequently echoes the liminal states of their protagonists.

Edward Gordon Craig's 1935 visit to Russia coincided with Mei Lanfang's 1935 performance in Russia. While Mei Lanfang's performance and its impact on Brecht and Russian theatre artists have been well documented and studied in recent years, Craig's contacts with the Chinese actor and his interest in the Chinese theatre, however, have yet to be investigated. Drawing on previously unpublished archive materials and other rarely used sources, this article for the first time documents Craig's contacts with Mei Lanfang during his visit to Russia. It also investigates his interest in the Chinese theatre in the context of his theoretical construction of the art of the theatre and his overall interest in the traditions of Asian theatres.

This essay considers the virtuoso in music, theatre and dance as a liminal figure of performativity. It draws on cultural studies as well as the history of science to offer a critical reading which follows the virtuoso's oscillation between science and art. The escalating dynamic in the virtuoso's technical control of material (of the body, the ‘instrument’, language) leads to a polarization between artistic ‘creation’ and virtuoso performance: the virtuoso thus occupies a seismographic function within the aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century. The article also outlines the relationship between the media and virtuoso performance and the relevance of the anecdote for the virtuoso's charismatic impact. This essay will contribute to our understanding of how the contemporary media influenced the virtuoso concept, and address the issue of whether the (partial) disappearance of the virtuoso from the theatre stage translocates the figure of the virtuoso onto other ‘cultural stages’.