Current productions written, directed, and/or performed by First Nations Canadians are often characterized by a complex layering of myth and iconography operating simultaneously in more than one cultural system. The effect is richly visual and auditory theatre, but, more important, such performances highlight the essentially indexical and iconographic nature of theatre itself by writing text at the intersection of discourses with quite different political and historical markers and, in the process, bringing those discourses together to form a new typology of signs. What is problematic is the effect of such signs.

The Singapore play, Talaq, was denied a public entertainment licence in October 2000 despite having been staged twice before, and its producer was arrested for trespassing when she refused to vacate the theatre in her bid to document the rehearsal process. The controversy, staged as a meta-drama by the print and broadcast media, reveals much about the cultural dynamics of Singapore's arts scene in respect of state subvention and artistic freedom, and the play itself raises questions about the performance of gender and ethnicity, as well as the political anatomy of the performing body.

The Sistren Theatre Collective came together in 1977 as the result of an initiative of the ruling People's National Party in Jamaica. As part of an extensive special employment programme in the 1970s, the Jamaican Government had created opportunities for women to receive basic job training. One group of women who had been involved in a training programme as Basic School aides decided to put on a play for Workers' Week. Through the good offices of the recently established Women's Bureau, the group was able to work on this project with Honor Ford-Smith who was a tutor at the Jamaica National School of Drama at the time. Their collaborative effort resulted in the creation of a sketch, Downpression Get a Blow (1977), based on the women's domestic and political experiences. In the months and years that followed, the group went from strength to strength, creating plays from their shared experiences; working with other groups to use dramatic scenarios as a way of problem-solving and ultimately establishing a permanent company with its own research unit, community workshops and silkscreen printing activities. At the time of writing in 1989, ten of the original thirteen members are still with the group and two new members have been added. Another ten to twelve women and men are employed by the collective as resource and support staff.

One of the features of the growth of playing in London in the late 1580s shows itself in the size of casts needed for some of the new plays composed around 1590. The history plays in particular laid exceptional demands on the numbers in the companies playing in London. Presumably this was one result of the foothold for performing to large audiences that the new amphitheatres had given the players. But it raises many questions about the organization of the companies. Did they enlarge the companies for the occasion with hired men, using casual if stagestruck labour hanging around the playhouses, or did they take on extra sharers? There is no evidence that this happened. The number of sharers in the leading companies, apart from the uniquely-large Queen's Men, who were allotted twelve players in 1583 but split into two in about 1590, when most of the companies had eight or ten players. Which came first, the larger companies or the larger plays? Did different companies join forces to stage them? Did they, after performance in London, take these large plays on tour? The conventional assumption about that, based largely on the evidence of the ‘bad’ and shortened quarto texts of the early plays, is that the ‘large’ plays were cut down to the ‘bad’ quarto size to allow the plays to be taken on tour. So were the large plays written only for London audiences? The writing of plays for large casts was a short-lived phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1580s and dying by 1594. What changed the conditions in that year? I believe we can address these questions most sharply by considering one of theatre history's more intriguing chimeras, the so-called ‘amalgamated company’ that is thought to have occupied Henslowe's Rose through the early 1590s.

This article traces the transnational career of the celebrated Beijing opera female impersonator Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) through photographic documentation of the performer. A wide spectrum of Mei's photos is analysed, which captures him both onstage and offstage. The timeline of these photos ranges from those produced during the Republican period (1911–49) to those produced in the People's Republic of China (PRC) (1949–) and includes media coverage from the US (1920s) and the USSR (1930s). This article raises questions about how nationalism, transnationalism and female impersonator's gender identity are represented in ever-transforming modes.

My dear Mackenzie, the fact is—my plays are too liberal for the aristocratic illiberals of Ireland.… My plays breathe the noble sentiments of the influential classes of Ireland.… But I am going to a place where the feelings and the reality of liberty exist in their most glowing form—and not the form alone, but the embodied spirit. I am going to America.

Since the 1980s the Taiwanese theatre troupe Contemporary Legend Theatre (CLT) has been devoted to transforming jingju by way of adapting world classics. Through an analysis of its adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (2005), this article considers how CLT pushes the boundaries of jingju acting, which is made up of singing, speaking, dance-acting and combat. To meet Beckett's challenge of performing comic failure, CLT integrates jingju restraint and Western slapstick. In so doing, CLT liberates the actors’ bodies from jingju conventions to produce a new aesthetic, which also gives the original play a new metaphysical interpretation.

I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulent umthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.

Performance is ideology! This is particularly true of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, one of his two comedies concerning the behaviour of husband and wife after the marriage ceremony—the other being The Comedy of Errors. Here he makes use of what may well be the longest-running English female stock character, the recalcitrant wife, who goes back to Mrs Noah, the disobedient woman of the mediaeval religious cycle plays. But at the same time he adapts the technique of classical farce to observation of human behaviour, by taking an impossible premise (that a wife can be tamed) and extending it logically to the utmost limits of absurdity. He also combines the Mrs Noah figure with the Judy puppet and the clever woman of the Interludes who outwits her husband, but with one distinctive omission: the physical violence commonly assumed essential to shrew-taming. I believe that here Shakespeare has forged a new dramatic mode by humanizing the intellectuality of rhetorically based classical farce and psychologizing the knockabout physicality of its Plautine offshoot.

This article introduces and theorizes ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein's performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein's work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and forms of productivity in twenty-first-century capitalism. I argue that Holstein's overidentification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft results in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice.

The aim of this article is to establish a classification for the various written documents produced by assistant directors (before and during the rehearsals, during the run-throughs, from the first performance onwards and so on). It also underlines theatrical work as an autonomous subject of interest. These written documents are useful, and even indispensable according to certain directors. The notes may differ in nature at different times in the production process. In their finality they preserve a record of what is to be redone, a record of the work whose existence the audience does not suspect. Contrary to what one might believe, it is not always the actors who retain the truest memory of their work. The following is based partly on my own experience as assistant director, or intern, to Yves Beaunesne, Denis Marleau, Matthias Langhoff and Robert Wilson.

This essay examines the polarizing politics of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I analyse the function of soft-power diplomacy in the design of the opening ceremony in relation to the international controversy around these games over the repression of civil and human rights. The Sochi Olympics became a lightning rod inciting pro-Western democratic protests against and Russian neo-national support for President Vladimir V. Putin's cultural reform programme. I argue that the Sochi stage was the opening scene of a much larger cultural propaganda campaign reflecting the government's move to boost a conservative world view. Sochi's spectacle mediated a reform strategy designed to reinvent Russian identity and restore Russia's global status. For contrast, I look back to the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics and its vision of Soviet society in order to highlight the changing contexts in which soft power underscores broader objectives in geocultural politics.

The first authorized productions in Japan of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado took place in the early years of the post-war American occupation. A group of Japanese theatre-makers whose international engagement had been circumscribed by the war were involved in these productions – first a 1946 American-led version for occupation personnel, and then an ‘all-Japanese’ version in 1947 and 1948. For these artists, The Mikado, a foreign operetta that was simultaneously ‘about Japan’ and not, offered a way of rebuilding post-war Japanese theatre, and, in doing so, imagining new possibilities for the nation. Through The Mikado they performed a ‘cosmopolitanism at home’, a mode of engagement with the international from within the borders of one's own nation.

Künstler ist nur einer, der aus einer Lösung ein Rätsel machen kann. (Karl Kraus)

Only that person is an artist who can turn a solution into a riddle. (Karl Kraus)

The aphorism by Karl Kraus captures the intuition that an artwork is an intentional structure, that it represents the response to a question or the solution to a problem, if only a problem of self-expression. Even when, for example, a theatrical performance is riddled with accidental omissions of text and other mishaps, we find ourselves watching and appreciating it as if everything in it was meant to be as we see it. It has therefore been said that in the presence of art we ‘suspend disbelief’, we suspend the sceptical suspicion according to which the arrangement of internal relations within the artwork might be less than perfectly meaningful: in the presence of art we begin as absolute believers in the integrity of the artwork.

But there is another dimension to Kraus's remark: what appears to be the solution to a problem or a coherent response to some situation becomes a riddle of its own. The apparent integrity of the work may result from interpretation rather than through the deliberate intentionality of the artwork itself. Moreover, it is the exception for a work of art to be reducible to providing a solution to a particular problem. Indeed, we would tend to deny that artworks are governed by instrumental reason. This is true even in the case of theatrical performances: a performance is bound to provide more than a solution to the problem of how to stage a particular play; it cannot be regarded merely as an instrumental means of conveying a drama.

In these notes I shall deal with the origin of the Drama for Fools – a drama for marionettes by E. G. Craig. That is, I intend to approach the drama along the thread that Craig himself must have followed from his initial liking for marionettes up to his writing of playlets for them. Naturally by thread I mean Craig's artistic experience in the development of its events. I have been stimulated to proceed along this line by practical and theoretical problems. Practical because I have been able to examine many unpublished papers which, however, still require a long period of study; for this reason the present notes must be considered preliminary conclusions. Theoretical because I believe that for a full understanding of the Drama it is essential to examine the contribution of the marionette ‘Toward a New Theatre’, Craig's outstanding project elaborated between 1900–10. It can be said without a shadow of doubt that the marionette is the source from which the characters of the ‘New Theatre’ have drawn inspiration: it has characterized the human element in the scene, it is the prototype of what he chose to call the übermarionette, that new figure created by Craig and integrated into his scenic machine. It dictates his style to the actor-artist. This leads me to the conclusion that the Drama begun in 1914 was nothing but the continuation of the ‘New Theatre’ with other means and in another period.

None of Sarah Barnhardt's many biographers has treated her American vaudeville tours as anything more than a footnote to a career remarkable in so many other ways. Examined more closely, Bernhardt's encounter with vaudeville suggests a not always tranquil marriage between high art and popular culture, and it serves as an index to the evolution of a distinctively American form.

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.

In sharp contrast to the Americans' involvement in Vietnam, which has been endlessly dramatized in different forms, the realities of the Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 until 1962 and cost 100,000 dead or wounded, have been dealt with by very few French playwrights or film-makers. In fact Genet is the only one to have written a substantial work based on this subject matter while the war was taking place. The one other dramatist with whom he can be compared in this respect is the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, whose trilogy Le Cercle des représailles offers some intriguing similarities with Genet's three great plays written during the course of the war: Le Balcon, Les Nègres and Les Paravents.