It is my pleasure to present the first number of Theatre Research International in 2005. This issue is the second of several under my editorship that will have a focus section. The first on ‘postdramatic theatre’ (29.1) has occasioned a great deal of interest (at least judging by the number of downloads from the journal's website) and this positive response suggests that the policy of publishing focus issues meets a genuine need. Focus issues will seek to explore a particular topic from a number of different perspectives. In keeping with the journal's international readership this invariably translates into articles from scholars working in different countries and scholarly traditions. A focus issue does not usually mean, however, that an entire issue will be given over to the topic. As the present number on the ‘director in the theatre’ indicates, three to four articles are usually sufficient to define (but certainly not exhaust) a topic. This means that some space in the journal will be reserved for articles submitted and reviewed in the normal fashion.

Unlike most Southeast Asian theatres, Vietnam has created a sizeable corpus of scripted spoken dramas that continue to be popular in performance with urban audiences. Initially influenced by French classicism and Ibsenist realism, the Vietnamese spoken drama, kich noi, very quickly adapted to local social realities and survives by readily incorporating topical subjects. While keeping abreast of current social issues, the theatre nonetheless makes use of its multi-cultural heritage, and in any given modern performance one can see the layers of influence – traditional Sino-Vietnamese hat boi/tuong; Vietnamese cheo theatre, Cham dance, French realism, Soviet constructivism and socialist realism, and most recently, western performance art. The Vietnamese playwrights, set designers, directors, and actors have combined aspects of the realistic theatre with the conventions of their suppositional traditional theatre to come up with a hybrid that is uniquely Vietnamese. It is argued that these manifold layers should be regarded as a kind of palimpsest rather than just as pastiche.

Celebrity status at the fin de siècle depended largely on the creation and sustenation of a high profile, easily recogniZable image and the entertainment lithograph offered the most powerful and culturally pervasive means to achieve this. Thanks to the poster collectors of the period, and the acceptance of this ephemeral form into the world of ‘high art’, many examples of advertising imagery exist, offering a visual record of the themes and the performers that dominated the popular stage. This article focuses on poster works created by Jules Chéret (1836–1933) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's (1864–1901) images of the dancer and actress Jane Avril, to explore whether the entertainment lithograph can be employed to aid an understanding and contextualization of fin-de-siècle popular performance.

Combining critical analysis, personal accounts, and original photography, this essay discusses Theatre Square, Moscow's most prominent theatrical destination, and examines the dramatic changes it underwent in the Soviet era, as well as after the demise of the Soviet Union. In following Yury Lotman's notion of the ‘ensemble’, I argue that the recent reconstruction of the garden in front of the Bolshoi Theatre created a particular set of conditions under which the difference between the ‘diversely encoded’ landmarks of Theatre Square became less relevant. The article also looks into whether the new and newly reconstructed gardens and parks of post-Soviet Moscow detract from, as some critics have suggested, or on the contrary contribute to, the act of remembering the past.

This article examines a spectacular example of Greek theatre-related vase iconography, the so-called ‘Cleveland Medea’, by studying the ways in which a painter appropriates iconography for his own narrative purposes. Of special interest are the interactions called for by the vessel from its prospective viewers in the symposium context. Throughout, the artefact is treated as an important document of the cultural history of Greek tragedy in the fourth century BCE.

The work of Robert Lepage is examined in the context of the avant-garde, from Robert Wilson and Peter Brook, through the French Surrealists, back to Edward Gordon Craig. As well as being an icon of post-modernism, analysis of productions such as Needles and Opium, Elsinore and Zulu Time show the degree to which Lepage has realized Craig's ideals of the Übermarionette, and his screens, as well as ‘Scene’, his concept of a flexible, mechanized performance space. What this demonstrates is the unity of the modernist movement throughout the twentieth century.

Proceeding from the observation that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy) soon abandons the analysis of actual performances in favour of a discussion of character, the article explores Lessing's problematic relationship with the performing body, situating it in the context of an increasingly textual culture. It shows the implications of this move in terms of gender prescriptions before discussing Lessing's ‘disgust’ with a particular performance of his Emilia Galotti. Reading this example with Lessing's treatise Laokoon and drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, it argues that Lessing's struggle with the performers reveals a profound crisis in subject formation in the sense that the disturbing corporality of the performing body is always threatening sympathetic identification. The article concludes that the Dramaturgie itself constitutes an ‘abjection’ of performance. A postscript opens up the view onto the contemporary relevance and refiguration of Lessing's Laokoon in the Laokoon Festival in Hamburg.

According to the Australia Council, the 152 arts festivals held in that country during the season of 1993–4 had a combined operating expenditure of Australian $58.3 million and were attended by 2.2 million visitors. At the same time, these festivals provided 32,000 paid engagements for Australian artists. Considering this massive expansion of festivals in terms of artistic arena, national marketplace and international industry, the scholarly interest in this phenomenon has taken new directions. To study the productions seemed not to be enough, nor was it satisfactory to survey audience attendance or to investigate economic turnouts. Obviously festivals did something more than promote theatrical performances.

Michael Frayn's play about quantum mechanics, memory and history, Copenhagen, has taken a lot of criticism for ‘misrepresenting’ its historical characters, primarily Werner Heisenberg. This essay analyses the dramaturgy of the play and argues for a postdramatic reading in which questions of representation are dissolved by formal strategies that ally themselves with the thematics of the work. The text is viewed as a hybrid, somewhere between the dramatic and the postdramatic, set, as it is, in a fictional afterlife where conventional human categories no longer function. The postdramatic theatre, in refusing to interpret text, becomes a viable mode for performance in that the indeterminacy of meaning on stage equates with the uncertainty principle that lies at the scientific and moral heart of Copenhagen.

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

The Swedish Theatre Biennale is a peculiar festival in the sense that it lacks a public audience. More than a thousand theatre professionals gather for four days to present and watch the most exciting productions of the last two years in between lectures, debates, master classes and coffee breaks. There is hardly any room for local visitors to see a performance. Nevertheless, the hosting city sponsors the festival, newspapers report on it and the citizens look amazed at the crowd of known and unknown artists. What are the values of such a festival? Why is it held every two years and who benefits from it? These questions are pursued in this article according to a model of the theatrical event as presented in the introduction of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) book publication Theatrical Events –; Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). Politics, management, environment and experiences are juxtaposed as equally important elements of the festival as a theatrical event. The article is concluded by an expanded model pointing out some of the values at stake.

Lewis Mumford, writing in the 1930s, understood the city as a ‘theater of social action’. Mumford's ideas remain important in the context of the contemporary post-industrial city, in which theatricality and performativity are key drivers of so-called ‘experience economies’. Increasingly, urban planners are attuned to such theatrical notions as the ‘urban scene’ and ‘urban drama’ in framing policy. Adopting interpretive strategies enabled by Performance Studies, this paper gives an account of some of the ways in which theatre and performance are made manifest in cities. It considers some of the implications of urban performativity, arguing that good city planning demands an ethics of performance, whereby citizens become spectators and co-performers in the urban drama.

This essay examines the theoretical and practical implications of performance as a utopian gesture, particularly with regard to postcolonial drama. Analyzing Manjula Padmanabhan's futuristic play, Harvest, as a case study, I argue that ‘utopia’ is a crucial critical concept for postcolonial dramatic practice because it stands for the collision and convergence of aesthetic and political interests, using the body itself as a site for representation and resistance. The play explores the extreme outcome of the international trade in human organs as a metaphor for neocolonialism and the constraints of postcolonial societies rent apart by economic inequalities. In this, it presents a moment of personal moral reckoning as a paradigmatic marker for an entire culture's confrontation with its utopian desires and their consequences. Harvest reflects the utopian impulse of modern drama masked by dystopic expression: it demands a differently imagined and shaped future, even as it chronicles the collapse of utopian visions in absolutist excess.

In recent years the construct of the festival form has shifted considerably, engaging with contemporary debates regarding issues of community and identity. One manifestation of this engagement is the model of the boutique festival, which focuses on a particular audience, and which positions that audience to substantially produce its own festival experience, in a manner far more rigorous than more conventional festival models.

The OUT OF THE BOX Festival of Early Childhood, produced by the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Australia, is a potent example of a boutique festival, in which key elements pertaining to the manner in which this model of festival production, including audience positioning, notions of excellence, consultation, philosophy, programming, and the use of space, are evinced.

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacs's assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the director's history.

The concept of festival can help to understand the framework within which political community building took place in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the methods employed in doing so. Political communities were established within different kinds of cultural performances such as gatherings, demonstrations, party conventions, and – most frequently – political celebrations, which obtained a festival-like structure. Referring to examples from the labour movement, this article examines different techniques of creating communities and discusses the impact of theatrical strategies and certain types of theatre in this crucial field of modern politics.

Stanislavsky's ‘emotion memory’, basic to Method acting, is a pretext, if not subtext, for reflections on the vicissitudes of directing, most particularly as it confronts the one inescapable emotion, stage fright, which may be seen, rather, as an existential condition – without which, actually, there would be no theatre. Or at least, without a sense of psychic or physical risk, no theatre of any consequence. If susceptibility to such risk is expected of the actor, whose technique is a way of dealing with stage fright, much of what is done in directing is an equivocal cover up, because the credibility of performance draws upon that fright, hiding it and exploiting it, all the more as we approach the limits of performance. As for the emotion memories of the essay, and the emotions about memory too, these are drawn from a long career in theatre, marked by experiment and controversy, and an insistence that, for all the stress on emotions, the mandate of performance is to bring it into thought, or what – neurally, analytically, bodies, minds, psyche, senses, every form of intelligence activated – is referred to as blooded thought.

The English dramatist/director Howard Barker has, through a unique combination of style, content, theoretical argument and mise-en-scène, persistently countered conventional presumptions and propositions of the supposedly ‘natural’ diminutions or ‘inevitable’ restrictions whereby one might think, feel, speak, act, love and exist. His work offers a purposefully anti-naturalistic expansion of vocabulary: of language, terms of experience, scenic and physical expression, and being. This article presents an actor's account of preparing and playing a role, under Barker's direction, in a two-hander play, and offers a reading of the play's strategic dynamics based on these experiences, and of the characters' uses of self-conscious performances in order to sustain and subvert artifice, with references to Greenblatt's theories of theatrical charisma and eroticism, and Baudrillard's theories of seduction.

This article explores contemporary Iranian theatre festivals and their relation to the whole structure of theatrical playing in the country. It examines in particular the role of the most important decision-making centre for theatre and theatre festivals: the Dramatic Arts Centre (DAC), the theatrical branch of the Ministry of Culture. The main framework of the article is based on Willmar Sauter's model of the theatrical event. Two of his four elements have been selected to develop the concept of festivals as theatrical events. The section titled ‘Organization and cultural context’ will discuss the organizational structure of festivals; and the section ‘Contextual theatricality’ will analyse the framework of the festival culture. Some fifty festivals and mini-festivals are held annually throughout the whole country. They are categorized in the article according to their genre: international, national, regional and community.