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

Chris Balme, having served as senior editor of TRI for three years, has passed over the editorship to me. I really want to thank him for the excellent job he has done during his period as editor, while I have been watching the action from the wings, waiting to step in. At the same time Elaine Aston from the University of Lancaster has joined me as the new assistant editor of the journal. As a person and as a scholar she makes a huge difference, and I am looking forward to working with her. This means that three years from now she will be taking over as the senior editor of TRI. Kristina Hagström Ståhl, a graduate student from UC Berkeley, finishing her dissertation as we were working on the final touches for this issue of TRI, has joined as editorial assistant and I am very pleased to work with her as well. Finally, I also want to thank Janelle Reinelt, IFTR president, and Brian Singleton, IFTR vice president for publications, for their trust and support.

The rhetoric of censorship is increasingly invoked in the West in response to the curtailment of civil liberties, often as a result of new repressive legislation arising from efforts to fight terrorism. However, while agreeing that serious issues concerning censorship are arising for artists with more frequency, this essay argues that caution needs to be exercised concerning the charge of ‘censorship’, and that theatre artists and scholars need sustained and nuanced analyses of what constitutes censorship and what extenuating circumstances may accompany events that at first glance bear the marks of the censor.

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’.

The work of Palestinian playwright Fateh Samih Azzam arises from his experience growing up as a refugee and from his strong commitment to human rights. His latest play, Baggage, is set in a crowded airport where a lone Traveler re-enacts the Catastrophe of 1948 and its consequences. This article begins by positioning Azzam's work in relation to post-1948 Palestinian theatre. It then looks in detail at how Baggage, written as a monodrama, incorporates a number of devices including airport announcements and other voiceovers to imbue monologue with dialogue. The question of the relationship between monologue and dialogue is examined in the context of the emergence of the ‘political’ in performance and especially in relation to Jon Erickson's recent contention that dialogues facilitate the representation of conflicting world views whereas monologues tend to be ‘vehicles for the overarching world view of the playwright’. Next, it discusses a recent staging of Baggage in Famagusta, North Cyprus, focusing in particular on the way in which the production was able to embellish and extend devices contained in the written text of the play to facilitate a movement from monologue to dialogue. In its conclusion, the article returns to the prevalence of monologue in Palestinian drama and to Erickson's idea that monologue involves partiality to one side of a dispute. The article contends that productions of Baggage, which, like the one in Famagusta, accentuate the dialogical, will make it clear that the play is not just a memory play for Palestinians, but that it also cries out for all those forced out of their homes and into what Edward Saïd has called ‘the trauma of exile’. Furthermore, it argues that the Traveler's monologues need to be heard and should initiate dialogues, which in some parts of the world have not yet even begun. Finally, it suggests that the universal appeal of this and other Palestinian plays could be even more striking were the heavy use of politically oriented symbolism counterbalanced by a more minimalist Beckett-like aestheticism.

Peter Zadek, now in his eighties, is among the most honoured and respected stage directors in Germany, a nation which during most of the past century has privileged stage directors above all other theatre artists. Zadek's central position is somewhat surprising in that he began his professional career in England and has in his repertoire, his public statements and his artistic approach sought to position himself outside the mainstream German tradition. This survey of his lengthy career seeks to illuminate this paradox, to show the nature and extent of Zadek's singularity and also to suggest what features in his approach have attracted such a devoted following within a culture he has never claimed as his own.

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.

The article discusses a non-event as evidence for history writing, as well as the role of historians as constructors of histories, especially those historians who have taken part in the events they are writing about. These historiographical questions are intertwined in a case study of the Finnish National Theatre's intended visit to Berlin in May 1943. Although the visit was carefully planned, it never happened, due to a change in the political situation between Finland and Germany during the Second World War. This journey, which never took place, and its absence in the history of the Finnish National Theatre, are an indication of the complex bonding between theatre, history and politics.

This article provides analysis of the short-lived London Grand Guignol (1920–2). During its brief existence, this institution became infamous – its presentation of acts of murder and violation provoked strong reactions from its audience, the press and the Lord Chamberlain's office. It has not attracted sustained scholarly analysis since, however, and this article draws upon archival material from the Lord Chamberlain's Plays and Correspondence Files, London's Theatre Museum and the Mander and Mitchenson collection in order to assess its audience's scopophilic – and often very physical – responses, as well as the ocularcentric preoccupations of the genre. The article illuminates censorious, critical and academic definitions of value, drawing upon Foucault's essay ‘A Preface to Transgression’ and the work of Georges Bataille.

German director Frank Castorf and his designer Bert Neumann have created a series of productions that have altered the dramaturgy of visual space. Their scenography integrates stage space with other spaces mediated by technology and interlocks taped and/or live mediated images with live performance. Castorf exposes spaces hidden from the audience's direct view to address the question of what ‘truth’ inheres in an image. The philosopher Boris Groys has called this spatial dramaturgy ‘submedial space’. I flesh out Groy's concept with reference to the writings of Walter Benjamin and analyse how Castorf and Neumann create such spaces through performance strategies that blend live and mediated elements. Using Castorf's productions of Final Destination America (2000) and Forever Young (2003) at the Volksbühne Berlin as examples, I argue that the multilayered images and complex spatial configurations thereby created effectively serve Castorf's purposes of political critique.

This article asks how it is that performances of the work of the most important playwright in Israel – Hanoch Levin – fill auditoria, despite the fact that these plays are considered to be unpleasant, irritating and even repulsive. I investigate the position of Levin's theatre with regard to audience response, and demonstrate how he arouses both conscious intellectual and emotional responses in his audience. The article seeks thereby to identify the sources of pleasure in Levin's theatre. It is apparent that Levin has no wish to send his audience home cleansed and contented. Neither is he interested in providing intellectual affirmation of the world's rationality, regularity and order. Rather than balance, harmony and external affirmation, Levin's plays offer a kind of pleasure bordering on what Roland Barthes calls jouissance, resulting in a new kind of catharsis in his audience.

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.

A large proportion of Thai films and of traditional and modern dramas are based on significant figures whose lives helped shape the trajectory of Thai history, but who are in the end overwhelmed by events. Some works are produced with obvious propaganda intent, reflecting the efforts of cultural reconstruction and historical reinterpretation. This paper suggests that the plays under discussion follow an epic and episodic form, depicting the full scope of the protagonist's life rather than focusing on a single dramatic event or examining a tragic destiny. This structure resembles the paradigmatic epic underwriting Thai royalty, the Ramakien, even while the role and nature of the king is being newly exemplified in annual spectacles.

John Kani's Nothing But the Truth (2002) dramatizes South Africa's collective confrontation with its traumatic past – played out on the public stage most visibly in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings – through the personal situation of Sipho Makhaya and his family. This essay analyses the obstacles Sipho and his daughter face in their attempts to negotiate new identities within the shifting social and physical geographies of post-apartheid South Africa. Identities in the apartheid era were rooted in specific places and socio-spatial configurations that are now being radically and rapidly transformed; Kani's play implies that this transitional moment in the country's history provides the opportunity to rewrite the codes that determine the ways that space is produced and used, and in the process to alter the ways that people form identities and memories in relation to both social space and other people.

This article discusses the functions of African community theatre in general, and its preventive capacity in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in particular. By delineating the parallel developments of community theatre and HIV prevention, the reciprocal needs of the practices are assessed in light of certain cases in Tanzania. This country has taken a leading position in the implementation of sustainable and locally owned theatre projects, but the challenges of the AIDS epidemic have proven so vast that the previously assumed purposes of community theatre must be called into question. Rather than being viewed as a means in itself, or a means for rapid change, community theatre is viewed as a relational means in coordinated programmes against AIDS. However, in spite of functioning as an exceptional relational agency for the most exposed cohort in the epidemic (women aged between fifteen and twenty-four), the social, gender and epidemic predicaments will persist as long as policy-makers do not fully recognize the status of young people and the capacity of community theatre.

Written by Lee Yun-taek, arguably the most prolific and influential of contemporary Korean dramatists, The Dummy Bride (1993) is of considerable significance to the Korean political theatre's search for a new dramatic idiom in the increasingly apathetic post-ideological era. Although the issue of modernization of tradition has been a constant preoccupation with a number of other Korean playwrights in the 1990s, Lee's exploration of the relationship between tradition and contemporary social reality strikes a much more political note under the influence of Brecht and Artaud. His incorporation of the utopian realm of imagination into everyday life does not offer a stable sense of resolution to the audience. Swerving away from the ‘decontextualization and museumization’ of tradition and cautiously guiding against the excessive optimism of madang theatre, a dominant form of political theatre in the 1980s, his unique theatrical aesthetic stands as a vigilant rehearsal for how to dream without disregarding or succumbing to a frustrating reality.