Charles Marowitz, who died on 2 May this year, arrived in England from his native New York in 1956, on a scholarship earned for service in Korea. He immediately found in Unity Theatre a venue for his first London production, and in the following year opened his own theatre – an attic in the headquarters of the British Drama League known as In-Stage. In 1981, after the closure of his last and longest London base, the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, he left, disillusioned with his adopted country, to settle in California, creating companies in Los Angeles and in his new home of Malibu. But during the momentous decade of the sixties it was British theatre that Marowitz helped to reshape – not least in developing London's still flourishing ‘fringe’. In this feature, NTQ co-editor Simon Trussler celebrates not only Marowitz's directing career, on which many obituarists have written, but also – through personal recollections of the man in those early years – the many other ‘hats’ he wore: as theatre critic, editor, playwright, and cultural entrepreneur. Marowitz's long-term professional partner, Thelma Holt, shares her own memories of the twelve years when together they formed and ran the Open Space. Marowitz contributed to the old TQ and to New Theatre Quarterly, but here we include some of the articles he wrote in later life for the online Swans Commentary, to which we are most grateful for permission to reprint. All are from 2012, when Parkinson's disease was tightening its hold, and so are among the very last pieces he wrote.

CHARLES MAROWITZ and I were introduced to each other in the early 1960s when the actor I was playing opposite in a William Saroyan double-bill at the Duke of York's announced he was about to revive his performance of Hamlet, which he had played for Charles in Peter Brook's Theatre of Cruelty season. Charles had seen me in a play at what was the Hampstead Theatre Club where I prophetically played a lion-tamer. Neither of these performances indicated what he saw in me to play Gertrude as a mother merely eight years older than her son, Hamlet.

In his flat, the first sight of Charles was forbidding: he was very tall, unhealthily pale with a lot of black hair, a dead ringer in my eyes for Rasputin. He offered me a cup of coffee and, when he went to fetch it from the kitchen, I hastily scanned his bookshelves, to see if they would tell me something about the man. The books were terrifying as he was so obviously very well read in terms theatrical from A to Z, and historically from the beginning of time to contemporary theatre. His smile obliterated the Rasputin impression: it was a wolfish grin. So I slipped into thinking I could play Little Red Riding Hood to his Big Bad Wolf.

In the spring of 2004, I was invited to Prague to direct Vaclav Havel's Temptation at the National Theatre in the Czech Republic. I had directed in a number of European cities but there was something of a frisson about going to Prague and working with the ex-president of the Czech Republic, whom I remembered most vividly as the Great Dissenter against Soviet rule in a city I had often visualized but never actually seen.

On the day Vaclav Havel was scheduled to attend the first-act run-through of his play there was a palpable sense of hysteria in the air. The actors, all highly experienced members of a robust and respected permanent company that performed regularly before the upper echelons of Prague society, had never played in a scrappy rehearsal room for an internationally lauded political icon and ex-president of the Czech Republic surrounded by secret service men. Lines were muffed, moves went awry, cues forgotten, and a sense of a ‘Royal Command Performance’ hung in the air. After an hour or so, the torture was over and the actors sat circled around an appreciative, avuncular, and soft-spoken playwright, being gently massaged with compliments and diverted by anecdotes about his numerous incarcerations, the play's inception, and the thrill of being back in the midst of working actors after an absence of some twenty-five years.

In 1923, all of New York was bowled over by the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to America. No one in this country had seen such synchronized ensemble playing or a troupe of individual actors of such power and persuasiveness. When the company returned to Russia after a triumphant national tour, actors such as Maria Ouspenskaya stayed behind and, along with Richard Boleslavsky, an earlier dropout, began instructing American actors in that strange doctrine known as the Stanislavsky System. One of Boleslavsky's most attentive students was Lee Strasberg. He and his close friend Harold Clurman were early converts to Stanislavsky as handed down by Boleslavsky.

The trajectory of most books is from the eye to the brain and then out of some imperceptible pee hole at the back of the head. Only occasionally does something that you read enter the bloodstream and become a permanent part of your metabolism. Those are books that become so permanently lodged in the mental archives that they remain on instant recall for the rest of your life. Jan Kott's Still Alive (Yale University Press, 1994) is that kind of book for me.

I read it, savouringly, over four or five days, and when I'd finished found scenes and situations recurring in my dreams. An analyst would be able to provide some astute reason why that was so. He would probably prove that it connected up with personal psychic preoccupations triggered by the depicted events, but a critic would have a simpler explanation. He would point out that being vivid, subtle, graphic, and profound, the book fleshed out what was already known in general terms, but here achieved a specificity that made it ineradicably memorable.

On 13 October 2012, Lenny Bruce, had he not accidentally overdosed on narcotics (or committed suicide – the jury is still out on that one), would be eighty-seven years old. It is, of course, a thoroughly incredible notion – like an octogenarian Mozart, a super annuated Janis Joplin, or James Dean signing up for a senior citizen pension. Poètes maudits, doomed rock icons, and self-destructive superstars are supposed to die young. Their myth demands it, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Bruce at forty-one, perched on a toilet bowl with a spike in his right arm and his last typed words (‘conspiracy to interfere with the Fourth Amendment const—’) in the barrel of his still humming electric typewriter, died characteristically. He was always associated with toilet humour and throughout the last decade of his life ex hausted himself trying to demonstrate that the United States Constitution protected the free speech for which one court after another mercilessly prosecuted him. (The Fourth Amendment, incidentally, protects citizens from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ and, along with the state's First Amendment violations, was as much responsible for his downfall as the cocaine and morphine.)

In this article Jim Davis considers gender representation in Victorian pantomime alongside variance in Victorian life, examining male and female impersonation in pantomime within the context of cross-dressing (often a manifestation of gender variance) in everyday life. While accepting that male heterosexual, gay, and lesbian gazes may have informed the reception of Victorian pantomime, he argues for the existence of a transgendered gaze and a contextual awareness of gender variant behaviour, with a more nuanced view of cross-dressed performance. The principal boy role and its relationship to variant ways of seeing suggests its appeal goes beyond what Jacky Bratton calls the ‘boy’, a notion she applies to the dynamic androgyny of male impersonators in burlesque, music hall, and occasionally melodrama. For the principal ‘boy’ is clearly transmuting back into a girl, at least physically. Equally, while the dame role is usually unambiguously male, Dan Leno's late-Victorian dames seem based on observation of real women. There has been enormous scholarly interest in theatrical cross-dressing, but also a partial tendency to associate it with what Marjorie Garber calls ‘an emerging gay and lesbian identity’. This is appropriate, but should not obscure the relevance of cross-dressed performances to an emerging transgender identity, even if such an identity has partially been hidden from history. Any discussion of cross-dressing in Victorian pantomime should heed the multifaceted functions of cross dressing in its society and the multiplicity of gendered perspectives and gazes that this elicited.

In this article, Ken Rea examines the factors that make for success in an overcrowded acting profession. He asks what actors can do to influence their chances of having a successful career and doing outstanding work, and suggests what drama schools could do to increase the number of their students who achieve this. He examines research on peak performance in other domains, such as sport and music, then formulates a profile of the outstanding actor, based on his own empirical research and more than thirty years' teaching at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Drawing on interviews with world-class professionals, he proposes seven key qualities that most outstanding actors manifest, and he suggests how these can be nurtured in a training context. This article explores ideas now being reworked as a book on success in acting. Ken Rea is senior acting tutor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and author of A Better Direction (1989).

In this article Richard Hornby argues that Ibsen's plays are badly performed today, or not performed at all, because of directors' refusal to take them with appropriate seriousness. The tendency is to stage the plays' reputation as simplistic social problem plays rather than as the complex, challenging, bizarre dramas that Ibsen actually wrote. In particular, directors avoid the grotesque elements that are the true ‘quintessence of Ibsenism’, and that are often remarkably similar in style to that of avant-garde playwrights today. Richard Hornby is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside. For the past twenty-eight years he has been theatre critic for The Hudson Review, and is author of six books and over two hundred published articles on various aspects of theatre. This essay was delivered as the keynote address at the fourteenth annual Ibsen Festival of the Commonweal Theatre Company, Lanesboro, Minnesota, in April 2011.

Although Joseph Losey is best known as the blacklisted director of films such as the Pinter-scripted The Servant, The Go-Between, and Accident, as well as Mr Klein starring Alain Delon, he also had an important career in leftist theatre prior to making his Hollywood film debut in in the late 1940s. Because of his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht on the 1947 Hollywood production of Galileo, it is assumed that Losey learned from him most of his stagecraft – particularly the use of Verfremdungseffekt and self-reflexivity. However, as this article shows, Losey's apprenticeship was rooted not in the Epic Theatre (which was largely a second-hand phenomenon) but in the Soviet theatrical avant garde, observed at first hand during a 1935 Moscow visit studying the techniques of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Pavlovich Okhlopkov, whose ‘theatre in the round’ stagings and use of complex ramps and projections provided the basis for Losey's subsequent Federal Theatre Project ‘Living Newspaper’ productions – notably Triple-A Plowed Under and Injunction Granted! Under the aegis of co-founder Hallie Flanagan, the Living Newspaper proved to be the model of 1930s political theatre: topical, didactic, fast-paced – and almost immediately obsolete as events superseded the plays' relevance. Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester University Press's ‘British Film Makers’ series and of Beckett, Deleuze, and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently working with Felicity Colman on a three-volume Encyclopedia of Film-Philosophy.

What is the discipline in which ‘academic drama’ is engaged? Leaving aside debates about an emphasis on theatre or performance as the key term, who is included in the discipline, and how has it reshaped itself over the last decades? Is it right to say there have been major redefining changes, and if so, what are they? Graham Ley is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on ancient Greek performance and comparative theory, and is currently preparing an essay on a theoretical history for Greek tragedy. He has previously published in New Theatre Quarterly on developments in Australian theatre (1986), the avant-garde (1991), Peter Brook (1993), Diderot (1995), Tara Arts (1997), and most recently diaspora theatre in the UK (2011). The present discussion is adapted from the conclusion to Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance, a collection of essays to be published later in the year by the University of Exeter Press.

With its second revival of The Roaring Girl now in the Royal Shakespeare Company's repertory, Chi-fang Sophia Li documents in this article the making of the first production, as directed by Barry Kyle in 1983. She reviews the other RSC productions that informed Kyle's directorial approach, and, using the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Library's archival materials and a research interview, she attempts a reconstructive criticism of Kyle's project of ‘theatrical archaeology’, arguing that what Kyle did was adapt Dekker and Middleton's Jacobean angst about the radical economic changes of the first decade of King James's reign to articulate current anxieties about Thatcherite economic ‘reforms’. The revival became compellingly invested with Kyle's critical reflections on triumphalist capitalism and ‘Victorian values’. Chi-fang Sophia Li is Assistant Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. She has also published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, and English Studies (Routledge), and in Chinese in Review of English and American Literature.