In 1897 audiences welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson's new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage, and his sane, intelligent Prince was received as an exciting departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell's own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so warmly greeted, critics describing her playing as ‘curiously weak’ and ‘unconvincing and unimpressive’. Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblematic of the prettiness and pathos exemplified by Ellen Terry, and instead offered a vacant, depressive, ‘beaten’ Ophelia. In this article, Fiona Gregory examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress's own experience of mental illness and the notorious ‘rest cure’. The reception of the performance is read in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness, as well as of responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity in the visual arts. Ultimately, Campbell's performance of Ophelia can be read as a ‘witness account’ of neurasthenia and the ‘rest cure’, to stand alongside texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. Fiona Gregory lectures in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University, and has published work on the career of actress Judith Anderson, Australian cultural history, and Victorian and Edwardian writers. She is currently undertaking a wide-ranging study of actresses and mental illness from the nineteenth century to the present day, drawing on historical examples and literary and cultural representations to consider the intersections of ‘hysteria’ and the ‘histrionic’.

’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).

In this article Mireia Aragay and Clara Escoda examine James Macdonald's Royal Court Theatre production of Martin Crimp's triptych Fewer Emergencies (2005) in the wake of recent critical assessments of Crimp's work in relation to Hans-Thies Lehmann's postdramatic paradigm. By focusing on light design, the authors suggest that Macdonald's staging of the play productively enhanced the tension inherent in Crimp's text between dramatic and postdramatic elements. Light was conceived in postdramatic terms as a major component of the mise-en-scène, synaesthetically interacting with the linguistic material in a way that necessitated the spectators’ active processing of all onstage signs and, ultimately, their critical examination of their own ethical and political positioning with respect to the late-capitalist social and cultural order. Mireia Aragay is a Senior Lecturer in English drama and theatre at the University of Barcelona. She is co-editor of British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics, and Academics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Clara Escoda has recently completed a PhD thesis on Martin Crimp's theatre at the University of Barcelona, where she lectures in English literature.

The long neglect of the work and influence of the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia has begun to be remedied in recent decades; but as Richard Beacham points out in the following article, Appia's own character was in part responsible for his ‘anonymity’. Where his friend Edward Gordon Craig was a tireless self-promoter, whose work remained influential despite being little utilized by practitioners in his lifetime, Appia tended to withdraw from contact with the wider world, and indeed chose to spend the last years of his life in the seclusion of a sanatorium. Here Beacham traces the twin threads which for long kept Appia's life a sealed book – the problems and delays over the publication of his writings, and the misplaced ‘discretion’ of those controlling the rights concerning Appia's homosexuality, a ‘condition’ which, in the early twentieth century, caused him much distress, and contributed to the long periods of deep depression, lassitude, and debilitation in his life. With the dedicated Appia scholar Walther Volbach, Beacham himself was at last able to edit and publish Adolphe Appia: Essays, Scenarios, and Designs in 1989. He contributed earlier studies of Appia to this journal in the two-part ‘Adolphe Appia, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Hellerau’, in NTQ 2 and 3 (May and August 1985), and ‘“Brothers in Suffering and Joy”: the Appia-Craig Correspondence’, in NTQ 15 (August 1988). Richard Beacham was one of the founders of the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, and besides his work on Appia has published extensively on ancient theatre practice. He has implemented ways of visualizing the study of theatre history as founding director of the King's Visualization Lab in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, where he served as Professor of Digital Culture.

Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years directed masked Greek drama. On the basis of the research she has undertaken using her own masks, in this article she considers some of the practical issues involved in a masked staging of the plays today, drawing specifically on her experience of directing the Bacchae and the Antigone. Here she extends the discussion started previously in ‘Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek New Comedy’ in NTQ 79 (August 2004). Earlier, with David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001). In 2008 she completed a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In Mnemonic, a play conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and devised by Theatre de Complicite, words are not only time capsules in which different fictionalized memories are preserved, but also mnemonic objects in their own right. The playtext they conform acts, of course, as a reminder of the show that this British company created in 1999 for the Salzburg Festival, and that toured internationally again in 2002: at the same time, the published text of the work contains the perspectives and potential techniques from which the notion of memory – and of individual and collective forms of remembrance associated with it – can be explored and semiotized. Núria Casado-Gual's article looks at the dramaturgical strategies and theatrical techniques used by the company in their particular theatricalization of memory. Mnemonic, she contends, is not only relevant as an outstanding piece of contemporary theatre, but also as a ‘memorable’ text that helps us decipher our enigmatic selves in apparently oblivious and eroding postmodern times. Núria Casado-Gual lectures in English language, literature, and theatre at the University of Lleida, Catalonia, Spain. She is author of a PhD thesis on the the Caribbean playwright Edgar Nkosi White, and combines her academic work with creative theatrical projects as both playwright and performer with the company Nurosfera.

In this article Caroline Heim explores an avenue for the audience's contribution to the theatrical event that has emerged as increasingly important over the past decade: postperformance discussions. With the exception of theatres that actively encourage argument such as the Staatstheater Stuttgart, most extant audience discussions in Western mainstream theatres privilege the voice of the theatre expert. Caroline Heim presents case studies of post-performance discussions held after performances of Anne of the Thousand Days and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which trialled a new model of audience co-creation. An audience text which informs the theatrical event was created, and a new role, that of audience critic, established in the process. Caroline Heim is a lecturer in Performance Studies at Queensland University of Technology. Her PhD examined the changing role of theatre audiences in recent years.

Report on the Tbilisi International Festival of Theatre, held in Tbilisi, Georgia, 14 September to 8 October 2011.

Report on the seventeenth Conference of Performance Studies International in Utrecht, 25–29 May 2011.