In 2015, the Italian director Romeo Castellucci presented Oedipus the Tyrant at the Schaubühne in Berlin. His staging was based on the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin's translation of 1804, which is known for its peculiar linguistic, philosophical, and theatrical approaches to Greek tragedy. In this article Keld Hyldig examines how Castellucci, in a response to Hölderlin's translation and commentaries on the tragedy, staged Oedipus as a theatrical and philosophical confrontation between religious and rational approaches to knowledge. The staging was seemingly simple, showing a group of nuns performing Oedipus in a monastery. However, the nuns’ Christian and feminine performance of the pagan and masculine tragedy was the basis of a metatheatrical complexity, which was reinforced through a film projection showing Romeo Castellucci getting tear gas sprayed in his eyes, making the relation between physical reality and fictional representation problematic. Keld Hyldig is an Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen. He has published several articles about the Ibsen tradition in Norwegian theatre and is currently working on a monograph on that subject.

In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem focuses on The Bride from the Sea, a community performance by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers, presented in a sand box in a multi-functional kindergarten in Jaffa in 2008. From the beginning of the creative process, the Jewish facilitator and the performers had to struggle to overcome the various barriers erected by the intricate, oppressive daily life of the young Palestinian women. They eventually managed to perform a ‘short, thin performance’, which, despite resembling a misperformance, had an emotional and even exceptional effect on the audience. This performance is examined as a special kind of women-based community theatre, termed here ‘the bare theatre’, to indicate a form that articulates the bare daily life of women trapped between internal and external oppressive power regimes. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, a trained actress, and a community-based theatre practitioner. Her recent publications include Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration, and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (2010), as well as articles in Research in Drama Education and Israeli Sociology.

Death denial is a psychological impulse and a cultural attitude that banishes thoughts about death and disavows the reality of personal mortality. In theatre, death denial can function as an unexamined philosophy and conditioning element unless it is foregrounded and challenged. In this article, Adrian Curtin looks at two examples of American experimental theatre that did just that: a 1975 production of Dino Buzzati's 1953 play Un Caso Clinico (A Clinical Case) and Terminal (1969–1971), a collectively created work by the Open Theatre. Buzzati's play is little known, especially in English-language scholarship. This article pairs an obscure work with a canonical work in order to offer new insight into American experimental theatre of the early 1970s, indicating how both productions contributed to the contemporaneous ‘death awareness’ movement, which opened up matters relating to death and dying. These productions highlighted the illogicality and absurdity of death denial, exposing the delusional basis of this attitude and its potentially damaging effects on the individual and society. Adrian Curtin lectures in the Drama Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and multiple essays on theatre sound, musical performance, and modernism. He is the 2015 winner of the Early Career Research Prize, awarded by the Theatre and Performance Research Association.

In this article, Oliver Double examines the process of turning traumatic personal experience into viable stand-up comedy material by offering a detailed account of the creative process behind his 2015 show Break a Leg. Drawing on Bergson, Brecht, and Noël Carroll, he explores the origins of comic ideas in personal observation, and argues for a two-stage process of joke creation. This is fleshed out in a detailed examination of a particular routine, in which he uses Koestler's concept of bisociation to show how an initial observation was shaped into a series of punchlines. He also discusses authenticating strategies which comedians employ to demonstrate that they are recalling their actual experiences, and ways in which the dialogic qualities of stand-up affect empathy and intimacy. Oliver Double is a former professional comedian who is now a Reader in Drama at the University of Kent. He is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (1997), Britain Had Talent: a History of Variety Theatre (2012), and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (2nd edition, 2014). A film of Break a Leg is available on YouTube, and the related podcast Breaking a Leg is accessible via iTunes.

In this article David Barnett explores the Berliner Ensemble's production in 1956 of Synge's classic The Playboy of the Western World. Although it was directed by Peter Palitzsch and Manfred Wekwerth, Bertolt Brecht, the company's co-founder, loomed large in planning and rehearsal. This staging serves as an example of how a politicized approach to theatre-making can bring out relationships, material conditions, and power structures that the play's production history has often ignored. In addition, Barnett aims to show how Brechtian methods can be applied more generally to plays not written in the Brechtian tradition and the effects they can achieve. David Barnett is Professor of Theatre at the University of York. He is the author of Heiner Müller's ‘The Hamletmachine’ (Routledge, 2016), A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambrige, 2015) and Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory, and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014). His recent AHRC-funded ‘Brecht in Practice: Staging Drama Dialectically’, led to a Brechtian production of Patrick Marber's Closer, and he offers theatre-makers and teachers workshops on using Brecht's method on stage and in the classroom.

In this article Stephen Barber investigates performances that take the form of last works by their performers and specifically utilize the distinctive medium of last-gasp monologues which intimate imminent death or unconsciousness. He assesses three such final performances, across theatre and dance – by Ko Murobushi, Antonin Artaud, and Patrice Chéreau – arguing that such performances often engage in a combative manner with processes of representation, and are able to articulate strong currents of memory and anger, often in fragmentary form. These performances also appear prescient for theatrical works today which deal with the vocal evocation of forthcoming calamities, whether corporeal or ecological. Stephen Barber is a Research Professor in Visual Culture at the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture, Kingston University. He is the author of several books on the work of Antonin Artaud, including Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (1993), and most recently Muybridge: the Eye in Motion (2012), Performance Projections (2014), and Berlin Bodies (forthcoming, 2017).

In 1996 the Polish theatre scholar Juliusz Tyszka was present at the gathering of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen. Here, Dario Fo – in company with his wife and theatrical partner Franca Rame, also a contributor – was among the few invited to participate in both sessions of the conference: ‘Performers’ Bios: Whispering Winds of Theatre and Dance’ and ‘Theatre in a Multicultural Society’. Though already seventy years old and still in recovery from a recent stroke, Fo was incapable of confining himself to a conventional lecture, but (against his doctor's advice) combined his talk with performing the points he was making, whether imitating the curves of a voluptuous girl or enacting a speech in his universal ‘language’ of ‘gramelot’. He was to live on for another twenty years before his death at the age of ninety on 13 October 2016, outliving Franca Rame by just three years. Juliusz Tyszka, an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal, is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).