In soundscape composition, environmental sounds form a ‘language’ that highlights the voices of the environment for everyone’s contemplation. Ideally, they create an atmosphere and space of listening that allow us to grapple with and perceive more deeply the ecological imbalances, social inequalities, cultural gaps, and political issues in which we find ourselves. With the help of compositional examples, the author traces ways in which soundscape compositions can be a forum for ‘speaking back’ in protest, making oppositional voices heard while simultaneously exploring artistic-poetic expressions for a deeper listening engagement with the sonic complexity of environmental sounds and the meanings they carry within them. Furthermore, the author considers whether and how a soundscape composition can be a relationship-builder between environment and listener: can it be an agent for listening to the land, to the natural world, in ways that make urgent and necessary changes of human behaviour possible?

From an eco-spectatorial perspective, every live theatrical event is an ecosystem – a fusion of production, reception, society, and the environment. In Timothy Morton’s phrase from Being Ecological (2018), live theatre is ‘an experiential space’. When theatre (whatever its subject matter) is recognized as ecological, flows of energy, matter, and ideas come into view, as the combined life force driving the whole. In 2016, Carl Lavery asked, of the relationship between performance and the environmental crisis, ‘What Can Theatre Do?’ As a keen reader of nature writing, with a long-standing interest in eco-spectatorship, I see parallels between theatre and nature writing. Yet, a nature/culture divide separates the two fields. In this article, I experimentally conjoin them, in the hope of seeing more clearly what theatre might do. My opening paragraphs set the ecocritical scene. A shift in style brings in nature writing as a practical experiment in spectatorship. I explore several recent examples of live theatre, as a spectator: the RSC/Good Chance 2024 production of Kyoto; the 2024 revival of Complicité’s 1999 devised production Mnemonic; Kae Tempest’s 2021 play Paradise (National Theatre); and the RSC’s 2023 Theatre Green Book production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Festival de Almada – which was established in the city of Almada, on the south bank of the River Tagus, in 1984 – is Portugal’s pre-eminent international theatre festival. Led by its founding director, the acclaimed theatre-maker Joaquim Benite, until his death in 2012, the showcase has been taken forward successfully by his successor Rodrigo Francisco. Famous for its friendly and welcoming atmosphere, its democratic ethos and its ambitious programming, the festival has attracted many of the greatest companies, directors, and actors in world theatre. In 2020, Festival de Almada was the first summer festival to proceed – under assiduously applied public health protocols – in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article Mark Brown (who has attended most editions of the festival since 2008) provides a historical overview of the Almada showcase, highlighting particularly significant aspects of its ethos and programming, and offering critical insights into some notable productions.

Theatre reviews have long shaped artistic discourse, but their role in capturing the cultural depth of global majority theatre is seldom addressed. HOME X, a collaboration between East Asian artists in London and Hong Kong, highlights the rich interactions between theatre, diasporic identity, and Chinese literary traditions. However, its British theatre reviews largely ignored these cultural references, prioritizing the production’s technological aspect over HOME X’s deep-rooted engagement with Chinese literature including mythology, fable, poetry, and the novel. This article foregrounds the cultural and literary depth of HOME X, and contrasts it with the limited lens of existing British theatre reviews, further drawing on such theories as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘epistemic violence’ and Ric Knowles’s ‘new interculturalism’ to address the controversies surrounding such reviews. It thus argues for a more inclusive and culturally aware approach to reviewing East and South East Asian (ESEA) performances in an era when global majority theatre practices and audience are visibly increasing.

This article reflects on performing A Taste of Millefeuille, a visual theatre piece by Éric de Sarria that develops the aesthetic and pedagogical legacy of Compagnie Philippe Genty. Focusing on the 2024 production at Theatre YOUNG (Shanghai), it examines how physical manipulation, gendered presence, and material interaction were adapted to linguistic, cultural, and performative contexts. Using a practice-based and auto-ethnographic lens, it explores how memory, rhythm, and performer–object relations were negotiated in rehearsal and performance. These reflections are placed within wider debates on intercultural theatre-making and visual dramaturgy, showing how meaning can emerge across cultures through non-verbal performance.

Drawing on the framework of intermediality, this article investigates Martin McDonagh’s decision to embed Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran within The Cripple of Inishmaan. Such an intertextual layering produces a dialogic encounter between theatre and cinema that dismantles Flaherty’s idealized vision of a harsh, primitive island existence in 1930s Ireland, substituting instead a sardonic, anti-romantic critique. McDonagh highlights the fractured familial relations, the peculiarities of the island community, and the absence of any natural harmony to construct a counter-perspective. This dramaturgical device of the ‘film-within-a-play’ operates ‘ekphrastically’, allowing the inserted text to breach the dramatic frame and open onto a liminal space – at once intermediary and unstable – between reality and representation. The article argues that this intermedial practice prompts spectators to interrogate both cinematic myth-making and theatrical narration, generating a hybrid aesthetic zone where stage and screen unsettle traditional dramatic forms and broaden the field of interpretation.

This article explores the historical antecedents and later developments of the ‘quick-change’ or so-called ‘protean’ performance genres enacted on the British stage by male and female artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Foundational in intent and chronological in approach, it foregrounds previously unknown or neglected performers, especially (though not exclusively) from Britain, whose respective contributions to these genres have seldom been recognized. Overall, the research highlights the rich complexity of these marginalized yet sophisticated performance practices that have been critically ignored within theatre historiography but which are still alive today.

This study explores the characteristics of musical and communicative interactions – primarily vocal – between parents and children aged 6 to 36 months in Barcelona, Spain. Five families participated. Data were gathered using LENA® audio recordings across full days and semi-structured interviews. Episodes were analysed using a validated instrument and thematic coding. Findings reveal mismatches between parental perceptions and observed behaviours, highlight children’s active participation, and identify underreported functions and settings of musical interaction. This research underscores the importance of combining parental accounts with data gathered from real-life scenarios to understand everyday family musicality as a shared, dynamic, and reciprocal phenomenon.

Speculative xenomusicology explores alternative music theories, imagining the physical and cognitive affordances of alien musical life. Exoplanets are actively studied in astronomy, and though there is no direct evidence of xenobiology, particularly of more advanced musical intelligences, potential alien music may still be considered in advance in the same way that exobiologists speculate on the conditions for alien life. In particular, a generative system is presented which creates imagined xenomusic based on altering human memory constraints and links the organisation of the sound to the parallel generation of an alien language. Microtonal pitch, complex rhythm, timbral material and spatialisation within putative alien architectures are all considered. This alien ‘analysis by synthesis’ can provide new musical adventures and new understanding of the possibilities of music theoretical space, regardless of any eventual ontological resolution of xenocultures.