A recurring strand over the past few years in New Theatre Quarterly has been the relationship between the nature of theatricality and scientific conceptions rooted in quantum mechanics – notably Chaos Theory and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. This approach is questioned by scientists, who doubt the possibility of bridging the scientific and the literary uses of the metaphorical language being deployed. Michael Frayn's recent play, Copenhagen, used the crucial wartime visit paid by Heisenberg to Niels Bohr, his fellow architect of the Uncertainty Principle, to explore the scientific concepts involved through the work's own form and content. Victoria Stewart here assesses the nature and the success of Frayn's techniques in relation to the wider uncertainties of live theatrical performance as well as to the relationship between the scientific and artistic use of metaphor. The outcome, she concludes, is ‘a dialogue between two fields of discourse – science and theatre – which reveals that both necessarily deal in ambiguity and uncertainty of outcome’. Victoria Stewart lectures in English and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

Walter Benjamin's concept of the flâneur has been widely used to conventionalize ‘the disinterested voyeur, the lonely figure haunting the streets of cities, the person who watches the spectacle of modern life’. Petra Kuppers argues that the flâneur is as central to the ‘nineties cityscape as to that of Baudelaire's Paris, of which Benjamin was writing, or to his own inter-war Berlin. She responds to feminist and other objections and, while recognizing the validity of later writings on the nature of the body such as Foucault's, argues that the flâneur remains valuable in counterbalancing ‘aspects of contemporary theory that use the human body as metaphor’ with the physicality of ‘a lived set of material practices and inscribed discourses’. To illustrate and develop her argument she uses moments from Kathryn Bigelow's film Strange Days (1996), performances by the Austrian group Bilderwerfer and by Francesca Vilalta-Ollé, and the camera-dance made for TV, Pace (1996). Petra Kuppers is Research Fellow in Performing Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by which The Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes and (edited with Michael Booth) The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author of A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.

Reviews are an indispensable resource for the theatre historian – records not only of individual productions and performances but of broader cultural attitudes. However, the few attempts to account for the review as a form are compromised by outmoded models both of authorship and, in particular, of language itself. This article describes the rationale, development, functionality, and initial results of an electronic database of theatre reviews which permits analysis of the form according to the principles of corpus linguistics. Such an approach, argues David Roberts, can track across a large body of texts questions of conceptual vocabulary, reader-orientation, and – as the expansion of the corpus permits – generic variation and historical change. Initial searches demonstrate the embedding of much mainstream reviewing in neo-Aristotelian assumptions about dramatic form and effect, derived from the New Critical backgrounds of many reviewers, and suggest the means by which readers are made complicit with such partial representations. David Roberts teaches English and Drama at University College Worcester. His publications include three volumes in the World's Classics series for Oxford University Press, and a monograph on seventeenth-century audiences.

In commemorating the one-hundredth issue of New Theatre Quarterly, in continuation of Theatre Quarterly, we wanted to reflect the concern of the journals with offering a referenced record and retrospect of the performing arts – so here we offer a record and retrospect of the journals themselves. We hope it will provide a useful source of reference, and intend that in due course the indexes will be incorporated and updated on the NTQ pages of the Cambridge University Press website. A consecutive, issue-by-issue listing of contents is followed by author indexes – these latter separately indexing each journal, as it was our feeling that many present readers will not have easy access to the original journal, and that a cumulation might also prove confusing since the numbering sequence started afresh with NTQ. References are to these ‘TQ’ and ‘NTQ’ numbers rather than to volumes and parts, but annual volumes can be quickly identified from the list at the start of each index. The compiler, as author of A Classification for the Performing Arts (British Theatre Institute, 1974), is aware of the irony of failing to offer a subject or classified listing, which resources of time at present do not permit: he would be happy to make available on disk the material presented below to anybody interested in undertaking such a task, with a view to future publication.