New Theatre Quarterly

The Pierrot tradition, invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, established a prevalent but now largely forgotten mode of performance around the coastal resorts of Britain. In this article, Dave Calvert considers the relevance of this form in its historical context. Arguing that it observes the preservation of anachronism consistent with notions of invented traditions, he situates the Pierrot tradition within a symbolic network concerned with national identity and experience. This includes its declared links to the construction of royalty as the head of the imperial family, and both its schism and continuity with the tradition of blackface minstrelsy whose conventions it maintains. Its location at the seaside accentuates this network of relations and elevates it to a transcendental plane of the imaginary untroubled by the complexities of modern life. Dave Calvert is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Huddersfield. His research encompasses popular theatre, applied theatre and learning-disabled performance. He is also a member of The Pierrotters, the last remaining professional seaside Pierrot troupe.

The first major posthumous London revival of a play by Harold Pinter was Moonlight at the Donmar Warehouse in April 2011. There was a striking difference between the critical reception of this production and the way the play had been greeted on its 1993 premiere, when Moonlight – then framed as Pinter's return after fifteen fallow years and a number of increasingly controversial political interventions – prompted an extremely mixed response. In 2011, by contrast, the critical community was more or less united. This progression can be seen to illustrate more than just the benefits of hindsight, and in this article Harry Derbyshire considers responses to Moonlight in 1993 and 2011 as a means of illuminating the range of competing interests that underlie the journalistic and academic infrastructure within which the merits of cultural products are assessed. He also considers the emotional investment commentators often have in the triumphs and reversals of those they follow on the public and cultural stage. Harry Derbyshire's doctorate, on ‘Harold Pinter: Production, Reception, Reputation 1984–1999’, is from King's College London, and he currently lectures in Drama and English at the University of Greenwich. Publications include articles on Roy Williams, on human rights and verbatim theatre, and on the Reminiscence Theatre Archive of Pam Schweitzer, recently acquired by Greenwich.

Exactly one hundred years separate two notorious dramatic aristocrats: Alfred Jarry's wild Ubu and Sarah Kane's apathetic Hippolytus. Ubu is iconic of Jarry's surreal reaction to nineteenth-century positivism and, at the same time, a criticism of modernism's abstract poetics and will-less aesthetic experience. Kane's Hippolytus is a witty and macabre response to the late twentieth-century ‘logic’ of capitalism. Nevertheless, these seemingly diametrically opposed characters share one trait that binds them – spending desire. In this article Dror Harari considers these figures as conspicuous waypoints along a broader spectrum of indispensable relations between body and desire in modern theatre. He tracks certain dramaturgies of desire, as theorized and/or realized by theatre practitioners and philosophers. Starting with modernist attempts to overcome desire by likening the performer's body to a machine, he closes with the indifferent Hippolytus becoming a desiring machine. Dror Harari is senior lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His recent articles have appeared in The Drama Review, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Annual. His study Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self is forthcoming in Hebrew from Resling Publications, an Israeli academic publishing house.

In this essay Jim Davis considers two examples of everyday non-theatrical performance in nineteenth-century London: hoaxes and fires. Whereas an element of hoaxing can be perceived in some contemporary performance events and in the practice of ‘invisible theatre’, usually with some ethical intention, hoaxes in early nineteenth-century London were perpetrated for the sake of creating disruption and making dupes of unsuspecting witnesses. A more visible form of disruption and spectacle was created by fires and firefighting itself, which, at least after Captain Eyre Massie Shaw took control of the London fire brigade, became a form of public performance. Although hoaxes were common in pantomime and farce, and conflagrations often strengthened the impact of sensation melodramas, the disruptive effects of extra-theatrical hoaxes and fires on everyday life created a less reassuring and more dystopian sense of the metropolis. An earlier version of this paper was originally delivered at ‘The Audience through Time’ conference at Queen Mary College, University of London, in December 2011. Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His his most recent books are Victorian Pantomime: a Collection of Critical Essays (2010) and Lives of the Great Shakespearian Actors: Edmund Kean (2009). He is also joint author of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 (2001).

Nearly seventy-five years after his death, Konstantin Stanislavsky remains a toweringly influential figure, and many fundamental ideas about acting can be traced back to his practice. In this article, Marc Silberschatz examines the correspondences with, and divergences from, flow theory – the theory surrounding the psychological state associated with ‘being in the zone’ – in Stanislavsky's practice. Although separated by vast differences in social, cultural, and historical context, some significant and increasing correspondences between flow theory and Stanislavsky's practice are revealed and examined. Additionally, divergences from flow theory are identified and interrogated, suggesting that Stanislavsky's reliance on fixed, repeatable performance scores and divided consciousness are direct impediments to the achievement of flow. Marc Silberschatz is a PhD candidate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He is also a professional theatre director whose work has been seen in both the United States and Scotland.

This conversation took place during the Gdansk Festival, 1–10 August 2009, where The Wooster Group performed its internationally acclaimed Hamlet (2006), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The conversation, led by Maria Shevtsova and edited by her for publication, was part of the conference organized under the auspices of the Festival by Jerzy Limon, the Festival's director. Here LeCompte and two performers from the company, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, discuss how they generated the work, and develop their thoughts in answers to questions from the audience. Later this year The Wooster Group will perform Hamlet on 10–13 August at the Edinburgh International Festival. Maria Shevtsova is the Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Created in an American rehearsal room, exported to an English workshop, and developed in Australia, among other places, ‘headphone verbatim theatre’ – also called ‘recorded delivery’ – is a truly global genre. In this article Caroline Wake focuses on the work of two pioneering practitioners, Briton Alecky Blythe and Australian Roslyn Oades, in order to trace the form's history as well as its methods, genres, and theories. In doing so, she considers how audio technology has evolved over the past decade and how the display or disguise of headphones has affected both the production and reception of the form. She identifies three dominant genres of headphone verbatim theatre (the social crisis play, the social justice play, and the social portrait play, as well as three main performance modes – the epic, the naturalistic, and the mixed. The epic has been the most successful thus far, but the naturalistic and mixed modes are, in turn, begetting new ones. Finally, she suggests that in the same way that headphones have rejuvenated verbatim theatre, they might also reinvigorate the discourse on it by offering the opportunity to go beyond the politics of voice and visibility and to turn, instead, to listening. Caroline Wake is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South Wales. Her research examines cultural responses to and representations of refugees and asylum-seekers as well as the role of testimony in law, performance, and visual culture. Her work has previously appeared in journals such as Text & Performance Quarterly, Modern Drama, and History & Memory. She is the co-editor, with Bryoni Trezise, of Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013).

In this article John Freeman focuses on theatre after postmodernism as exemplified by the Belgium-based Needcompany. If, as is suggested here, we are all more than a little ‘postmoderned out’ through an over-dependence on individualism, the shadow cast by postmodernism remains large in the contemporary Western world, and its impact is still clearly felt. As the postmodern came to offer a safety net through which bad practice could not easily fall, the modernist theatre it followed offered its own elusive ideal. In arguing this, Freeman forges links between Brecht's knowing embrace of amateurism and the faux uncertainty of much contemporary work, where Brecht the arch-dramatist becomes the archetype of the postdramatic, as twenty-first century theatre moves in the shadow of the past. John Freeman has written extensively on contemporary performance, creative learning, and arts policy. He is currently Associate Professor at Curtin University, Western Australia, where he leads the Humanities Honours programme.

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).

Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk here discuss with Maria Shevtsova The Wooster Group's work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on Troilus and Cressida and the challenges posed for them by this joint venture. The project was initially proposed by Rupert Goold, but was brought to fruition by playwright Mark Ravenhill, his first directing experience. Troilus and Cressida was part of the World Shakespeare Festival, during which all Shakespeare's plays were performed by different companies from countries across the globe. The Festival, four years in the making and spanning eight months, was part of the cultural programme of the Olympic Games held in London in 2012. Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 3 to 18 August 2012, and then at the Riverside Studios in London from 24 August to 8 September. This conversation took place at the Riverside Studios on 30 August 2012, and pairs with the discussion of The Wooster Group's Hamlet, the company's first Shakespeare production, published in NTQ 114 (May 2013). Maria Shevtsova holds the Chair in Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Her most recent book is the co-authored Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (2013).

An actor's training continues throughout his/her professional career, yet they rarely have the time or inclination to write in detail about their processes, when building a character, to provide documents for inquisitive peers. In this two-part article, Bella Merlin articulates the discoveries made playing Margaret in Richard III at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Summer 2012, directed by internationally acclaimed actor-director Tina Packer (co-founder of Shakespeare and Company with Kristin Linklater in 1978). Merlin highlights how the shift from teacher to actor reactivates the ‘willing vulnerability’ that she demands of her own students. She focuses on Stanislavsky's three avenues of research: on the playtext; on the world of the play and playwright; and on the self. There can be resistance by some theatre practitioners to the application of Stanislavsky's tools to Shakespeare's texts, often due to a perceived over-psychologizing. Here, Merlin challenges some of these resistances. She demonstrates that Packer's insistence on connecting voice with thought to release the imagination implicitly harnesses Shakespeare's structure with Stanislavsky's underpinnings. Packer also lays emphasis on contemporary resonance, freeing the natural voice, and the significance of Shakespeare's female characters in Richard III for awakening an audience to the consequences of violence. The journey is unsettlingly personal and startlingly global. Part I, which follows, addresses research on the text and research on the play, drawing upon history, biography, accounts of grief, and chilling footage of the Rwandan genocide. Part II, planned for the next issue, uses the immediacy of a rehearsal journal to address research on the self. Bella Merlin is an actor, writer and actor-trainer. Acting includes seasons at the National Theatre with Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Company. Publications include The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (2007) and Acting: the Basics (2010). She is currently Professor of Acting at the University of California, Davis.

Born from its usage in the Natyasastra, rasa, as both concept and experience, is notoriously difficult to define. As an experience, rasa is generated within performance but cannot be contrived. However, the conditions for its coming into being can be prepared for by both practitioner and spectator, who generate rasa together within the performance. Rooted in a deeply specific cultural context, rasa is the Indian classical contribution to the particular area of performance studies research that seeks to explore and discuss the ineffable experience of the spectator in performance. However, the concept gains traction in the understanding of and engagement with its cultural specificity, and therefore serves as a poignant example of how cultural specificity is a way through cultural barriers in performance. Scheherazaad Cooper has recently completed her PhD in practice-as-research at Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing on the contemporary Odissi Indian classical dance practitioner's cultivation of access points in performance. This article is developed from the research undertaken for her doctoral thesis, inspired and informed by Maria Shevtsova's work in the sociology of theatre and performance.

The multi-spatial landscape of the North-West of England (Manchester–Salford and the surrounding area) provides the setting for Walter Greenwood's 1934 play Love on the Dole. Both the urban industrialized cityscape and the rural countryside that surrounds it are vital framing devices for the narrative – these spaces not simply acting as backdrops but taking on character roles. In this article Claire Warden reads the play's presentation of the North through the concept of landscape theatre, on the one hand, and Raymond Williams's city–country dialogism on the other, claiming that Love on the Dole is imbued with the revolutionary possibility that defines the very landscape in which it is set. From claustrophobic working-class kitchen to the open fields of Derbyshire, Love on the Dole has a sense of spatial ambition in which Greenwood regards all landscapes as tainted by the industrial world while maintaining their capacity to function independently. Ugliness and beauty, capitalist hegemony and socialistic hopefulness reside simultaneously in this important under-researched example of twentieth-century British theatre, thereby reflecting the ambivalent, shifting landscape of the North and producing a play that cannot be easily defined artistically or politically. Claire Warden is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln. Her work focuses on peripheral British performances in the early to mid-twentieth century. She is the author of British Avant-Garde Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012) and is currently writing Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: an Introduction for Edinburgh University Press, to be published in 2014.

In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).

A milestone development in a practice-as-research investigation led to the identification of ‘habitational action’ as a term that resists a priori restrictions of inner–outer problematics when discussing performer processes. In this article Frank Camilleri cross-references the term with ‘neutral action’ to locate it conceptually and historically; first with Jacques Lecoq's pedagogical mask work, and then with Yvonne Rainer's conceptualization of the ‘neutral doer’. The cross-referencing to specific theatre and dance contexts is also intended to problematize psychophysicality as a central aspect of current actor training discourse. Frank Camilleri is Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the University of Malta and Artistic Director of Icarus Performance Project. In 2007 he co-founded Icarus Publishing with Odin Teatret and the Grotowski Institute. He is also Visiting Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Huddersfield.

Richard Wagner's works have repeatedly been the focus of questions concerning the possibilities, limits, and nature of the director's role in opera productions, especially in Germany, and prominently at the Bayreuther Festspiele. In this article Clemens Risi discusses some recent developments in staging Wagner's operas at the Festspiele, including Katharina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (2007), Hans Neuenfels's production of Lohengrin (2010), and Sebastian Baumgarten's production of Tannhäuser (2011). While all these productions could be categorized as ‘director's theatre’, they also marked new steps in the staging practice of Wagner's work, going beyond questions of the interpretation of a single piece and taking it as material for exposure in a setting of experimentation. Here Risi considers how a well-known work emerges under the conditions of a newly established situation, as in a laboratory. Currently acting as interim Chair for Theatre and Media Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Clemens Risi was previously Assistant Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Auf dem Weg zu einem italienischen Musikdrama (Tutzing, 2004), and is currently completing a book on opera in performance and preparing another monograph for the 2005 Parma Verdi Prize on performance practice in mid-nineteenth-century Italian opera.

The proliferation of pedestrian performances since the beginning of the twenty-first century has led to an active rethinking of the defining parameters of site-based practice. Does the action of walking deterritorialize or strengthen the boundaries of site, or is the terming of ‘site’ itself redundant for these types of performance? In this article Kris Darby examines one of the most influential types of walking practice on this mode of performance, that of the dérive (‘drift’), and its subsequent adoption and renovation by arts collective Wrights & Sites. Beginning with a contextualization of ‘drifting’ within the Situationist International, this study then focuses on key terms derived from the collective's use of this type of walking in their performance work. The three types of drifting defined by Wrights & Sites – reconnaissance, group, and simultaneous – are then analyzed, illustrating how, through ‘framing’, the defining parameters of site begin to shift further. The article concludes by suggesting that Wrights & Sites’ drifting can be termed situation-specific rather than site-specific, due to its movement across multiple places. Kris Darby is a PhD student in the Drama Department of the University of Exeter, whose research concerns an expansion of the defining properties of pedestrian performance.

The focal point of this article is sensory perception in terms of action and experience. Perceptual constructs are both physical and cognitive acts that carry meaning in themselves, thus being a vital element of expression in performance making. Liora Malka Yellin's theoretical discussion here draws on J. J. Gibson's information-based model of perception and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, relating aspects of their thought to that of theatre practitioners and their practice. At the centre of these reflections are references to the shifts undergone by Butoh since its beginnings in the 1960s, and an analysis of Shijima, a dance-theatre work by the Japanese group Sankai Juku, based in Paris. This analysis of the perceptual constructs embedded in the configuration of bodily movement directs attention to what can be called corporeal narrative. Liora Malka Yellin is a Lecturer in Theatre and Dance Studies in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at Tel Aviv University.

In his essays and speeches, Harold Pinter addressed issues that are central in political and philosophical debates: national identity and the other, the ethics of responsibility, the relational nature of human rights, the politics of death. Discussing his treatment of these issues, Maria Germanou sees Pinter as a Foucauldian intellectual engaged in the politics of truth, and argues that in these texts the postmodern writer enables the political activist. Pinter subjects to scrutiny naturalized political rhetoric, discloses the affinity between meaning and power, and challenges the legitimacy of established hierarchies and their practices. His ultimate purpose is to restore ethics to politics. To this end, he places responsibility for the other at the core of his problematic in ways similar to Emmanuel Levinas, and invites western democracies to redefine ‘humanity’ and the ‘international’ community by taking into consideration accountability for those allowed to die in the name of an alleged justice. Maria Germanou is Professor in English Drama at the University of Athens. She has published in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Gramma, and elsewhere. Since 2008 she has been co-editor of Synthesis, an e-journal of comparative literature.

An actor's training continues throughout his/her professional career, yet they rarely have the time or inclination to write in detail about their processes, when building a character, to provide documents for inquisitive peers. In this two-part article, Bella Merlin articulates the discoveries made playing Margaret in Richard III at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Summer 2012, directed by internationally acclaimed actor-director Tina Packer (co-founder of Shakespeare and Company with Kristin Linklater in 1978). Merlin highlights how the shift from teacher to actor reactivates the ‘willing vulnerability’ that she demands of her own students. She focuses on Stanislavsky's three avenues of research: on the playtext; on the world of the play and playwright; and on the self. There can be resistance by some theatre practitioners to the application of Stanislavsky's tools to Shakespeare's texts, often due to a perceived over-psychologizing. In these articles Merlin challenges some of these resistances. She demonstrates that Packer's insistence on connecting voice with thought to release the imagination implicitly harnesses Shakespeare's structure with Stanislavsky's underpinnings. Packer also lays emphasis on contemporary resonance, freeing the natural voice, and the significance of Shakespeare's female characters in Richard III for awakening an audience to the consequences of violence. The journey is unsettlingly personal and startlingly global. In Part I, in NTQ 113, Merlin addressed research on the text and research on the play, drawing upon history, biography, accounts of grief, and chilling footage of the Rwandan genocide. In Part II, which follows, she uses the immediacy of a rehearsal journal to address research on the self. Bella Merlin is an actor, writer, and actor-trainer. Acting includes seasons at the National Theatre with Max Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint Company. Publications include The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (2007) and Acting: the Basics (2010). She is currently Professor of Acting at the University of California, Davis.