Since the survival of Noh theatre at the time of Zeami (1363–1443) and Kanami depended entirely upon the support of its audience, which consisted mainly of laymen, warriors and nobles, it was essential that each presentation had its own unique beauty and power enabling each performance to become an unrepeatable idiosyncratic event. In particular, Zeami demands that each performance will attain the goals of hana (the flower, i.e. a strangeness and novelty in beauty that will attract the audience) and yūgen (a mystic quality of beauty and elegance) on stage. In order to achieve these goals, he provides us with a great deal of suggestive and analytical ideas from various points of view, ranging from precise technical comments to pure metaphysical concepts.

Whenever a new fragment by Wilde appears, it inevitably raises hope that the often vulgarized but still fascinating relationship between the life and the work will somehow be clarified. Did the one really get all the genius, the other merely the talent, as he told Gide? Were the two always so disparate, so irreconcilable, as he insisted? Did work always seems, as he once said it seemed, ‘not a reality but a way of getting rid of reality’? If so, was this why ‘the real life is the life we do not lead’, the life of the literary imagination? Or was it that the ‘real life’ and ordinary life alternately promised Wilde those intense experiences his imagination craved, then took it in turns to double-cross him?

In preparing this paper I wrote, among others, to David Lees, Edward Gordon Craig's photographer son. In reply to my request for help, he wrote: ‘EGG and his schoob:[the final consonant underlined in red] this plural leaves me a bit surprised, for I have always known of just one school, that being “The School for the Art of the Theatre” started at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, on March 1913.’ He goes on to refer to A Living Theatre which is primarily concerned with the School in Florence. He concludes the paragraph by writing: ‘As for the schools – in the plural – as I said in the beginning, I know of no other school beside this one’.

After successfully eliminating the British motorcycle, Japan now threatens the European car industry; it is also rapidly developing advanced industrial techniques that will make much Western plant look like a blacksmith's forge. Is the theatre next? When is East Asian art going to undermine a culturally obsolescent Western aesthetic which is the counterpart, perhaps, of a one-dimensional voluntarist technology?

Playacting in public has been considered suspect since the day Solon stepped backstage to ask whether Thespis felt ashamed to tell so many lies to such a great number of people. From the very beginning, there were recognizable dangers not only for the audience but also for the actors themselves. And every possible attempt was made to point out those dangers and to obviate them. In the Republic, Plato warned against imitating anything except pure virtue. Especially dangerous, in his opinion, was the imitation of a woman, ‘old or young, railing against her husband, or boasting of a happiness which she imagines can rival the gods', or overwhelmed with grief and misfortune; much less a woman in love, or sick, or in labour.’ Plato, and a long line of writers who followed, condemned such imitation, contending that the imitator could all too easily become what he imitated. In the Ion, Plato discussed the divine frenzy that overcame the actor and made him momentarily insane or unable to distinguish truth from illusion.

In 1699, James Wright's Historica Histrionica … In a Dialogue on Plays and Players chronicled the troubles of the London theatrical community after the Civil War, during which it had supported the Royalists almost to a man. Wright's character Trueman, in the spirit of Dryden's and Dennis' spokesmen, tells his compatriot Lovewit that

Afterwards in Oliver's time, they used to act privately, three or four Miles, or more, out of Town, now here, now there, sometimes Noblemens Houses, in particular Holland-house at Kensington, where Nobility and Gentry who met (but in no great Numbers) used to make a Sum for them, each giving a broad Peice, or the like.

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Eric Bentley's statement is singularly appropriate to L'Illusion comique, with its plays within a play and its apparent insistence on the magical art of Alcandre which conjures up for Pridamant a theatrical vision of the reality he seeks, and for him and for us a demonstration of the imaginative power of drama, a territory governed by its own laws which Corneille calls ‘les préceptes de l'art’, adding that ‘il est constant qu'il y a des préceptes, puisqu'il y a un art…’ In the dedication of the first edition of L'Illusion comique, which appeared in 1639, three or four years after its first performance, the dramatist called the play ‘un étrange monstre’, ‘une invention bizarre et extravagante’, ‘cette pièce capricieuse’, and when, in 1660, his Examen of the comedy appeared in his collected works, he used similar expressions to describe it, ‘une galanterie extravagante’ and ‘ce caprice’, referring deprecatingly to his failure to observe the rules, those ‘precepts’ which by then he appeared to accept as a necessity.

In China, Western theatre-goers often have the feeling that they are sitting in a boulevard theatre. At most the higher moral level and a certain didactic quality, together, with political seriousness, seem to distinguish the melodramas, comedies and thrillers from the popular plays of the commercial theatre at home. Reflecting on the different character of Chinese theatre, the European viewer quickly falls back on adjectives like ‘backward’, ‘underdeveloped’, even if he or she would justifiably reject such eurocentric judgments in an economic or political context. I should like to try not just to describe modern Chinese drama but to suggest some historical and social reasons for its specific characteristics.

Playgoers needed no special incentive to attend the opening of T. W. Robertson's Caste at the Broadway Theatre in New York on 5 August 1867. The same author's Ours had been the hit of the previous New York season, and the enthusiastic reception of his latest domestic comedy in London heralded its American appearance. A few days before the première, however, Broadway manager Barney Williams received an unwelcome piece of extra publicity: a temporary injunction against the forthcoming production had been granted by the New York Supreme Court to Lester Wallack, actor-manager of the renowned Wallack's Theatre. Although the essential facts of the subsequent hearing have been accurately preserved in Odell's Annals, the case deserves to be reopened and examined more carefully. To contemporary observers, the proceedings revealed the court's inability and unwillingness to protect the work of a respected English dramatist. Yet events following the judge's decision ultimately won for Robertson and Wallack the vindication denied by the court, and the case is now remarkable as a judicial ‘last stand’ against the legitimate rights of foreign authors.

In The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage Leslie Hotson devoted a chapter to the playhouses of that period and discussed the background and development of Gibbons's Tennis Court. He drew attention to the early leases of the site on which the tennis court was built, to Gibbons's petitions, successful and otherwise, for permission to build the tennis court and to the subsequent litigation that was conducted by interested parties. Those parties were the Earl of Clare, the owner; Charles Gibbons, the tenant; and Sir Matthew Mennes, the frustrated holder of the lease of the property. Hotson also noted the extant graphic evidence for the tennis court, the Hollar engraving (PI. I); the map belonging to the Society of Lincoln's Inn, (PI. II); and the engraving (PI. III) published by Wilkinson in Londina Illustrata, 1811. Concluding his discussion of Gibbons's tennis court he traced the gradual infiltration of Davenant and his pre-Restoration theatrical activities down to the conversion of the building into Killigrew's Theatre Royal which ultimately became the home for the Nursery company.

Hindu mythology claims that human activities are governed by four philosophical treatises (Veda) which were divinely conceived. A fifth Veda concerned with a religiously correct form of drama was later added and it became known as ‘Bharata's Natyashastra’. This text, originally written in Sanskrit, is particularly striking for its thoroughly detailed directives on how theatre ought to be performed. This Vedic or Temple theatre was only for the members of the Higher Castes: actors and audiences alike were necessarily Brahmins. This patrician theatre flourished between the third and ninth centuries and then fell into oblivion because of its inability to become a popular art form.

Malaysian drama in English (MDE) is an inelegant name, but it describes exactly a curious breed of theatre in Malaysia: Englishlanguage drama, which seeks to be locally appropriate, in a country whose polycultural history has resulted in the presence of a diverse mixture of languages including Malay (the National Language), the major dialects of Chinese, Hindi, Tamil and other Indian languages, as well as English. Malaysian drama in English has existed for some twentyfive years – not a long history, even measured by the standards of the New Literatures of post-colonial nations. Its quarter century of life has been short and turbulent. MDE has followed a course marked by race riots, language demonstrations, defections from its fold, institutional indifference, censorship, and the gradual withering of the English language itself as a medium viable within the national context. Much of the history of MDE has been affected by the major socio-political changes of the nation. It is not possible, then, to see MDE as an autonomous, selfenclosed entity. Its life cannot be extricated from the national history out of which it grows, and its story is inseparable from the political fortunes of the English language in Malaysia.

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.

John Banvard was a nineteenth-century adventurer, painter, poet, and theatre owner. Born in 1815 in New York City, he was forced to leave home at fifteen years of age when his father died and left the family penniless. He followed an older brother to Louisville, Kentucky, where he worked as an apothecary's helper and amateur artist. In 1833 he joined the Chapman Family as a scenic artist on the Floating Theatre, also known as Chapman's Ark, America's first showboat. This experience inspired Banvard to operate his own showboats and display his landscape paintings.

Hong Kong is a bi-lingual community, and drama in Hong Kong has, over the last few decades, developed along two lines: drama in the predominant dialect of Chinese for the vast majority of the local population, and drama in English for expatriot westerners and a small English speaking minority of Chinese theatre goers.