This special issue takes as its conceptual starting point ‘theatrical things’ too commonplace to ordinarily deserve scholarly notice – bits of foam, cushions, mothballs or even elephants. It sheds light on how unassuming features of performance practice constitute critical apertures for the study of theatre historiography, telling us something vital about theatre-making and sense-making. In the study of theatre history, Tracy C. Davis says, there is a premium on asserting originality and innovation, so we are ill-disposed to acknowledge consistency, unoriginality and derivation. Following Davis’s line of thought, we consider how utterly commonplace theatrical things become interfaces between theatre and world-making or microcosms for understanding theatre practice in ways that social ‘context’ does not allow us to imagine. We denote this form of historiography as metonymy.

This paper discusses Roman Jakobson’s concept of metonymy as a form of theatre and performance historiography. Following traces of elephants in Europe during the early modern period, the paper suggests that these fragmentary documents – be they textual, visual or material – do not align with a grand récit but hint at multiple layers of cultural negotiation, concerning questions of ontology, anthropology, politics and even technology. The proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ is a provocation to reflect on these larger categories, while its cultural impact is firmly grounded in its theatrical and performative qualities. Drawing on the paradigm of critical media history, fragmentary and scattered documents become legible as part of a larger process of cultural formation.

The catalogue produced for the Armenian intermedial performance Ararat (1977) in Milan stands as the most significant remnant of an avant-garde project that combined music, painting and poetry. The volume includes musical scores by Ludwig Bazil and artwork by Herman Vahramian, artists connected to the Armenian community, as well as critical essays. Analysing the catalogue as an integral component of the performance demonstrates its role as an evocative remnant that aligns with the event’s intermediality. Drawing on archival studies, I argue that the catalogue embodies a metonymic relation to the performance, serving as a crucial tool for fostering a historiography of Milanese-Armenian cultural production. Ararat’s diasporic context amplifies the catalogue’s impact and contributes to the memory practices of the marginalized community. Steeped in affective resonance, the artefact incites the community to engage with cultural and historical narratives, contributing to a broader discourse on Armenian identity within the Milanese context.

This article questions the recent tendency for theatre historiography to focus more on the political context of productions than on the ‘stages’ themselves. While this trend seems logical it neglects an important, visceral, aspect of the art form that was itself designed to impact and democratize politics. The paper focuses initially on a schoolchild’s attraction to strips of foam rubber litter left onstage after a Theatre in Education performance of Edward Bond’s The Under Room (2006) at his school in Bartley Green, Birmingham. It approaches this event using Lacan’s rapprochement between psychoanalysis and linguistics to explore the a priori and a posteriori temporalities of metaphor and metonymy. The paper suggests that charging trivial objects like foam strips with significance confounds the a priori logic of logos. It explores how Bond bends, but does not rupture, the theatrical boundaries instituted at the Theatre of Dionysus, to position audiences to make meaning during an event a posteriori as the boy does. It proposes that when the modernists dismantled these boundaries they destroyed an important metonymic challenge to logos. The paper tests this theory by comparing the boy captivated by foam strips with the very different effect achieved by the Royal Shakespeare Company when they confronted their audience with actual human remains, and with the hallucinatory effects of ‘bedside theatre’ on its vulnerable young audience. It suggests that form is content, that we can read the political impact of a performance through its handling of theatrical boundaries. In conclusion, in the era of artificial intelligence with logos more powerful than ever, the paper urges theatre historiographers to put the stages back in the picture.

Thus spake Immanuel, the son of Rabbi Shlomo, blessed be the memory of that righteous man: … I was living in the city of Fermo, which is in the province of the Marche. And it happened one day, after the banquet of Purim,1 when we had enjoyed a wealth of eating and wine and poultry, we sat together on broad cushions, and we carried on with the telling of our tales, and we decided that we were going to converse exclusively about poems and melitsot [rhyming prose].

And each man who had made up a poem in his own head, he would recite it; and if he had heard a poem written by someone else he would recite it; and there was a man who collected them and put them together into a book, and showed their beauty and their splendour to the signori … And the prince said: ‘And now rise up, tongue of gold and splendour, and make for yourself a name of glory, and collect the hosts of your poems into machberot.'2

David Belasco's collection of antique objects housed in his studio apartment above the Belasco Theatre and in warehouses nearby offers a rich archive of things that suggest strong metonymic readings. Drawing on Belasco's pronounced sympathies toward spiritualism, this essay offers a psychometric prism to approaching Belasco's intuitive relations with his collections. As a science for reading souls, psychometry proposed that objects held on their surfaces histories of past individuals who had touched or been in contact with the objects. Belasco often invited journalists to tour his museum-like studio and enjoyed picking up things in his hands and telling of their pasts.His storerooms and warehouses were believed to be haunted by ghosts drawn to materials of theatre history stored within them. As Belasco's collections were auctioned off following his death and that of his surviving daughter, they too passed on sorrowfully and would speak no more.