Focusing on the UK, where feminism is gaining momentum through multiple sites of activist dissent from a neoliberal hegemony, my primary concern in this article is to understand how, given this renewal of feminist energies, theatre might be able to play its part in agitating for change. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe's compelling description of a ‘network of resistance’, as a possible way forward I conceive of theatre politically as a series of heterogeneously formed sites of oppositional and affirmative activity, each linked into articulating dissent from neoliberalism and the desire for socially progressive change. This provides the critical framework for my engagement with three radically diverse performances ranging from new playwriting (Lucy Kirkwood's NSFW), through the flash mob (Eve Ensler's One Billion Rising campaign), to the West End musical Made in Dagenham.

This is my final issue for Theatre Research International. Handing over to Charlotte Canning as Senior Editor and Paul Rae as Assistant Editor, I want to wish them every future success with the journal. At the same time, I would like to thank everyone involved in the journal over the last three years, from those who submitted articles to those who contributed invaluable, behind-the-scenes labour – the editorial board, books-reviewing team and peer reviewers. A special thanks to Cambridge University Press for the assistance they provided with all aspects of the production process – especially to James Carr who has overseen each and every issue during my term of office. Leaving the editorship of the journal, I am pleased to note its buoyant subscription and submission rates – its revenue, despite the global, economic recession, continues to rise, while the number of articles offered for review has doubled over the course of the last three years.

Aesthetics. Politics. The Public Sphere. These emerge as connective headlines in this edition of TRI. Taken as a whole, the articles provoke key critical questions about the choice of aesthetics in relation to the potentiality of theatre's transformative capacities, and also about how the possibilities (and limitations) of the transformational power that theatre is commonly deemed to be capable of are conditioned by the kind of role theatre and performance have or are permitted to have in the public sphere.

In July 2010 at the IFTR World Congress held in Munich, I sat listening to Helen Gilbert's keynote address: ‘Making Modernity: Indigenous Theatre and Salvage Ethnography’. Aside from the insightful specificities of Gilbert's topic, I was taken immediately by her methodological approach, which involved sifting back through reflections gained from postcolonial cultural studies, sharing the impulse of this work to look at cultures through a transversal lens and to posit their folding together through space and time, this with a view, for example, to challenging received ideas of indigenous cultures as traditional, the West as modern, and so forth. Broadly speaking, both the paper and the Q & A that followed it offered a timely and salutary reminder of how knowledge generation is often a sedimentary process: over time certain ideas get deposited and are endlessly mined; others get washed away or eroded. Moreover, this also means that we can find ourselves digging the same old theoretical spaces without looking at the local sites of theatre, performance or culture in ways that might persuade us to excavate elsewhere with different tools and methods. In brief, critical strategies, such as Gilbert's, that variously encourage us to revisit, rethink, rearrange, reconceptualize or recover are important strategies to keep in mind as means to renew and progress our contributions to bodies of theatre and performance knowledge.

Traditionally, the role of theatre and performance scholars is to examine theatre from critical and theoretical perspectives that adopt an outside-in approach. That is to say, our vantage point locates at some disembodied, critical distance from the process and the practice, from the making and the moment of showing. Increasingly, however, there are signs of inside-out approaches to theatre where avenues of theatre and performance enquiry are shaped by means of getting closer to practice. The first three articles brought together in this issue have their own, distinctive inside-out routes to theatre and performance knowledge.

‘Silent Voices/Forbidden Lives: Censorship and Performance’ was the topic of IFTR's annual conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2009. Introducing the theme of the conference, the organizers signalled the importance of censorship for Portugal and other countries with histories of governmental dictatorship, given the ways in which this has made an impact or left its mark on the cultural, social and political fabric of the nation. The first two articles in this issue, by Jean Graham-Jones and Paul Rae, arose out of papers presented at the Lisbon conference. Both authors open up the censorship debate to argue for more subtle accounts of how the term is conceptualized. In brief, both are mindful of the cautionary note sounded in an earlier TRI article on ‘the limits of censorship’ by Janelle Reinelt where she writes, ‘“Censorship” has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it.’

‘Radical bodies’, to borrow from Diana Looser's title, emerge as a central concern in this general issue of TRI, where five articles explore the policitizing possibilities of theatre in relation to multifaceted questions of gender, cultural hybridity, identity and social democracy, in a rich and diverse range of performances and geographical locations.

This issue celebrates thirty-five years of TRI (New Series) publication, from the first issue in October 1975 through to this October 2010 edition. Last year, Cambridge Journals launched the digitized TRI archive, housing all of the volumes from the inaugural 1975 issue through to Volume 25 in 2000. During those first twenty-five years of now digitized publication, Oxford University Press served as the journal's home under the editorship of Claude Schumacher. It was in 2001 that the journal moved across to Cambridge with Brian Singleton as its Senior Editor.