Male cross-dressing in leading female roles in the Elizabethan theatre has, at different extremes of modern stage practice, been either ignored as a no longer relevant convention or appropriated to make some kind of sexual-political statement. In either case, at issue is the ‘lifelikeness’ or otherwise achieved, and how far modern deployment should or should not be taken to challenge our own assumptions. John Russell Brown takes a recent production by the Wooster Group, in which Kate Falk played the eponymous male lead in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, to suggest that cross-dressing can engage us with other perceptions of reality altogether – and demand, in relation to Shakespearean performance, a reading of the text that responds to resonances more often ignored or avoided. He illustrates his argument with close reference to the presentation and representation of sexuality in Romeo and Juliet. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and, subsequently, Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia. He is now based in London, and is Consultant in Theatre at Middlesex University. His most recent book is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999) and his most recent theatre work a production of Surrena Goldsmith's Blue for the Wandsworth Arts Festival (November 1998) and an acting and Living Newspaper workshop for the National School of Drama in Delhi (March 1999).

Female Jewish stereotypes such as the ‘Jewish Mother’, the ‘Jewish American Princess’, and the ‘Radical Bitch’ are often closely associated with sexuality. Roberta Mock proceeds from Riv-Ellen Prell's premise that these stereotypes are a projection of male Jewish fears of a changing secular society which yet must sustain religious continuity. She links a discussion of theoretical transgression of women's social roles to the physicalization of this transgression by female Jewish comedians who embody an explicit rebellion against function. Through the comic mimesis of established stereotypes, often combining more than one in a single characterization, female Jewish comedians typify themselves (to excess) from another's point of view, transforming themselves from the object of a gaze to subjects who redirect its focus. The appeal of these comedians moves away from a localized female (perhaps Jewish) audience to a more inclusive acceptance by applying Bakhtin's theories of ‘the grotesque body’, creating a subversion which embodies the ‘normal’ by being ‘abnormal’. The Jewish woman comedian is placed in the difficult position of being estranged from the community which ‘created’ her by being associated with the dominant culture, while being tolerated but not accepted as ‘one of them’ by that dominant culture. Roberta Mock teaches Theatre and Performance at the University of Plymouth. She is a co-founder of Lusty Juventus theatre company, and is currently editing a book entitled Performing Processes, which explores the relationship between the process of creating performance and spectator response.

It has become a critical commonplace to contrast the relative generosity of the early Arts Council towards establishment institutions with its miserliness towards Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, as the company struggled to survive through the immediate post-war period of touring and then to establish itself with a degree of security at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. In this article, Nadine Holdsworth complements evidence that has before been mainly anecdotal with material from the archives both of the company and the Council, and traces the mutual suspicions that were later also to undermine support for Littlewood's ‘Fun Palace’ in the 'sixties. She documents also the ironic loosening of the funding purse-strings at the very moment when Theatre Workshop's run of West End transfers depleted its energies at its Stratford base – and forced it also to return a percentage of its hard-won profits to Arts Council coffers. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University. She contributed an article to NTQ49 (1997) on ‘Good Nights Out: Activating the Audience with 7:84 (England)’.

Traditional Chinese theatre seems to appeal to audiences across the world more for its exquisite acting than for its literary qualities. Yet Mei Lanfang, Tang Xianzu and Li Yu all assert that good acting must be firmly rooted in its literary base. What compelled these masters to go out of their way to emphasize the importance of the written text, argues William H. Sun, was precisely the failure of many traditional actors to take it seriously, preferring to rely on superficial virtuosities. From this constant struggle in traditional Chinese theatre between a theoretical respect for textual quality and practical emphasis on performance has emerged the peculiar paradox of acting here explored. The author, William H. Sun, is a Shanghai-born playwright, author, and associate professor of drama at Macalester College. A contributing editor of TDR, he has taught at Tufts University, California State University, Northridge, and the Shanghai Theatre

Variously raising hackles and acclaim, the work of Peter Sellars is wider-ranging than the occasional observer might suppose – rooted in an apprenticeship as a puppeteer, followed by some sixty productions in a variety of media during the decade of the ‘eighties. But it is for his eclectic approach to opera that Sellars has become best known on the international festival circuit – which, suggests Maria M. Delgado, he is forced to travel by default, since his socially critical stance combined with an anti-realist aesthetic deters the sponsorship on which so much American theatre depends. Maria M. Delgado here offers an overview and an assessment of a career and a philosophy dedicated to an awareness ‘both of theatre’ s role as a force of political and social responsibility and understanding and of the need to rise above the literal’. The author teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary College in the University of London.

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.

In the south-west German village of Hayingen, the playwright-director Martin Schleker presents large open-air productions of politically sensitive yet entertaining plays to mass audiences on an annual basis. This article explores the element of risk in Schleker's work: his use of purely amateur performers; his job-creation schemes for young people; and his left-wing and often anti-Catholic stance on issues such as racism and nuclear arms before often deeply conservative, culturally Catholic audiences. Schleker's work is situated in the wider context of the state-funded, civic theatres in Germany, and of the tradition of open-air ‘Naturtheater’ which is particularly strong in the Swabian region. Some assumptions surrounding such binary divides as amateur-professional and high art-entertainment are also explored. Data for this article was collected in the Hayingen ‘Naturtheater’ during a period of ethnographic research supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Having completed her doctorate at Sheffield University, Alison Phipps has been working as a lecturer in the Department of German – and in particular in the Centre for Intercultural Germanistics – at Glasgow University since October 1995. She has published in the areas of her research interests, which include contemporary German theatre and performance research, Ethnographic approaches to language education, and popular German culture and intercultural studies.

Anton Chekhov's dissatisfaction with Konstantin Stanislavsky's early productions of his plays is well known and oft-discussed. However, it may be argued that the detailed analysis to which Stanislavsky subjected the script of The Seagull, though offensive to the author's intentions, led to the germination of Stanislavsky's acting system as well as laying the foundations for the success of Chekhov's own dramatic career. Bella Merlin, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, explores this avenue of debate by assessing the possible reasons for the Alexandrinsky Theatre's failure in its premiere of The Seagull in 1896. Thereafter, the mutual dependency of Chekhov and Stanislavsky is discussed with reference to the success of the Moscow Art Theatre's production of 1898. In the following article in this issue, she links these reflections on the play's early fortunes to its relevance to the ‘Method of Physical Actions’ developed by Stanislavsky towards the end of his career.

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.

In ‘Artaud at Rodez’, published in the sixth issue of the original Theatre Quarterly, Charles Marowitz pursued an investigation into the nature of the alleged madness of Antonin Artaud, for which he was confined during the Second World War – eventually being transferred to the asylum at Rodez where he was subjected to electric shock ‘therapy’. Marowitz's article, which later formed the basis for his play of the same title, explored the motivations and responses of those involved: here, Nigel Ward focuses rather on the nature and effects of the treatment itself, inflicted on Artaud no less than fifty-one times – a treatment which, however controversial, was ironically appropriate for the creator of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ which itself claimed to purge its audience of weaknesses and to heal through shock. Nigel Ward is a tutor on the MA in Performance Studies course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

In 1996 John Stokes was appointed to the first endowed Chair in Modern British Literature at King's College, London, where English has been taught since the 1830s. In this version of his inaugural lecture, delivered on 6 November 1997, he traces the transformations undergone by the figure of the prodigal son in the drama of the last hundred years and argues for recognition of the part played by actors in determining the course of theatrical history.

In Desdemona, Paula Vogel's revision of Shakespeare's Othello, we have a Desdemona who is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of lago's fiction into reality. Why has Paula Vogel created a Desdemona who, though ostensibly inside out, still appears to be Othello's projection? Sharon Friedman argues that although Paula Vogel's raucous Desdemona draws on many of the conventions of feminist revisioning, it marks an important shift in the feminist critical perspective in drama – as characterized by Lynda Hart, ‘from discovering and creating positive images of women … to analyzing and disrupting the ideological codes embedded in the inherited structures of dramatic representation’. In a deconstructive parody, Vogel dislodges the convention of the intimate scene between women in Shakespeare's theatre and expands it into an entire play. Decentering the tragic hero, she foregrounds and enacts the threat of female desire that incites the tragic action, and disrupts the familiar categories of virgin, whore, and faithful handmaiden by forging links with gender ideology and class status. The author, Sharon Friedman, is an Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of New York University, and the author of several articles on American women dramatists, including Susan Glaspell and Lorraine Hansberry.

Postgraduate programmes in performance studies are playing an increasingly important role within drama departments in the British university sector, and require that both staff and students confront with greater rigour than at undergraduate level the relationship between theory and practice – more precisely, how that theoretical relationship should and can be related to practical aspects of the programme. Taking her own cue from bedside-reading ranging from Foucault to the latest titles from Routledge to the influential article on ‘Geographies of Learning’ contributed to Theatre Journal in 1993 by Jill Dolan, Susan Melrose here debates the dilemma, and in particular the problems posed to actors by challenging their approach to their work at precisely the moments when they may most need to fall back on old strategies and securities. Susan Melrose recently took up the post of Head of Graduate Studies and Research Development at Rose Bruford College, London. She presented an earlier draft of this article at the SCUDD Conference at the University of Glasgow in March 1998, which was concerned with issues relating to the teaching of theatre and drama studies in the university.

As a complementary piece to her preceding article on the formative significance of The Seagull to Stanislavsky's early thinking, Bella Merlin here looks at the play in the context of Stanislavsky's later work, when he was developing the Method of Physical Actions – an approach to a text which placed improvisation and the physical exploration of a scene at the centre of the actor's rehearsal process. This was in some ways a contravention of what was becoming codified in the West (through limited material being available in translation) as the psychological basis of the system. In 1995, Bella Merlin undertook a ten-month course of actor-training at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where she worked with acting ‘master’, Albert Filozov, who had trained with Mikhail Kedrov, one of the first developers of Stanislavsky's work following his death in 1938. Here, she examines the roots of Filozov's training and the nature of the Method of Physical Actions in theory and in practice. Bella Merlin trained as an actress in Britain and Russia, and has worked extensively in theatre and television. She is currently a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, where her area of research is acting processes and the psycho-physical nature of performance. This article is based on a paper delivered at the ‘Flight of the Seagull’ conference at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, in November 1996, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of The Seagull.

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.

Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

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.

It is received theatrical wisdom – indeed, a self-evident truth – that performances of a particular production differ not only night by night, depending on the chemistry between actors and audience, but in the case of touring productions, in response to the changing relationship between the driector's approach and the venue for which it must be freshly adapted. Yet studies of the theoretical or practical effects of such differences are rare – and can rarely draw on such a range of performing venues as those in which the Out of Joint company presented Max Stafford-Clark's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1995. Originally staged at the ornate, tradition-steeped Bristol Old Vic, the production was taken on tour to modernist, hangar-like auditoria in India, and presented in the unusual yet apt ‘found’ environment of an English country house, before reaching its final home at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with its renovated Victorian interior surrounded by a modernist shell. Exploring the terminology used by lain Mackintosh in his Architecture, Actor, and Audience, Sylvia Vickers compares and contrasts the conception, realization, and reception of the production in these varying venues. Sylvia Vickers worked as an actress in a wide range of theatre before co-founding and creating the Brighton Actors' Workshop and Studio Twelve in the 'seventies. She then took a first in English at Sussex, and now teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute while continuing her work as a director, most recently for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

In NTQ50 (May 1997) Irving Wardle offered his reflections on forty years of theatre reviewing, from the point of view of the seasoned practitioner. Here, Ian Herbert looks at the craft of the reviewer in the wider context of the British theatre since the war, and sees an ironic similarity between the venerable, gentlemanly generation against which Kenneth Tynan pitted his considerable wit, and the generation of Tynan's disciples now no less firmly entrenched in their seats on the aisle. His article, first presented as one of the public lectures celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the Society for Theatre Research on 15 January 1998, is as much an informal history of London theatre during the period as a discussion of the part played in it by the members of the Critics' Circle drama section, of which he is currently secretary. Having completed the last of three editions of Who's Who in the Theatre to appear under his editorship, in 1981 Ian Herbert, started London Theatre Record, now Theatre Record, the fortnightly journal which gathers together the unabridged reviews of all the major British theatre critics.