Admired by Brecht, yet also counting Hitler among his fans, the German cabaret performer Karl Valentin remains an enigmatic figure for most English-speaking theatre people; and his accommodation as a licensed jester during the Nazi years has reinforced the received wisdom that his comedy was ultimately offering reassurances of their own supremacy to bourgeois audiences. Here, Oliver Double and Michael Wilson outline Valentin's life and career, and offer an analysis of his performance style closely linked to two of his best-known routines, which are here also translated for the first time into English. They conclude that Valentin's idiosyncratic style of surreal logic had an effect akin to that of Brecht's Verfremdung, of making the familiar strange, and so, while often extremely funny in its unexpected dislocations, never offering a simple view either of comedy or of life. Oliver Double worked as a comedian for ten years on the alternative comedy circuit, was formerly proprietor and compère of Sheffield's Last Laugh Comedy Club, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997). Currently he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Mike Wilson, whose background is in community theatre, is now Professor of Drama and Field Leader for Performing Arts and Film at the University of Glamorgan. He has published widely on varying aspects of storytelling practice and, in particular, on teenage storytelling culture, notably in Performance and Practice: Oral Naratives Among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland (Ashgate, 1997). His latest book, Theatre, Acting, and Storytelling will be published by Palgrave in 2004.

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

A hundred years ago the international craze for picture postcards distributed millions of images of popular stage actresses around the world. The cards were bought, sent, and collected by many whose contact with live theatre was sometimes minimal. Veronica Kelly's study of some of these cards sent in Australia indicates the increasing reach of theatrical images and celebrity brought about by the distribution mechanisms of industrial mass modernity. The specific social purposes and contexts of the senders are revealed by cross-reading the images themselves with the private messages on the backs, suggesting that, once outside the industrial framing of theatre or the dramatic one of specific roles, the actress operated as a multiply signifying icon within mass culture – with the desires and consumer power of women major factors in the consumption of the glamour actress card. A study of the typical visual rhetoric of these postcards indicates the authorized modes of femininity being constructed by the major postcard publishers whose products were distributed to theatre fans and non-theatregoers alike through the post. Veronica Kelly is working on a project dealing with commercial managements and stars in early twentieth-century Australian theatre. She teaches in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, is co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies, and author of databases and articles dealing with colonial and contemporary Australian theatre history and dramatic criticism. Her books include The Theatre of Louis Nowra (1998) and the collection Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (1998).

The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Lloyd Newson has worked in Europe for some twenty-three years with DV8 Physical Theatre, creating powerful socio-political pieces which address sexuality and interpersonal relationships. These works are generally created with performers through workshop processes and collaboratively with composers. London's experimental dance and theatre scenes in the 1980s and early 1990s provided a challenging context for Lloyd Newson's early creative endeavours. Here, Janet Lansdale takes one work, Strange Fish, as the locus of her discussion on narrative positions in relation to dominant forms of modern dance and issues of sexuality, homophobia, and politics within physical theatre. She conceptualizes and contextualizes ‘voices’ as ‘authorial’ and ‘ancestral’, and traces their manifestation in readings of the work. Complementary and sometimes competing voices from author, text, reader, and cultural history are articulated through a range of intertextual perspectives. This is the second in a series of articles on this work. Janet Lansdale is Distinguished Professor in Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she was Head of Department, and later Head of the School of Performing Arts. She is the author and editor of four books on dance theory, history, and analysis, the most recent being Dancing Texts: Intertextuality in Interpretation (1999).

The distinctively Korean concept of Han evokes a pervasive sense of sorrow, traditionally in need of shamanistic purging in the spirits of the dead, but also describing the sense of national trauma induced first by the Japanese occupation, then by the post-war division of the country. Han has also become an important feature of modern Korean drama, and in this article Jung-Soon Shim describes how Park Joh-Yeol's play The Toenails of General Oh (1974) revisits the concept, integrating indigenous cultural traditions – notably the shamanic ritual Gut – and how, in the production by Sohn Jin-Chaek, the director utilized a western style of epic theatre to create a ‘distanced’ style of Gut on the proscenium stage. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor of English at Soongsil University in Seoul, and a founding member of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT), of which she is currently President. Her books include the two-volume Globalization and Korean Theatre (2003), which won the Best Book of the Year Award of the Korean Ministry of Culture. She also received the Best Critic Award for 2004 from the Korean Association of Theatre Critics. Her research for this article was supported by Soongsil University.

The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

The long-standing artistic collaboration between director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw has, argues Clara Armand, raised the powers of performance to a form of genuine authorship. Her article explores the distinctive qualities of their scenic writing as evident in the production of Medea which transferred from the Abbey Theatre to London's West End on 30 January 2001, and went on to play at the Queen's Theatre for over ten weeks. She makes comparisons between the production of Medea and those of the earlier Footfalls and Richard II, focusing on Warner's challenging ways of transforming pre-existing playtexts and theatrical spaces so as to enunciate statements about the contemporary world. Shaw's interpretation of Medea is explored with an emphasis on the actress's ability to maintain truthful identification with the dramatic character and make it reverberate with her own critical social stance as an artist. The discussion of Medea as seen at the Queen's Theatre is developed in the light of Bakhtin's concept of dialogism and related ideas. The article is complemented by the interview with Fiona Shaw which follows. Clara Armand teaches acting and directs at the Stratford Circus Theatre in Stratford East, and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Reading.

Trained under Ekhof at Gotha, the German actor August Wilhelm Iffland began his professional career in 1779 at the Mannheim Court Theatre. He moved to Berlin to become director of the National Theatre in 1796, remaining there till his death in 1814. In between, he paid a guest visit to the Weimar Court Theatre, at the invitation of its presiding genius, Goethe. A local schoolmaster, Karl August Böttiger, published an account of several of his roles. This was, for its times, an evocative and unusually detailed record of performance style, and here George Brandt complements his analysis with extensive quotation. George Brandt, currently a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Bristol, joined the Drama Department there in 1951, served as its Head of Department over a number of years, and shaped much of its policy, creating among other things the first practical postgraduate film course at a British university. He edited British Television Drama (1981) and British Television Drama in the 1980s (1993) for Cambridge University Press. His German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848 (1993), with Wiebe Hogendoorn, was part of the CUP series ‘Theatre in Europe’, and Modern Theories of Drama was published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

The death on 1 July 2004 of the playwright Peter Barnes robbed the British theatre of one of its most individual and richly imaginative yet shamefully neglected writers. Although his best known work for the theatre – which included The Ruling Classes, The Bewitched, Laughter, Red Noses, and Dreaming – won widespread admiration, and his later radio and television work brought him before a wider public, he remained a theatrical outsider, his plays transcending the conventions of critical labels and movements – the singe discernible influence that of Ben Jonson, whose eccentric genius he championed throughout his life. Here we include three personal tributes: the oration delivered at Barnes's funeral by the stage and screen actor Alan Rickman; recollections from the avant-garde director Charles Marowitz of his association with Barnes's early career at the Traverse and his own Open Space Theatre in the 'sixties; and the impressions of a personal friend, the lecturer and writer Elaine Turner. An analytical assessent of Peter Barnes's work will appear in a later issue.

Stanislavsky's first production of The Seagull is well documented in English, in The Seagull Produced by Stanislavsky, edited by S. D. Balukhaty in 1952. But little is known of his exploratory work on an intended second production almost two decades later amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary period, and the rehearsal notes made by Stanislavsky's assistant Pyotr Sharov remained unpublished even in Russian until 1987. Here, Laurence Senelick provides the first English translation of these notes, contextualizing them with an account of the difficulties under which Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre were working at the time. Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University, and a long-time contributor to TQ and NTQ, which published his articles on the Craig–Stanislavsky Hamlet, serf theatre in Russia, and Wedekind and Lenin at the music hall. His last book, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, won the George Jean Nathan award as the best work of dramatic criticism of 2000–01, and his previous book, The Chekhov Theatre: a Century of Plays in Production, won the Barnard Hewitt award of the American Society of Theatre Research. He is currently translating and editing the complete plays and dramatic fragments of Anton Chekhov for Norton Publishers.

Clara Armand, author of the preceding article on ‘Dialogism and the Theatre Event’ in relation to Deborah Warner's production of Euripides' Medea, talks with Fiona Shaw about her close working relationship with the director in earlier productions, and the process of creating and developing the title role in the play. The interview took place in the Queen's Theatre on 21 February 2001, during the West End run of the production.

This essay is concerned with the history of wild animal training between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, specifically with circus acts involving ‘big cats’. The author, John Stokes, is sympathetic to the view that such performances are inhumane, degrading to animal and human alike, but rather than simply rehearsing familiar attitudes, he subjects the ‘big cat’ act to a performance analysis based on established criteria, in the belief that, if performance theory is to have the widespread application that its advocates claim, then it should be able to elucidate many different kinds of theatrical event. His primary materials are the myriad biographies and autobiographies of wild animal trainers that were produced during the heyday of their art, and which he finds to be frequently characterized by an unexpected thoughtfulness and breadth of experience, besides being highly informative about performance aesthetics. John Stokes is Professor of Modern British Literature in the Department of English, King's College London. He is a regular theatre reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and co-author, together with Michael R. Booth and Susan Bassnett, of Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time (Cambridge, 1988) and Three Tragic Actresses (Cambridge, 1996).

The second conference called by the organizers of the ‘Practice as Research in Performance’ project (PARIP) was held from 11 to 14 September 2003 at the University of Bristol. PARIP is not an organization, but an AHRB-funded research project into the nature and academic implications of performance practice as research, in terms both of the discipline of Drama and Theatre Studies in the university, and the related issues of research assessment and funding. Its conferences aim to give academics in the field the opportunity to add their voices to the debate, and indeed to help shape its outcome. Bella Merlin, a Contributing Editor and Book Reviews Editor for NTQ, is author of Beyond Stanislavsky (Nick Hern Books, 2001). She attended the PARIP conference on the cusp of her personal decision to return to the acting profession from her post in the University of Birmingham, and as this issue goes to press is appearing in the Out of Joint production of David Hare's The Permanent Way. Here she combines a report on the conference with some personal reflections on practice, research, and practice as research.

It is not yet ten years since Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking reached the stage of the Royal Court, during its West End exile in 1996; yet the play has already become, with Sarah Kane's Blasted, identified as central to the emergence of so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. While Mark Ravenhill recognized the influence of such writers as Martin Crimp and David Mamet, it was only recently, during a discussion over coffee about a possible screenplay, that he began to consider the effects of both private and public events of 1993 upon his emergence as a writer – the death of a partner, and the infamous murder of a child by other children. In the following article he identifies recurrent concerns in his first three plays which he now sees as a working-out of his responses to a year which was crucial not only to his own personal narrative, but to others for whom the James Bulger murder epitomized all the worst aspects of a society that the Thatcherites claimed no longer to exist. Among Mark Ravenhill's more recent plays have been Mother Clap's Molly House, which transferred from the National Theatre to the Aldwych in 2002, and Totally Over You, written for the 2003 Shell Connections youth theatre season at the National. This article was first presented as the Marjorie Francis Lecture at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, on 5 May 2004.

Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years trained and directed in performing masked drama. On the basis of research she has undertaken, using her own masks, on how to perform the ancient Greek plays, in this article she questions some of the modern orthodoxies of masked theatre, drawing specifically on her experience with Menander's New Comedy. With David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001) and, with Richard Williams, ‘Masks for Menander: Imaging and Imagining Greek Comedy’ to Digital Creativity, X, No. 3 (1999). Some of her masks can be seen at www.chrisvervain.btinternet.com. She is currently working towards a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Twenty-five years after the landmark publication of Theatre of the Oppressed, there is no denying the continuing influence of Augusto Boal on theatre practitioners, community workers, and political activists worldwide. To judge by the number of recent publications by or about Boal (including five best-selling books from Routledge in little more than a decade), the ‘Boal Boom’ shows no evidence of decline. There is also, however, an emerging culture of critique around various aspects of the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed; and in the following article, Paul Dwyer argues that a reflexive, critical approach to using Boal's techniques should begin with an acknowledgement that they are not based on a stable theoretical foundation. Rather, the underlying principles, articulated by Boal in the many anecdotes that fill his books, lectures, and workshops, appear to have shifted over the years to become more closely aligned with the expectations of his audience. The theory of Theatre of the Oppressed should thus be seen as a co-creation for which the readers and propagators of Boal's work share a significant responsibility. Paul Dwyer is a lecturer in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.

Containing an Explanation, an (Undelivered) Funeral Oration, Divers Reminiscences, a Draft Treatment for a Docudrama (and Some Dialogue Therefrom), and Some Shandyan Digressions. When, back in 1972, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner– Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966) and Edna the Inebriate Woman (1972). The debate continues, but despite the critical esteem in which Sandford's work is held, the man himself became persona non grata on national television, and devoted himself to his many other concerns, notably the traditions and present treatment of the gypsy people. He died on 12 May 2003 – an apparent recluse, yet with websites devoted to hundreds of loving tributes from young and old alike. The leading historian of docudrame, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – here offers a tribute which refuses to fit a ‘proper’ academic format, and takes on something of the variegated style of Sandford's own work.

Many of Copeau's students and colleagues in the first half of the twentieth century used a specific vocabulary to describe successful performance. The performer was ‘in a trance’, or ‘possessed’, or in an ‘altered state of being’. Decroux spoke of ‘evicting the tenant from the apartment so that God could come to live there’. For Copeau and others, the mask was an important tool in the discovery of this optimum state. In this article, Thomas Leabhart suggests that the ideas of the American theatre theoretician David Cole might help us to explore what this language means in terms of shamanic voyages. Thomas Leabhart is Resident Artist and Professor of Theatre at Pomona College in California, editor of Mime Journal, and author of Modern and Post-Modern Mime (Macmillan, 1999). He is also a member of the artistic staff of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) and teaches workshops and performs internationally. Leabhart studied with Etienne Decroux from 1968 to 1972, and served as his teaching assistant and translator.