Eugenio Barba founded Odin Teatret in 1964, since when it has become one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives of the past half-century, and Eugenio Barba one of the most influential figures in world theatre. The following is his speech of thanks to the members of the Academy of Music and Theatre of Estonia for bestowing the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. It was delivered in Tallinn on 27 September 2009.

Václav Havel's plays of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were evaluated primarily for their dissident content. Leaving, which he wrote in 2007, followed his thirteen-year premiership and presidency of the Czech Republic. In this article, Michelle Woods asks whether perception of Havel's plays in England was confined to their alleged politics, how this view affected their translation, adaptation, and reception, and whether they can now be read beyond the ideological positions of the Cold War. She focuses on Protest at the Royal National Theatre in London in 1980 and Sorry on BBC Television in 1977, as well as on two commissions which failed to be produced: The Garden Party for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1964 and The Conspirators for the National in 1970. She argues that the plays were fundamentally misread through the prism of a Western conception of East European dissidence, which determined whether they were produced or not, and led to the dismissal of Havel's translator, Vera Blackwell. Material from Blackwell's recently opened archive is here used to reassess her role in the dissemination of Havel's plays in the English-speaking world. Michelle Woods is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz and is the author of Translating Milan Kundera (2006) and several articles on the translation of literature and film.

Little attention has been paid to the fact that Grotowski's first tour abroad with the Laboratory Theatre was to the Scandinavian countries rather than to Paris, as is often imagined. In this article, Franco Perrelli focuses on the responses of critics, especially in Sweden, to performances of The Constant Prince and to the seminars and other discussions accompanying the tour. He thus provides a comprehensive account of the impact made by Grotowski and his actors in their first encounter with spectators outside Poland. A specialist in Scandinavian theatre, Franco Perrelli is Chair of Performing Arts and Head of the Doctoral School in the Department of Art, Music, Theatre and Cinema (DAMS) at the University of Turin. His books include Echi nordici di grandi attori italiani (2004), La seconda creazione. Fondamenti della regia teatrale (2005), I maestri della ricerca teatrale. Il Living, Grotowki, Barba e Brook (2007), and Strindberg: la scrittura e la scena (2009).

Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

The late 1960s and early 1970s are known as a period of rebellion and turbulence in the Soviet Russian theatre. Dynamic directors such as Georgy Tovstonogov, Anatoly Efros, Oleg Efremov, and Yury Lyubimov, with varying degrees of acceptance by the authorities, revolutionized the staging of classics and inspired a number of new works based on the realities of everyday life. Less well known is that this activity took place during the regime of Elena Furtseva (1910–74), first as a member of the Presidium, then as Minister of Culture. Furtseva is a paradoxical figure: the very model of a line-toeing Party member, she also used her femininity to advance her career. Uncultivated in the arts and ruled by her personal taste, she alternately bullied and coddled the artists she was supposed to control. Although Furtseva's influence was ever present from the Khrushchev era to the early Brezhnev years, she is rarely mentioned in Western accounts of Soviet theatre, and this sketch of her career is the first in English. The author, Laurence Senelick, is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. His books include The Chekhov Theatre: a Century of Plays in Performance (1997) and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2007). Several of his articles have appeared in Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly, the most recent being an article on Michael Chekhov in NTQ 99.

In this article Tom Cornford examines the policy of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare's Globe for each new production, as pursued by Dominic Dromgoole since the beginning of his tenure as Artistic Director in 2006. The article responds initially to John Russell Brown's equation in NTQ 102 of a particular kind of ‘intimate’ acting with ‘small theatres’. Cornford resists this conflation of acting and building, seeing in it a tendency to obscure both the role of reconstructed theatres to challenge contemporary notions of the ‘rightness’ of theatre spaces and the role of directors and actors to convert their apparent problems into opportunities. He explores the transformation of the Globe since 2006, using interviews given by Dromgoole and the directors working with the Globe's research team to critique the theory underpinning the ‘permanently temporary’ alterations to the theatre, and takes the evidence of performances to examine their use of the space in practice. Cornford offers a selection of staging solutions to the apparent ‘problems’ identified by Dromgoole and his team, and proposes an alternative model of reconstruction: not the rebuilding of the theatre, but the constant reviewing of theatre practice, including training. Tom Cornford is a freelance director and teacher of acting for the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota BFA Program, the Actors' Centre in London, and Globe Education at Shakespeare's Globe. He was, until recently, Artist in Residence at the CAPITAL Centre in the University of Warwick, where he is undertaking PhD research.

In this article, Michael Goron examines the working lives of the ‘refined girls’ employed in what was popularly referred to as the ‘D'Oyly Carte Boarding School’ – the working environment in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company of the 1880s and 1890s, in which backstage gender segregation was strictly enforced, and where a patriarchal management personally regulated the private behaviour of female performers. Here, the attempted ‘gentrification’ of the West End theatrical milieu in the later nineteenth century was transposed by Richard D'Oyly Carte to the popular musical stage. Just as ‘unwholesome’ elements of late-nineteenth-century burlesque were absent from both the content and presentation of comic opera at the Savoy, so the ‘respectability’ of its female performers, offstage as well as on, was actively promoted to forestall middle-class antitheatrical prejudice. The working lives of these performers helped to create an image of theatrical respectability which transformed public perceptions of musical theatre in the final decades of the Victorian era. Michael Goron is a PhD student and part-time Associate Lecturer at Winchester and Southampton Solent Universities.

There is no scholarly consensus about the precise meaning of the term ‘über-marionette’, as coined by Edward Gordon Craig. Is it a life-size marionette? A masked dancer? Or simply a metaphor for an actor who exerts perfect control over his body and emotions? The present article, based, among other sources, on recently discovered material in the Edward Gordon Craig Collection of the National Library of France, gives a brief overview of several perspectives regarding this issue before proposing another hypothesis – that the über-marionette may actually have been a full-body puppet. Patrick Le Bœuf is a library curator at the National Library of France, and was in charge of the Edward Gordon Craig Collection from 2006 to 2009.

Steven Berkoff has remained a polarizing and influential figure in British theatre for almost forty years, yet his work has received scant critical attention despite its widespread imitation and regular appearance on British stages. In this article, Jon Foley Sherman identifies choral movement as a key element of Berkoff's signature aesthetic of exaggerated, precise, and violent movement and language. Tracing a trajectory from his 1971 experiments with Agamemnon to his direction of Coriolanus, this article analyzes the uses to which choral movement has been put, and reveals a startling political development in Berkoff's work that belies the consistency of his chorus's manner of moving. His commitment to a particular kind of ensemble performance not only altered the political valences of his source texts, it eventually resulted in a stark assessment of self-government that is rendered more problematic by Berkoff's deployment of polyracial casts. Jon Foley Sherman is a visiting assistant professor at Beloit College; he recently earned a PhD in theatre and drama at Northwestern University, where his dissertation proposed a phenomenology of stage presence in contemporary performance. One of Jacques Lecoq's last students, he is also the artistic director of Sprung Movement Theatre.

Although better known as a playwright and film-maker, David Mamet started his artistic career as a teacher of acting. In this essay Christophe Collard contextualizes the influences, evaluates the implications, and criticizes some of the implementations of his ‘Practical Aesthetics’ by bridging the divide between Mamet's aesthetic theory and its concretization in practice. Often mistaken for a disingenuous appropriation of the so-called ‘Stanislavsky System’, Mamet's derived ‘Method’ arguably is more functional than original. Nevertheless, Collard argues that his confusion between various interpretations of these precepts is deliberate and serves primarily a reflexive purpose, as illustrated here with an analysis of Mamet's rehearsal play A Life in the Theatre. Christophe Collard works as a research fellow in American theatre and drama at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels), where he recently completed a doctorate about media and genre crossings in the work of David Mamet.

The received wisdom has long been that Shakespeare's plays are best seen in theatres that resemble his own – and the assumption is usually that these should aim to simulate the actor–audience relationship of the Globe, with its galleries and thrust stage. Yet, as John Russell Brown argues here, that playhouse, fashioned hastily from the timbers of the Theatre, was becoming old-fashioned when it was constructed, and ‘Shakespeare's theatre’ – already also the halls of city companies and the court – was soon to become the Blackfriars, with its much lower capacity and end-on stage. These elements, he argues, with their more direct and intimate visual relationship with audiences, enabled spectators to pick up clues in the writing that are lost on a larger, three-sided stage. The most recent of John Russell Brown's many books are Shakespeare Dancing (Palgrave, 2005) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (2008). In 2007 he was appointed Visiting Professor at University College London.

One of the most creative communicative strategies of German twentieth-century political song has been narrative role-play. From the songs of Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring in Weimar cabaret during the 1920s to the dramatic monologues of Franz Josef Degenhardt in the 1960s and beyond, singers have assumed identifiable roles to parody the language, mannerisms, and characteristics of known establishment social types. Role play has also been evident in the narrative identities constructed by singers and performers, either by means of literary association or by association with certain political ideas or stances, as in the case of Ernst Busch embodying the proletarian worker. This article examines different types of role-play, including that of Hans-Eckard Wenzel and Steffen Mensching who, in their 1980s performances, assumed the ironic masks of clowns, with which they projected an alternative ‘carnival’ vision of society in the German Democratic Republic. David Robb is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen's University of Belfast. He is an experienced songwriter and performing musician, the author of Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens: das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (1998) and the editor of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s (2007).

In this article Adam J. Ledger reflects upon his recent experience of directing Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies. The play – a triptych comprising ‘Whole Blue Sky’, ‘Face to the Wall’, and ‘Fewer Emergencies’ – is one of a number that have been described as ‘open’, a term suggesting the absence of definitive meaning, defined characters, identifiable locale, or ‘traditional’ dramaturgy, a type of writing which has also been allied to the aesthetics of Lehmann's ‘postdramatic’. Without the ‘dramatic’, the actor may need alternative points of focus in the task of performance. In Fewer Emergencies, Crimp's stage directions also state ‘time: blank, place: blank’. What implications for acting might this provoke? Further, how can physicality be developed within such a relentlessly linguistic piece? After discussing particular rehearsal exercises, this article examines how the development of the performance moved closer to devising. However, despite the apparent openness of the text, Ledger suggests how Crimp resists ‘postdramatic’ labels and that his text can be seen as ‘closed’. Adam J. Ledger completed a PhD on rehearsal process and new work at Exeter in 2007, and is now a lecturer in drama and theatre practice at the University of Hull. He publishes on performance practice and has a particular interest in the Odin Teatret. He directs and leads projects both in the UK and abroad.

The conversation below is a follow-up to Christopher Bigsby's interview with Amiri Baraka, published in Theatre Quarterly three decades ago, in 1978. It was recorded in the artist's backstage room in Katowice, Poland, immediately after a moving performance of the Amiri Baraka Speech Quartet in the Hipnoza Jazz Club in Katowice, during the ‘Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris’ Festival in 2009. The interlocutors were accompanied by a leading jazz pianist, Dave Burrell, and an excellent double bass player, William Parker. The interview, originally carried out for the Er(r)go: Journal of Theory, Culture and Literary Studies, was possible thanks to the help and encouragement of one of the most inspiring Polish contemporary poets, Bartek Majzel, an unswerving propagator of culture in Silesia and throughout Poland. Paweł Jędrzejko is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of Liquidity and Existence: the Experience of the Land and the Sea in Herman Melville's Thought (Sosnowiec-Katowice-Zabrze: BananaArt.Pl/ExMachina/MStudio, 2008). He is also a co-founder and co-editor of the Review of International American Studies and regularly works with Er(r)go Quarterly.

Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).

Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral worked for a number of years with Gardzienice before founding Teatr Pieéń Kozła – Song of the Goat Theatre – in Wrocław in 1996. The conversation that follows took place on 22 June 2009, during Song of the Goat's run of Macbeth, their most recent production. Created in tandem with the Year of Grotowski theatre festival, the ‘World as a Place of Truth’ held in Wrocław on 13–30 June 2009, it was one of a series of meetings, presentations, and performances organized by Joanna Klass of Arden 2 for the US Artists Initiative, a project established in partnership with the Grotowski Institute and the Center for International Theatre Development. Macbeth will be performed at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Song of the Goat's two-month-long British tour of this production in October and November 2010, accompanied by workshops and demonstrations. Its itinerary is Eastleigh (4–9 October), Birmingham (11–15 October), Cambridge (18–23 October), Manchester Metropolitan University (25–30 October), London (3–20 November), and Brighton (21–26 November). This conversation about some of the principles of the company's work was led by Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

The radio play has long survived the competition from television in Britain, and also has a long tradition in the German-speaking world in the form of the Hörspiel – but its strength has lain precisely in demanding a visual contribution from the listener's imagination. What happens when a radio play is ‘staged’ before a live audience? In 2005, under commission from the Royal Festival Hall, the composer Carter Burwell proposed writing a sound score for new plays; and under the banner of Theatre of the New Ear, he recruited his long-time collaborators on film, Charlie Kaufman and Joel and Ethan Coen, to write specifically for sound-only. In this article Jenn Stephenson describes the experience of ‘watching’ a radio play, and offers a theorization of its qualities and the effects on its audience. Jenn Stephenson received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2003 and is now Associate Professor of Drama at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Her recent publications include articles in Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Theatre Research in Canada. She is co-editor of the ‘Views and Reviews’ section of Canadian Theatre Review.

In this article Anna Porubcansky discusses the work of Song of the Goat Theatre not only in its artistic practice, but as a life practice. Based in Wrocław in Poland, the group continues a Polish tradition of experimental theatre practice as seen in the work of Juliusz Osterwa, Jerzy Grotowski, and Włodzimierz Staniewski. A fundamental influence on Song of the Goat has been the belief in Buddhism of its co-founders Grzegorz Bral and Anna Zubrzycki, which has shaped a performance practice rooted in the principles of interconnection and compassion. The group focuses its work on ‘coordination’, an approach that seeks to create a profound sense of harmony within and between each actor and every element of his or her work through training, improvising, and research on diverse songs, dances, myths, and rituals. Maintaining connection to the world through this material, Bral and Zubrzycki extend the group's artistic work through social projects such as the Brave Festival, which celebrates lost and dying cultural traditions in an attempt to create a performance practice that is actively integrated with the social world. Few academic publications are available on Song of the Goat, and this article draws on three years of extensive fieldwork with the company, utilizing interviews and personal observations of training, rehearsals, expeditions, and performance development for its most recent production, Macbeth. Anna Porubcansky is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Sydney-based Company B's 2008 season included The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles's Antigone in Irish poet Seamus Heaney's translation. This article shows how the production conveyed notions of war, social upheaval, displacement, and exile that are relevant to contemporary Australian spectators. With its ethnic and racial diversity, and one overt reference to the plight of indigenous people under colonial rule and its legacy, the production confirmed that the emotional resonances in this staging of Antigone reflect and yet transcend the contemporary Australian situation; and Peta Tait here argues that the production contributed to spectators' understanding of the emotions underlying contemporary political debates. Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University. Her recent publications include Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (Routledge, 2005) and Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces (Ashgate, 2002). She has published widely on theatre, drama, circus performance, and gender identity, and is co-editor (with Liz Schafer) of the anthology Australian Women's Drama: Texts and Feminisms (Currency Press, 1997).

Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.