In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.

The article explores the scenographic rendering of trauma in the theatre performance 872 days. Voices of the besieged city staged by a small theatre, Subbota, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The performance delves into the complex issues of private narratives of traumatic experiences, which, for decades, were deemed unimportant and even disruptive within the context of victory and glory of The Great Patriotic War. The production is based on memoirs and diaries of witnesses of the Leningrad siege. This study explores the connection between the scenographic ecology and empathic unsettlement, which is understood as a tool of approaching trauma through the experience of the audience. The article analyses how the scenographic rendering of trauma allows for potential representation and understanding of traumatic experience. It further looks at a theatre space as a place for mourning and reflexivity that allows the possibility of working through past trauma to better understand the present.

National Collection was a participatory tour performance presented at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2015 by Public Movement, a group that investigates public choreographies and forms of social order. This article discusses the work's examination of the interdependency between the state and its cultural institutions, both as a paradigmatic form and as historical narrative. By following the different stages of the performance score – the group's arrival at the museum's original building where Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence ceremony took place, a march in public space to the current museum and the tour held inside – the article explores the ways in which National Collection ‘restates’ the aesthetic political scene of foundation and the museum's central role. Along with the embodiment of institutional authority, the performance formulates a significant critical dimension, conveying doubt and a constant sense of crisis embedded in establishing a state and prominent by displaying or reforming museum order.

This dossier contribution focuses on Alutiiq performer Tanya Lukin Linklater's Woman and Water. It examines how the piece creates the opportunity for an experience of a way of being in the world, in intimate interconnection with one another, the land and other animals, and the experiences of time that this intimacy compels, that differs from the models of affiliation presumed in understandings of ‘nation states’ generally referenced by contemporary academic discussions of nationalism and transnationalism.

It is my pleasure to present the first number of Theatre Research International in 2005. This issue is the second of several under my editorship that will have a focus section. The first on ‘postdramatic theatre’ (29.1) has occasioned a great deal of interest (at least judging by the number of downloads from the journal's website) and this positive response suggests that the policy of publishing focus issues meets a genuine need. Focus issues will seek to explore a particular topic from a number of different perspectives. In keeping with the journal's international readership this invariably translates into articles from scholars working in different countries and scholarly traditions. A focus issue does not usually mean, however, that an entire issue will be given over to the topic. As the present number on the ‘director in the theatre’ indicates, three to four articles are usually sufficient to define (but certainly not exhaust) a topic. This means that some space in the journal will be reserved for articles submitted and reviewed in the normal fashion.

In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, with per capita incomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.

This dossier documents a research collaboration between members of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and members of the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom, between 2008 and 2010. This collaboration was dedicated to a cross-cultural inquiry into methods and topics of performance research that might serve to produce a robust international dialogue capable of approaching performance through multinational lines of inquiry. Participants chose a common topic (History, Memory, Event, and the Politics of Performance 1970–1990), and composed an archive of materials drawn from six nations which was analysed and interrogated by the group. The dossier offers examples from the archive and an account of the way the group processed these artefacts.

George Bernard Shaw reviewed three of Augustin Daly's Shakespeare productions in the course of his stint as theatre critic of The Saturday Review, and wrote briefly on another when he was the music critic of The World. At the beginning of the last of these notices, describing As You Like It in 1897 and Ada Rehan's performance in it, Shaw wrote: ‘I never see Miss Ada Rehan act without burning to present Mr Augustin Daly with a delightful villa in Saint Helena.’ Listing some of the production's errors produced a more sombre threat:

To think that Mr Daly will die in his bed, whilst innocent presidents of republics, who never harmed an immortal bard, are falling on all sides under the knives of well-intentioned reformers whose only crime is that they assassinate the wrong people! And yet let me be magnanimous. I confess I would not like to see Mr Daly assassinated. Saint Helena would satisfy me. (ShSh, 44) Readers of Shaw's reviews, especially those who encounter them only through Edwin Wilson's selection in Shaw on Shakespeare, will only know Augustin Daly's productions as seen by Shaw. But these critiques were part of a campaign on behalf of Shaw's aims for the theatre, and, specifically, a ‘wooing’ of Ada Rehan for the Shavian drama.

The group of actors from whom the Gelosi company arose are thought to have first come together in 1568, with the amalgamation of two troupes led by the prima donnas Vincenza and Flaminia. They were already known by the name Gelosi when they toured France in 1571; by 1572 they were popular enough to be able to complain that the stanze in Genoa could only hold an audience of 150; in 1574 their performance, and that of their leading lady, Vittoria Piisimi, were the highlight of Henri III's visit to Venice, and their reputation as the foremost com-media dell'arte troupe was fully established. Por-cacchi's pamphlet of 1574 notes some of the Gelosi actors of the time as Simon of Bologna, who played a facchino Bergamasco, Giulio Pas-quati as the Magnifico and Rinaldo. A Mantuan decree of 5 May 1579 names as Gelosi actors Simon the Bergamasco, Orazio and Adriano the innamorati, and Gabriele their friend.

Feminist discourse has proven to be a vital component in the expanding field of Irish theatre studies owing to its exposure of elided work and the articulation of unrepresented voices. Irish women's participation in the public sphere and cultural fabric of society has been hindered in the course of the twentieth century and this is reflected in limiting representations of femininity as perpetuated by discourses of nationalism and Catholicism: the dominant imagery of the idealized mother which merges the feminized nation – Mother Ireland – and the Virgin Mary. In Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899–1949, Paul Murphy highlights the ‘contradiction between the symbolic centrality of Woman as fantasy object and the social subordination of women as social subjects’. The incongruity between the shifting realities of Irish women's lives and the inflexible institutions that shape cultural representations is the focus of much feminist theatre research in Ireland. This research examines work which articulates the experience of estrangement from the dominant cultural imaginary and attends to the possibilities of staging more accommodating models through three interlinked strands: self-representation and the unhomely experience; constraint and freedom as explored through space and form; and a shift in focus to performance and the body.

On 1 February 2014, Ireland's best-known queer performer, drag artist Panti (Rory O'Neill), delivered a ten-minute speech on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre following a production of James Plunkett's play The Risen People (1958). The oration was the last instalment in a series of so-called ‘Noble Calls’ programmed by the national theatre, in which invited artists, activists and public intellectuals spoke after the production about an issue of pressing concern. Plunkett's drama explores the impact on a family of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, during which approximately 20,000 people took to the streets in an industrial dispute over working conditions. Marking the centenary of the event, the production and its Noble Calls commemorated the original incident, while also encouraging reflection on the state of contemporary Ireland, and the public's aspirations for a country deeply affected by recent social, cultural and economic upheavals.

When a company of Japanese actors under the leadership of Manzaburo UMEWAKA* presented some noh plays at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967 as part of the World Theatre Season, a good many British critics confessed themselves to be more than a little baffled. Opinions ranged from one reviewer's: ‘Noh is stylised to the point of static incomprehensibility’ to Philip Hope-Wallace's guarded appreciation: ‘The sound which prevails is curious; wailing and hooting noises like owls with indigestion. But the combination of strange noises and slow, potent, intense movement adds up to some very exotic and memorable poetry; to those (so to speak) in the know, it must be a lifetime's experience.’ To Irving Wardle the cultural barrier was impenetrable. ‘I found the performance totally alien: a blank cheque with no doubt centuries of artistic credit behind it, but which might equally almost have been staged as a hoax on the cultural community… I doubt whether any such vision can be transmitted without a shared language…’ Even critics anxious to enter into the spirit of this, to them, wholly new experience admitted that they found it hard going. W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘The plays were performed by a company trained from childhood to a stylised form of art of which one cannot hope, without study, to appreciate the finer points.’

A primary theme of twentieth-century theatre has been the actor's body. Numerous directors from Stanislavsky to Anne Bogart have evolved stage theories and related training methods to promote a more expressive body on stage. In her 1995 article ‘Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor’, Lea Logic provides an overview of many of these approaches. While acknowledging the contributions of these director-teachers, she suggests, ‘If body shape and movement are to retain and increase their power as the central focus of theatre, actors must learn to maximize the expressive potential of their bodies.’ Quoting Copeau, Chekhov, Stanislavsky or Barba, she maintains the primary problem is an actor's tendency consistently to return to physical choices related to their personality and not necessarily to the role they are playing. She quotes Copeau's description of actors: ‘I always know, in advance what they are going to do. They reduce everything to the level of their habits, their clichés, their affectations. They do not invent anything.’ While Copeau's complaint is not directed at actor teachers, but actors, his words define one of the primary challenges for them, to teach actors to expand their expressive abilities beyond their self image.

In the summer of 1671, after the court had left London and after his performance as Ladislaus in John Crowne's Juliana – a play thwarted, as the preface declared, by the fact that ‘the Dog-Star was near his Reign’ – Thomas Betterton made his way with Joseph Haines to Paris. What they, and particularly what Betterton, saw there helped to determine the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre which was then under construction, and which would open in November that year. When we compare what was happening on the French stage during and immediately after Betterton's visit with what we know of the Dorset Garden Theatre, however, it becomes clear that Betterton's experience was to have an effect on the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre not immediately, but in the years that followed its opening, and that the single most influential work was not one that Betterton saw on his visit to France in 1671, but one which was first performed two years later.

Home, a pioneering theatrical production in post-communist Romania, cast homeless/orphaned youth in the Youth Theatre in Bucharest. The ‘orphan problem’ has been one of the most covered topics on Romania in western media, and one of the signs of Romania's ‘backwardness’, while neglect and indifference have characterized local press coverage. The significance of the production in changing the Romanian public's perception of these young people, many of whom are from the Roma ethnic group, is analysed, as are much wider political implications. Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament rapporteur for Romania, saw Home and afterwards expressed her support for Romania's acceptance into the European Union. The production and its reception permit a tracing of the historical relationship between the performance of Romanian marginality and national identity in relation to Europe.