It has long been believed that the style of comedy depicted on southern Italian vases of the fourth century BC was a local Italiote form called phylax. A. D. Trendall, the leading authority on the vases, has consistently taken the view that the plays were ‘impromptu’ performances, ‘in which light, movable sets could be used to indicate the required background’. It is not surprising that this has become accepted history: the vases, it is believed, represent improvised farce performed on makeshift stages by strolling actors, also called phlyakes.

This article analyses Stories of Love & Hate, a headphone verbatim play produced in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Australia. While verbatim theatre typically invites audiences to listen therapeutically, Stories of Love & Hate enacts and enables two alternative forms of listening. First, it enacts the paradoxical mode of ‘ethical eavesdropping’; second, it enables the metatheatrical mode of ‘mediatized listening’. In doing so, the play asks spectators to reconsider whom they listen to and how. It also asks scholars to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre gives voice to those who go unheard by the media. Instead, the article argues that in the case of Stories of Love & Hate, headphone verbatim theatre enables the audience to listen to how the media listen.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the dominance of language, so typical of Western culture since the Renaissance, was increasingly challenged. As early as 1876, Nietzsche wrote on Richard Wagner in Thoughts Out of Season:

He was the first to recognize an evil which is as widespread as civilization itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, and the burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole of man's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more and more from its true province— the expression of strong feelings, which it was once able to convey in all their simplicity—and has always had to strain after the practically impossible achievement of communicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say, thought, its strength has become so exhausted by this excessive confusion of its duties during the comparatively short period of modern civilization, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which justifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer in communicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Man can no longer make this misery known unto others by means of language; hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under these conditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language has gradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coerces and drives humanity where it least wants to go.

The disease of language which Nietzsche here diagnoses, can be described as a degeneration of language from the state of being a polyfunctional, ambiguous, flexible semiotic system that allows people to express their feelings, constitute their selves and communicate with each other, into a restrictive technical language.

Surveys of nineteenth-century drama and theatre in England fall approximately into two categories: an examination of the development of the drama itself – tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, etc. – with some theatrical context provided, and a study of changing theatrical conditions, with some reference to the drama. In both cases what we are told about the theatre relates to acting, architecture, methods of production, lighting, costuming, company organisation, the actor-manager, and so forth. Never, or hardly ever, are we told anything about audiences: what kind of audiences went to what theatres, what their class was, what jobs they did, how much they got paid, what their non-theatrical tastes were, how often they went to the theatre, where they lived and under what conditions. Such information, however, is essential if we are fully to understand the repertory or style of a particular theatre at a particular time in history, and ultimately the character and content of the drama itself.

The history of the earliest documented Chinese opera performances in California (1852) and their successors during the following decades reveal how Chinese theatre in the diaspora was produced and consumed by Chinese immigrants, European visitors and Americans. On the one hand, a familiar repertoire eased the nostalgia and reinforced the national consciousness of Chinese immigrants, while on the other, the ethnocentric reading and writing of Chinese theatre helped establish an eternal frontier in the ‘old West’ to protect American national identity in late nineteenth-century California's periods of economic and political turmoil. Finally, the exoticism of California's Chinese theatre in America contributed to a European sense of American cultural uniqueness. Chinese opera performances played a crucial role in the invention of Californian identity.

In her 2017 show Nanette, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby announced that she was quitting comedy. In the show, Gadsby argued that as a marginalized person – a gender-nonconforming lesbian from rural Tasmania – she was doing herself a disservice when she invited audiences to laugh at her trademark self-deprecating humour. Gadsby framed her decision to quit comedy partly as a problem of persona: her practice as a comedian was to take actual, sometimes traumatic, events from her life and turn them into jokes, which she described as ‘half-told stories’. So framed, the problem with Gadsby's comic persona is the way it both presents and truncates her traumatic experience. When she refuses to be funny, Gadsby casts herself as something like Sara Ahmed's ‘feminist killjoy’, a spoilsport figure whose unhappiness positions her as a source of tension. In this article I consider how Gadsby's decision to quit comedy, and the terms in which she articulates that decision in Nanette, can help us think about varied modes of humourlessness and comic possibility.

Theatre created by Pacific Islanders is perhaps the most recent significant development in New Zealand theatre of the 1990s. Exploring this new phenomenon within a concept of diaspora, productions, producers and themes are linked to notions of displacement, home, and disruption on several levels. Three recent plays and productions are examined: Think of a Garden by the Samoan-American John Kneubuhl, which explores memory as the basis of diasporic identity; Home Fires, a collaborative production between Pacific Island and Ma°ori artists in which a new kind of syncretic theatrical style transcending specific cultural codes was developed; and Tatau – Rites of Passage, a performance created by the Christchurch-based group Pacific Underground and the Australian community theatre group Zeal Theatre which explores the notion of ritual reincorporation – involving actual tattooing on stage – as a means of transcending diaspora and repairing the ruptures caused by it.

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “talk back”, aiming to challenge, contest and problematize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects'. Works such as Miller's Glory Box (1999), which used his personal history of having a partner who is not a US citizen to discuss gay marriage and legal immigration for same-sex couples, and trans and Tamil performer D’Loco Kid's D’FaQto Life (2013), which presented an intersectionally marginalized trans person of colour's experience and narrative, have been critical in supporting political and personal empowerment for audiences and performers alike.

In an attempt to distinguish themselves from the increasing proliferation of like projects, some theories, training programmes, productions, sub-disciplines and the like project a kinship with already authoritative voices. This artificial association characterizes the inevitably ‘intercultural’ product not simply as another element in the postmodern mix, but as a truth validated by tradition and transcending the limits of cultural fads. Richard Schechner's self-styled ‘rasaesthetics’ seeks to associate itself with the rasa concept of classical Sanskrit theory. But rasa and ‘rasaesthetics’ have little in common, and Schechner's attempt to project their kinship requires misunderstandings of theatre in India and in the West. Ultimately, ‘rasaesthetics’ is an example of a tendency in dramatic theory not to try to explain phenomena but to try to legitimize practices.

Amateur theatre constitutes a largely unexplored narrative within the dominant histories of British theatre that traditionally foreground professional practice. A consequence of advanced capitalism has been an increasing emphasis on professionalism in all sectors of society that constructs the amateur as incompetent and expects guaranteed rewards for professional expertise. Statistically, however, amateur theatre has represented a major experience of performance for a significant proportion of the population especially those of the small nations that have been subsumed within the British nation-state. Much of today's state-funded theatre that ostracizes the amateur, has its roots in early twentieth-century amateur/professional collaborations and grassroots activity in the inter-war years. An examination of the ideological basis of aesthetic value judgements which are, in fact, socially constructed judgements of taste, raises issues about both the cultural value of performance and the responsibility of the historian to the experience of the past.

Two South African films, Oliver Schmitz's 1988 Mapantsula and Ramadan Suleman's 1997 Fools, drawing from the revolutionary fervour of Third Cinema, developed a radical consciousness against a backdrop of Anglo-Afrikaner cinema in South Africa. Set in Soweto during the 1980s, both films, in their representation of blackness, address issues of the body, identity and agency. With their anti-heroes at the centre, they explore questions of African identity by imaging the black body differently, and free it from the grip of the apartheid imaginary. Meanwhile, the white body in the films is ‘shot’ as a homogenized symbol of apartheid violence and oppression, thus ‘fixing’ white identity as a strategy for political truth claiming.

At Florence, housed in the Archivio di Stato in the noble rooms of Vasari's Uffizi, there lies a great collection of letters sent back to Tuscany from the many parts of Europe where representatives of the Medicean court were posted. Among them are files of dispatches written from London during the seventeenth century, and buried within these is a mine of information about the court theatre of the time. Masques, tilts and plays were occasions of some significance for the diplomatic community, for they were external signs of the power of the Stuart realm, and the Florentine agents who took up their residence in London during the course of the century were careful to note when such events took place, how well they came off and who was invited to them.

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and by Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt's theorization of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children's appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt's work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children's relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child's potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt's gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded.

In this article Nicholas Ridout argues that the work of the animal in theatrical performance generates an affective response which has both cognitive and potential value. Using examples of the appearance of animals on stage in recent work by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Jan Fabre, it suggests that when animals are coerced into the making of meaning in theatre, the unease which their appearance provokes is not so much the result of an encounter with the irreducibly ‘other’ as a recognition of familiarity, proximity and a history of exploitation. That animals can readily be seen to be exploited on stage allows the possibility of the exploitation of humans being seen as part of the same economy and this same history.

Lest We Forget, my current research project at Concordia University, critically analyses the history of queer theatre and performance as it intersects with the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Canada. Stretching over three decades and taking the country's bilingualism into consideration, its objectives are to study the aesthetic variety and political complexity of plays and performances that attend to the epidemic and to identify the multiple challenges faced by theatre artists and activists. Furthermore, the project explores the methodological and historiographical challenges when studying HIV/AIDS theatre and performance in a Canadian context.

On 22 July 1823 William Godwin addressed the following in a letter to Mary Shelley, who was returning to London after five years on the Continent:

It is a curious circumstance that a play is just announced, to be performed at the English Opera House in the Strand next Monday, entitled, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein. I know not whether it will succeed. If it does, it will be some sort of feather in the cap of the author of the novel, a recommendation in your future negociations with booksellers.

This essay considers the virtuoso in music, theatre and dance as a liminal figure of performativity. It draws on cultural studies as well as the history of science to offer a critical reading which follows the virtuoso's oscillation between science and art. The escalating dynamic in the virtuoso's technical control of material (of the body, the ‘instrument’, language) leads to a polarization between artistic ‘creation’ and virtuoso performance: the virtuoso thus occupies a seismographic function within the aesthetic debates of the nineteenth century. The article also outlines the relationship between the media and virtuoso performance and the relevance of the anecdote for the virtuoso's charismatic impact. This essay will contribute to our understanding of how the contemporary media influenced the virtuoso concept, and address the issue of whether the (partial) disappearance of the virtuoso from the theatre stage translocates the figure of the virtuoso onto other ‘cultural stages’.

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.