With a history of over six hundred years, Kun Opera is one of the oldest types of opera still actively performed in China today. In some Kun Opera plays, the story is set in a garden, which becomes an important narrative motif. Such plays were frequently staged in gardens, usually for private gatherings. The twenty-first-century revival of this type of garden Kun Opera took place during a strong wave of cultural tourism, aligning cultural preservation with economic development. A prototypical example is Six Records of a Floating Life, which, since 2018, has been performed at Canglang Pavilion, one of the classical gardens of Suzhou. An inventive yet historically informed production of garden Kun Opera, Six Records of a Floating Life provides an immersive aesthetic and more broadly cultural experience, situating Kun Opera in the economic, cultural, and social context of contemporary life.

In this interview, which took place in Birmingham on 16 February 2023, Hakan Gültekin talks to playwright David Edgar about his theatre universe and the current state of British theatre. Edgar has long championed the social and economic rights of playwrights, and here suggests that the lack of long-term and sustained support from British theatres has created what he calls ‘Primark playwrights’. His plays are characterized by a careful examination of historical events and the impact of these events on society, as evident in his epic two-part play Destiny (1976), which examines the roots of the British Labour movement. Other notable plays include Excuses Excuses (1972), Saigon Rose (1976), Wreckers (1977), and Entertaining Strangers (1986), commissioned by the Colway Theatre. He has also written plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, including The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1978), Maydays (1983, revived in 2018), and Pentecost (1994). More recently, he adapted A Christmas Carol for the RSC (2017) and staged the one-man show Trying It On (2018). He founded the first playwriting degree in Britain at the University of Birmingham in 1989, and served as President of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain from 2007 to 2013.

MITEM (Mádach International Theatre Meeting) celebrated its tenth anniversary in October 2023, somewhat out of sync and out of time because of the festival’s cancellation due to Covid in 2020. It was absorbed into the Theatre Olympics (as discussed in New Theatre Quarterly, XXXIX, No. 4 (November 2023) [NTQ 156], p. 377–86), but its most recent edition was something of a replacement for the cancelled event, presented in the round figure of ten that has made everybody happy. It has also allowed this editor to follow through with a ‘PS’ to that article, acknowledging the importance of MITEM for both the National Theatre in Budapest and the theatregoing public. By contrast with the three and a half months of the Theatre Olympiad, MITEM lasted a modest twenty-four days.

This article re-reads Beckett’s play Not I (1972) in the light of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes Report’, published in January 2021. Beckett interrogates what James Smith, Clair Wills, and others have referred to as Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. Mouth, ‘brought up … with the other waifs’ in a mother and baby home, absorbed religious notions of sin and punishment. Through a close reading of selected passages, the article considers to what extent Not I can be read as a ‘survivor’s testimony’ such as those given to the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes.

As a prominent figure in the contemporary Iranian theatre scene, Chista Yasrebi uses her plays to call for female liberation in the country while navigating the existing political constraints, including censorship. Her 1996 play Rahil, for example, acts as a political allegory through its narrative of the titular woman’s desire for transcendence within the patriarchal realm of Persian mysticism. In its close analysis of the play, this article identifies the historical significance of mystic women in Iran and examines Yasrebi’s use of mysticism to comment on the complexities of gender politics, the oppression faced by Iranian women, and the need for social resistance. Further, it draws on key concepts from Alain Badiou’s political philosophy to demonstrate how Rahil’s journey into mysticism can be seen as an act of transgression. It argues that Yasrebi’s work enriches the ongoing discourse on the role of women in Iranian society and the broader struggle for political transformation.

This article analyzes three contemporary plays by trans and gender-non-conforming artists from the United States that engage with forest fires and queer ecology. These three plays – MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, and Kari Barclay’s How to Live in a House on Fire – tie wildfire to colonial histories of fire suppression and imagine a just climate transition as linked to queer and trans self-reinvention. The article describes this dramaturgical tactic as ‘burning hope’ – letting go of straight, settler desire and gesturing toward reciprocal obligation with the non-human world. Building on Kim TallBear’s call to attend to organic matter and Stephen Pyne’s study of fire history in the ‘Pyrocene’, the article imagines theatre as a prescribed burn that can re-orient audience relations to futurity. Burning hope does not abandon hope; it recognizes grief as mobilization for environmentalist solidarities.

This article argues that Hebrew theatre is defined by a hegemonic Ashkenaziness that has been present from its beginning and which continues today. It identifies four main components of this hegemony, each of which is examined in turn. The first two components, Hebrew culture and Eurocentrism, are analyzed in relation to the repertoire of plays presented at such theatres as Habima, Ohel, and Cameri. This repertoire combines Yiddish plays and translations of European plays, while also reproducing Orientalist attitudes towards Mizrahi culture. The third component, privileged citizenship, centres on the privileges afforded to Ashkenazi artists and actors in the theatre when compared to Mizrahi actors, especially in terms of casting decisions. Finally, hegemonic Ashkenaziness is defined by membership of the middle class, which, in the theatre, leads to productions being targeted at an Ashkenazi audience and its cultural capital.

Laween is among several Palestinian theatre cooperatives established over the last decade, which have not received sufficient attention from theatre scholars. Born out of the struggle of living under Israeli apartheid, the repression of the Palestinian Authority, and alienation from NGO theatres, whose work has been depoliticized by reliance on foreign funding, the emergence of these theatre cooperatives represents a significant change in the Palestinian cultural landscape. Working with a renewed cultural and political consciousness, Laween seeks to reflect collectively on, and resist the various forms of oppression experienced by, the Palestinian community. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, together with Israeli military and settler violence in the West Bank, make it more pertinent than ever to rethink what ‘cultural resistance’ means in the Palestinian context and to give attention to the community initiatives grappling with the brutal realities of ethnic cleansing through art. The interview here with two of the founding members of Laween, Mousa Nazzal and Hamza Al-Bakri, discusses the development, challenges, and envisaged future of this Palestinian theatre cooperative.

The evolution of the colour of Othello’s skin-tone is a surprisingly accurate cultural barometer of attitudes towards race in the eyes of scholars. A significant portion of the critical literature is focused upon the Moor’s complexion as one of the main variables within the play. Yet the fact that the script has itself become a variable, and not a constant, has been neglected. This text’s transformation can be traced alongside the ratification of racial laws. In Jacobean England, Antebellum American, and Imperial Germany, audiences respectively experienced Othello committing divergent crimes, ranging from murder-suicide, to marriage, to simply existing. These countries’ racial legislation coloured the various audience interpretations of the Moor. While Othello’s actions were always the same, the public projected their own attributed meanings onto the play – a practice analogous to a living Rorschach test. This article explores the concept of using a metaphorical Rorschach test as a tool for the historicization of the many colours of Othello.

The Hi PerformanCZ visitor programmes, hosted regularly by the Czech Arts and Theatre Institute since 2018, have invited international theatre professionals, from directors and promoters to critics, to immerse themselves in the variety of theatre on the contemporary Czech stage. Showcased performances, themed in programmes dedicated to theatre for children and young people, puppet theatre, and text-based theatre, among other examples, are accompanied by symposia, meetings with Czech theatre-makers, theatre tours, and museum visits. In this article Mark Brown provides an overview of the Czech showcases from 2018 to 2024, while focusing particularly on four productions: Tomáš Dianiška’s The Magnificent 294 (2020, showcased 2023); Jan Jirků’s Zá-to-pek! (2019, showcased 2022); director Jan Mikulášek’s staging of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters (2018, showcased 2022 and 2023); and Brno’s Goose on a String Theatre’s collectively devised piece Smokeout (2022, showcased 2024). These productions markedly represent the diverse strengths of Czech theatre in the twenty-first century.

Emil Boroghină founded the Shakespeare Festival in Craiova in 1994 with the longer-term intention of making it an international festival of significant, indeed world, standing. This article, written in honour of Boroghină and dedicated to him, offers an overview of the Festival’s programming and related details from its triennial period to its present biennial existence. It draws particular attention to Boroghină’s selected outstanding directors (‘great directors, great productions’, in his words, and the title of one of his editions) without, however, losing sight of the Festival’s varied theatre activities, especially in the celebratory year of 2024.