This special issue takes as its conceptual starting point ‘theatrical things’ too commonplace to ordinarily deserve scholarly notice – bits of foam, cushions, mothballs or even elephants. It sheds light on how unassuming features of performance practice constitute critical apertures for the study of theatre historiography, telling us something vital about theatre-making and sense-making. In the study of theatre history, Tracy C. Davis says, there is a premium on asserting originality and innovation, so we are ill-disposed to acknowledge consistency, unoriginality and derivation. Following Davis’s line of thought, we consider how utterly commonplace theatrical things become interfaces between theatre and world-making or microcosms for understanding theatre practice in ways that social ‘context’ does not allow us to imagine. We denote this form of historiography as metonymy.

Focusing on the Sufi festival (mawsim) of Nabi Rubin, which used to take place near Jaffa in Palestine, this article explores the indigenous performance traditions that were an important part of Palestinian cultural life prior to the mass displacement of Palestinians by Zionist forces in the Nakba of 1948. Using the extinct festival of Nabi Rubin as a specific example, the article sheds light on a significant and neglected part of Palestinian theatre and performance history: indigenous Palestinian performance practices which have been omitted from the literature on Palestinian theatre. Thus the article advocates for a more inclusive approach to the study of performance that gives value to indigenous performance practices, which form a fundamental part of Palestine’s rich cultural history. It also examines the sociocultural changes that accompanied the Arab Nahda (‘renaissance’) and the manner in which it influenced cultural life in Jaffa and the festival of Nabi Rubin.

This paper discusses Roman Jakobson’s concept of metonymy as a form of theatre and performance historiography. Following traces of elephants in Europe during the early modern period, the paper suggests that these fragmentary documents – be they textual, visual or material – do not align with a grand récit but hint at multiple layers of cultural negotiation, concerning questions of ontology, anthropology, politics and even technology. The proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ is a provocation to reflect on these larger categories, while its cultural impact is firmly grounded in its theatrical and performative qualities. Drawing on the paradigm of critical media history, fragmentary and scattered documents become legible as part of a larger process of cultural formation.

The provocative work of German artist Christoph Schlingensief may seem to be not possible today. However, it developed an afterlife of its own. Against the backdrop of current discourse shifts and political developments my article historicizes this work from the early stage productions at the Berlin Volksbühne after the fall of the Wall to taking to the streets of Vienna at the turn of the millennium, when right-wing populism entered government politics in Europe. Determining the politicality of its fabrication of public tensions, the article calls for a closer consideration of concepts of affect studies in theatre and performance analysis and confronts the memory of Schlingensief's work with a more recent production and their reception in the context of current discussions on race and gender. Turning to Claudia Bosse's IDEAL PARADISE (2016), a street procession in Vienna, it suggests to locate Schlingensief's afterlife in new performative formats re-negotiating contemporary affective politics.

The catalogue produced for the Armenian intermedial performance Ararat (1977) in Milan stands as the most significant remnant of an avant-garde project that combined music, painting and poetry. The volume includes musical scores by Ludwig Bazil and artwork by Herman Vahramian, artists connected to the Armenian community, as well as critical essays. Analysing the catalogue as an integral component of the performance demonstrates its role as an evocative remnant that aligns with the event’s intermediality. Drawing on archival studies, I argue that the catalogue embodies a metonymic relation to the performance, serving as a crucial tool for fostering a historiography of Milanese-Armenian cultural production. Ararat’s diasporic context amplifies the catalogue’s impact and contributes to the memory practices of the marginalized community. Steeped in affective resonance, the artefact incites the community to engage with cultural and historical narratives, contributing to a broader discourse on Armenian identity within the Milanese context.

My examination of game play, ludic activity and being playful in immersive Gatsby shows that Gatsby is a typical example of the playification of theatre in the contemporary art scene. In using the term ‘playification’, I refer to the method of incorporating diverse play categories in theatre to motivate audience activity. While much critical attention has been devoted to the controversial nature of active spectating as a practice of audience emancipation, there has been relatively less focus on its play aspect. To develop an understanding of the idea of play in immersive theatre, I refer to the works of Johan Huizinga and Richard Schechner, and apply Schechner's language, which distinguishes play and game in immersive theatre. Moreover, in developing Schechner's vocabulary in the context of immersive theatre, I expand my scope of reference to include the insights of game theorists.

The pursuit of a utopian community through theatre-making involves re-examining the concept of stage presence. This article contributes to the discourse on the nature of stage presence in theatre, proposing a middle ground between the views that stage presence is solely a result of the performer’s quality and that it is an effect that technology can produce. Through a phenomenological lens, the author argues that stage presence is a contingent and relational phenomenon achieved through the bodily communicative process of both the performer and the spectator. Through the exploration of traditional Chinese theatre, this research found that the bodily encounter between the performer and the spectator contributes to stage presence. The article aims to stimulate further discourse on the significance of stage presence in constructing a utopian community.

This article examines Dao Yin (Saying Vagina), a feminist play produced by the Beijing-based theatre collective Vagina Project, focusing on textile theatrical objects representing the vagina, such as cloth, plush puppets and woven fabric scenery. Sharing methodological foundations with Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Dao Yin engages in feminist myth making through textile art. By analysing both onstage and offstage female textile work, this study highlights a dual dynamic: the visible artistic labour animating textile props onstage and the inert woven vaginal scenery that obscures the labour of its fabrication. Situating this work within a global commodity meshwork, the article foregrounds the weaving labour of female migrant workers and its translation to symbolic representation. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s concepts of texture and ‘texxture’, the analysis surfaces effaced histories of textile labour, the corporeal vulnerability it entails, and the material traces entangled in a theatre of feminist vaginal symbolism.

This article questions the recent tendency for theatre historiography to focus more on the political context of productions than on the ‘stages’ themselves. While this trend seems logical it neglects an important, visceral, aspect of the art form that was itself designed to impact and democratize politics. The paper focuses initially on a schoolchild’s attraction to strips of foam rubber litter left onstage after a Theatre in Education performance of Edward Bond’s The Under Room (2006) at his school in Bartley Green, Birmingham. It approaches this event using Lacan’s rapprochement between psychoanalysis and linguistics to explore the a priori and a posteriori temporalities of metaphor and metonymy. The paper suggests that charging trivial objects like foam strips with significance confounds the a priori logic of logos. It explores how Bond bends, but does not rupture, the theatrical boundaries instituted at the Theatre of Dionysus, to position audiences to make meaning during an event a posteriori as the boy does. It proposes that when the modernists dismantled these boundaries they destroyed an important metonymic challenge to logos. The paper tests this theory by comparing the boy captivated by foam strips with the very different effect achieved by the Royal Shakespeare Company when they confronted their audience with actual human remains, and with the hallucinatory effects of ‘bedside theatre’ on its vulnerable young audience. It suggests that form is content, that we can read the political impact of a performance through its handling of theatrical boundaries. In conclusion, in the era of artificial intelligence with logos more powerful than ever, the paper urges theatre historiographers to put the stages back in the picture.

Anne Charlotte Leffler's play Sanna kvinnor (True Women) (1883), together with other late nineteenth-century plays by women playwrights, is considered a significant historical event in Swedish theatre histories, regarded as a successful feminist intervention. This study examines the cultural-specific conditions and agendas that governed the interpretations of Sanna kvinnor at the theatres. Theoretically, it is based on the idea of plays as the initiators of circulation, which in turn is performative. The focus is on the social imaginaries that are reinstated by the stagings and their interpretations, and how these imaginaries reciprocally shape the interpretations of the play's central theme, protagonist and audience address. The article provides an overview of the various social imaginaries at play and identifies the cultural and social abstractions that form a specific culture of circulation. The encounters between the play and various Nordic theatre environments are examined by closely analyzing and contextualizing theatrical reviews.

This article argues that an understanding of male same-sex practices in ancient Greece point towards a queer desirous spectatorship – a male ‘gayze’. Ancient tragic scholarship has often omitted discussion of male same-sex practices, despite using marriage and heterosexual social norms to elucidate meaning in text and performance. This article seeks to redress the exclusion of queer histories and perspectives from understanding tragedy in its social context. The article outlines evidence of male same-sex practices, including pederasty; relates ancient understandings of desire to the gaze; and evidences how and where young men, like those who danced in the tragic chorus, were courted and coveted. The article concludes with a case study of the chorus of young huntsmen from Euripides’ Hippolytus, read through the lens of a desirous gayze.

Thus spake Immanuel, the son of Rabbi Shlomo, blessed be the memory of that righteous man: … I was living in the city of Fermo, which is in the province of the Marche. And it happened one day, after the banquet of Purim,1 when we had enjoyed a wealth of eating and wine and poultry, we sat together on broad cushions, and we carried on with the telling of our tales, and we decided that we were going to converse exclusively about poems and melitsot [rhyming prose].

And each man who had made up a poem in his own head, he would recite it; and if he had heard a poem written by someone else he would recite it; and there was a man who collected them and put them together into a book, and showed their beauty and their splendour to the signori … And the prince said: ‘And now rise up, tongue of gold and splendour, and make for yourself a name of glory, and collect the hosts of your poems into machberot.'2

This article offers a rereading of Theatre Workshop HaTikva Neighborhood’s activity as a unique troupe in the field of community-based theatre in Israel. There are three interrelated factors that account for this group’s distinctiveness: (1) it functioned as an independent theatre without public subsidies; (2) its repertoire shifted from a politics of distribution to a politics of recognition; (3) it underwent a transition from amateurism to professionalism. This is a rare status in relation to the common model of community-based theatre in Israel. The study explores these three factors within the theatrical and historical-political contexts of the period.

This article explores the 2017 performance of Harrison David Rivers's play, And She Would Stand Like This, and its dramatization of the intersectional marginalization and discrimination endured by a queer family of colour facing AIDS, through the framework of Euripides’ Trojan Women. It does so via three main perspectives: chosen family, normative discriminations and tragic disidentifications. In its changes to the tragic plot, the play reflects on AIDS, exploring criminal infection; hetero-/homosexual, genetic and communitarian HIV transmission; and bereavement. It critiques the offstage intersectional systems of oppression and shifts the status of the community from victimhood to survival, and from the representational periphery to the cultural centre. And She Would Stand Like This appears as a queer communal ritual of poetic empowerment with/through which to pay homage to queer forebears of colour, to celebrate queer lives of colour now and to galvanize those who are to walk a queer futurity of power and liberation.

David Belasco's collection of antique objects housed in his studio apartment above the Belasco Theatre and in warehouses nearby offers a rich archive of things that suggest strong metonymic readings. Drawing on Belasco's pronounced sympathies toward spiritualism, this essay offers a psychometric prism to approaching Belasco's intuitive relations with his collections. As a science for reading souls, psychometry proposed that objects held on their surfaces histories of past individuals who had touched or been in contact with the objects. Belasco often invited journalists to tour his museum-like studio and enjoyed picking up things in his hands and telling of their pasts.His storerooms and warehouses were believed to be haunted by ghosts drawn to materials of theatre history stored within them. As Belasco's collections were auctioned off following his death and that of his surviving daughter, they too passed on sorrowfully and would speak no more.

This article revisits Bertolt Brecht’s interpretation of Mei Lanfang, whose Moscow performance reportedly sparked Brecht’s idea of the V-effect. By placing both figures within the early twentieth-century media landscape, characterized by a fascination with attractions, this exploration delves into the transmedial and transcultural currents that sculpted Brecht’s misunderstanding that Mei appeared surprising to the audience. Framed by his exposure to early, particularly silent, cinema, Brecht views Mei’s performance through a cinematic lens, further amplified by Mei’s emphasis on exhibitionist visuality and traditional Chinese theatre’s inherent attraction-based tendencies. Brecht, moreover, overlooked the historical and practical aspects of Mei’s artistry, which sought to enchant rather than shock the audience. This article endeavours, through its transmedia exploration, to cast new illuminations on the myriad pathways of interpreting global theatrical dialogues.

In this essay, I analyse how practices of press denunciation operated within Hungary and impacted the theatrical landscape during the Cold War era. I examine how this technique of denunciatory criticism was transformed in Hungary with the change from the Stalinist ideocratic field of power to a post-Stalinist, now post-ideocratic, system, and also how denunciatory theatre criticism in the press, in its most severe form in the given circumstances, operated in this system. Adopting a structural approach, my aim is to examine what I am calling the ‘denunciatory article or criticism’ – the published article denouncing a particular artist or work aiming at ‘withdrawing from circulation’ the targeted artist, work or, indirectly, sometimes a whole series of artworks, or an entire movement. I argue that the denunciatory article is part of the system of state cultural control rather than simply aesthetic criticism. I am taking a well-known case in Hungary – the neo-avant-garde artists of Balatonboglár – to explore the operations of sociopolitical and professional power that resulted in the exile of these artists from Hungary in the early 1970s. In an era of ‘fake news’ and of increasing censorship of publications, this operation of power is becoming increasingly relevant and urgent.