Between 1986 and 1989, Michael Bogdanov directed The Wars of the Roses (an ambitious seven-play Shakespeare cycle that won him the Olivier Award for Best Director in 1990), introducing an accessible and pertinent Shakespeare to 1980s audiences and paving the way for later politicized versions of Shakespeare’s plays – such as, recently, the New York Public Theater’s 2017 production of Julius Caesar. Following Bogdanov’s death in 2017, the time seems right for a new appraisal of his work as a radical, political director. The collection of Bogdanov’s personal papers at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a unique opportunity to gain an insight into the director’s mind. The papers include annotated scripts, production records, prompt books, reviews, programmes, unpublished manuscripts, and two volumes of The Director’s Cut – documents spanning Bogdanov’s entire theatrical career. In this article Darren Freebury-Jones engages with these materials, as well as the influences of theoretical movements such as cultural materialism on the director’s approach, in order to shed light on the ways in which Bogdanov stimulated and inspired new readings of Shakespeare’s history plays.

In this article Patricia Lufkin examines the work of Margaret Macnamara, a remarkable feminist playwright whose work has fallen into obscurity but who deserves attention as an important female participant in the Independent Theatre Movement and the Fabian Society. Macnamara’s associations and collaborations with key figures of the time, including George Bernard Shaw, are explored, and her progressive thought and participation in key organizations demonstrated. Importantly, Lufkin analyzes Macnamara’s play The Gates of the Morning (1908), highlighting its feminist critique of religion and its patriarchal influence. The critical response to her work was mixed, yet both positive and hostile reviews acknowledged that the play was a competent and stirring example of the new drama of progressive ideas, and helped to bring the ‘woman question’ to the forefront of people’s minds. Patricia Lufkin received her PhD from Louisiana State University, and is now teaching at Arkansas State University Mid-South. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century British theatre, most significantly on the life and work of Macnamara and Samuel Beckett.

Natalism constitutes one of the main values of Israeli society, to the extent that the state’s explicit policy is to encourage and heavily finance childbearing. Whatever the reasons for this pronatalist ideology may be – religious, cultural, or politico-demographic – the fact is that, in twenty-first century Israel, motherhood is still considered a biological imperative; and a Jewish-Israeli woman’s reproductive body is implicitly mobilized for national needs. Against the backdrop of this persistent pro-birth agenda, in this study Dror Harari and Gillit Kroul discuss a noteworthy number of recently staged one-woman shows that critically debate the Israeli ‘fertility religion’ and the physical and emotional distress that it causes for the infertile and childfree woman. These autobiographical performances of infertility are seen as a sub-genre of Israeli critical disability performance, in that they manifest the idea that what defines the infertile as disabled is not (only) the woman’s biological deficiency but, rather, her inability to fulfil her national gendered role. Dror Harari is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. His Self-Performance: Performance Art and the Representation of Self was published in Hebrew by Resling Publications (2014), and his current research, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, focuses on the historiography of performance art in Israel from its origins in the 1960s and through the 1970s. Gillit Kroul has an MA in Theatre Studies from Tel Aviv University. Her book of poetry When the Sea Seeds its Hopes is published by Sa’ar Publications, and her short semi-autobiographical play in Hebrew Shnayim (Two), based on her experience of fertility treatment, is available at <http://pregbirthanthology.wixsite.com/anthology>.

Since her death on 15 October 2018 at the age of 92 many tributes have been paid to Cicely Berry, and no doubt more will follow. Her legacy is assured, however, through the many actors, directors, and young people she encouraged, inspired, and transformed during her long and illustrious career as Director of Voice (and subsequently Advis ory Director) of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other organizations where she shared her practice internationally, often with the assistance of translators in order to work in the language of the host communities. Moreover, her words and a myriad of examples of exercises on voice and text processes remain in print and on digital media for the benefit of future generations.1 In this article, Nesta Jones focuses on one specific piece of work and moment in time. Cicely Berry had directed a touring production of Hamlet for the Education Department at the National Theatre in 1986, with Tim McInnerny in the title role; then, two years later, came the production appraised in detail here – King Lear for the RSC, first staged at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1988, and at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 1989. Nesta Jones recently retired as Professor and Director of Research at Rose Bruford College ot Theatre and Performance, and was previously Reader in Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The legacy of Jerzy Grotowski twenty years after his death still presents a powerful challenge for theatre-makers, not only in experimental theatre, and theoreticians – which is also how it was during his life. This retrospect by Juliusz Tyszka on the Grotowski seminar organized by Robert Findlay and Robert Taylor for the Program in Educational Theatre, at New York University in February 1993, is a testimony to his achievements, offering insights into the opinions and reflections of American artists, critics, and scholars on the importance of Grotowski, and the impact of his theatrical output both on world theatre, and specifically in the US. Tyszka sets their views within the Polish background he shares with Grotowski. The climax of the seminar in a meeting with Grotowski himself, following a film recording of The Constant Prince, is fully described. In 1992/93 Juliusz Tyszka was a Fulbright visiting scholar in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He is an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal. Since 2008 he has been Head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

In this article Arya Madhavan examines the significance of the female protagonist Asti from the new Kathakali play, A Tale from Magadha (2015), in the four-hundred-year-old patriarchal history of Kathakali. The play is authored by Sadanam Harikumar, a Kathakali playwright and actor, whose contemporary retelling of Hindu myths and epics afford substantial agency to the female characters, compelling radical reimagining of Kathakali’s gender norms and a reconsideration of the significance of female characters, both on the stage and in the text. Asti unsettles the conventional norms of womanhood that have defined and structured the ‘Kathakali woman’ over the last five centuries. Although several new Kathakali plays have been created in recent decades, they seldom include strong female roles, so Harikumar’s plays, and his female characters in particular, deserve a historic place in the Kathakali tradition, whose slowly changing gender norms are here analyzed for the first time. Arya Madhavan is a senior lecturer in the University of Lincoln. She has been developing the research area of women in Asian performance since 2013 and edited Women in Asian Performance: Aesthetics and Politics (Routledge, 2017). She is a performer of Kutiyattam, the oldest Sanskrit theatre form from India, and serves as associate editor for the Indian Theatre Journal.