At the Theatre Historiography Symposium, held during the 1993 Helsinki IFTR/FIRT Conference, a specific term came into circulation which infiltrated and permeated the discussion to such an extent that it appeared to adopt the position and function of a key term in theatre historiography: ‘theatricality’. This was no great surprise, however. For the symposium set out to consider two basic issues: first, to examine the application of analytic strategies from other disciplines to theatre history and, secondly, to identify the distinctive features of theatre history as a single discipline. Both concerns are closely related to the concept of theatricality.

We are living at a time when we are particularly conscious of historical change and of the impermeability of institutions, political, social, intellectual, and educational. The old disciplinary structures that organized our Western educational system for so long seem to have accelerated from the slow and comfortable evolution which gave rise to, for example, the various social sciences and, indeed, our own discipline of theatre studies into a dizzying whirl of new inter and cross relationships that the stunning proliferation of centres, institutes, and special programmes reflects but by no means adequately represents. The world of intellectual discourse, within which theatre studies, historical studies, and for that matter the cognate fields toward which and from which analytical ideas of theatre and performance circulate, has become in the last quarter of a century extremely complex, and seems to offer an almost infinite variety of methodologies vying for critical attention. There are a number of concerns and assumptions that run consistently through a great deal of this varied discourse, however, and one of the most important of these has obviously also contributed significantly our sense of a conceptual world in flux. This is the wide circulation in modernist thought of historical and cultural relativism, the rejection of traditional essentialist beliefs in favour of an attitude that regards most human institutions as culturally generated and thus always changing or changeable through the continuing negotiations of cultural activity.

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.

Theatre historians often turn to art history, not only for information about source images that can help with the speculative reconstruction of lost performances, but also for lessons in historiographic method. Historians from both disciplines have long shared the difficulties of ‘ekphrasis’, i.e. the translation of nondiscursive images into descriptions, and vice versa, as well as other vexing problems of general history like periodization, documentation of events, and so on. Unlike theatre history, art history has a recognized pantheon of interpreters, which has been subjected to overview studies like Michael Podro's The Critical Historians of Art as well as specific treatments of major critics and their influence, like Michael Ann Holly's work on Panofsky. Theoretical concerns about historiography, sometimes assumed by literary critics of ‘master narratives’ to be synonymous with postmodernism, developed somewhat earlier in art historical writing, which would appear to be an advantage.

In 1529 Agrippa von Nettesheim criticized the ‘futility and uncertainty’ of science. Indeed, the triumphant rise of European culture and science has always been accompanied by shadows of dissent. While, on the one hand, the rhapsodic shattering of reason was heavily criticized, on the other hand, equally sharp criticism was raised against the hermetic spirit of universal systems. The accepted authority of scientific knowledge was continually served a Lenten repast, and mighty edifices built on theory have bowed to the weight of doubt, crumbling into ruins of truths. The path which we call ‘progress’ is overlaid with traces of our own actions in the image of Sisyphus in Hades, who is condemned to push a huge boulder uphill. He is forever forced back to the beginning of his task, because of the perfidious nature of the stone.

The world in which the International Federation for Theatre Research first accepted the invitation from our Russian colleagues to hold its Twelfth World Congress in Moscow was a startlingly different one from that in which the Congress eventually took place: and Moscow itself had borne witness most dramatically to this transformation. Since its Eleventh World Congress, held in Stockholm in 1989, the IFTR has been coming to terms with a world in which much, including the boundaries and contents of its own discipline, has become subject to radical change. In a formal way, the adoption of a revised Constitution for the Federation is a recognition of the new world in which we are living: now the responsibility for furthering the aims of the Federation lies firmly in the democratic hands of subscribing Institutions and individual Members. More substantially, the process initiated in Stockholm of dividing Congress Sessions into Working Groups held together by a common interest, reflects the diversity of approaches which are now embraced under the title of Theatre Research, and the role which the Federation plays in bringing together scholars from a diversity of backgrounds, not only to meet colleagues from other countries working in the same field, but to obtain through keynote speeches and informal contacts in a crowded schedule of theatregoing, receptions and private encounters, a wider view of developments outside their immediate sphere of interest.

I shall be thinking of you during the XIIth World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research. I am honoured by your invitation to attend, but regret that reasons of health prevent me from doing so. After almost twenty years of political darkness in the former Czechoslovakia, which prevented me from attending meetings organized by the Federation, finally, when I would have been able to go other complications (which I hope will be temporary) have made it impossible. I ask, therefore, that you accept my sincere apologies for my absence at what for me is such a significant moment. I greatly appreciate the honour which you have conferred upon me, although I am not sure whether I deserve it. Even though my period of office with the Federation was short, I have always been convinced of the importance of co-operation among theatre researchers from around the world, in order to develop their subject and its methodologies and for the mutual exchange of research findings.

When I accepted the invitation to address this World Congress and first devised my title, I was drawing on a strong conviction that as we approach the century's end, we are living through a period of profound local and global changes which touch every level of our intellectual and emotional lives. The location of this present moment of our inquiries, poised between the markers of termination and origin, the end and the beginning, the twentieth and the twenty first centuries, seemed to me a powerful and widely understandable trope for our shared contemporary situation, at this conference and in our respective countries. But of course, this is a World Congress, and not for all the cultures of the world is this trope of brinkmanship immediately compelling. Assuming the Roman calendar without initial reflection, I have performed in my title one of the very acts which I planned to criticize: I have assumed in language, imagination, and sociality a centredness and primacy for Western discourse which I no longer believe or support. Indeed, the major important revision of the theoretical, historical, and critical apparatus of our time has been to de centre such governing assumptions. The title, then, marks the limits and difficulties of moving beyond historically inherited and inscribed paradigms, even as I struggle to do so, and I offer this revision of the assumptions of this piece: while for many of us, this talk of the millennium may provide a meaningful context for inquiry, for others it may be perceived as a foreign and local concept, in need of translation.

The acting of emotions on the stage can be looked at from three different points of view. Traditionally, the relationship of the emotions of the actor to the presupposed emotions of his character is discussed from a theatrical point of view. I shall provide a short overview of the different approaches to acting emotions based on current acting theories. Only recently have the emotions of the actor on stage portraying character-emotions been looked at scientifically from a psychological perspective. Finally, I shall present the empirical results of a questionnaire drawing on answers from a wide sample of professional actors. Due to limited space, this presentation can only be a global one. Emphasis is placed on the presentation of the empirical material about actors and emotions on stage.

The American theatre and film critic Stanley Kaufman once told the following version of the ‘Napoleon’ joke. It seems a French official in the 1820s on a visit to an insane asylum was taken around the institution by one of the inmates. As the tour progressed, the official was increasingly impressed by the inmate's evident knowledge of the asylum. There were times when his guide even seemed to be running the place; he commanded orderlies to open locked doors or to remove other inmates from confinement, and the orderlies always obeyed. Finally, they came to the last room on the tour and the inmate explained that the people within suffered from delusions of grandeur. Sure enough, the official looked through the bars and saw an entire roomful of men dressed like French generals, strutting about with one hand thrust inside their vests. ‘Those poor fools all think they are Napoleon’, said the guide. Certain now that his guide was as rational as he, the official asked him how soon he was going to be released. The inmate drew him aside and whispered confidentially, ‘They'll never let me go. They're afraid of my power in France. They know all these other Napoleons are fakes.’

Shakespeare was first produced in Japan in a version fairly faithful to the original when, in 1903, the actor-manager Kawakami Otojiro, who came from outside the Kabuki world, directed Othello. Some reviewers were quite critical of the production, saying that it would make no sense to call this genuine Shakespeare since the serious drama was played so badly as to become comic. Others were more sympathetic and said that one had to be satisfield with this brave undertaking since the audience seemed to have enjoyed it very much. However, most critics did not see the entire performance, either arriving late or leaving before the end. Yet they seem to have felt no need to apologize: they had simply followed the usual custom of theatre-going practised by Kabuki audiences.

Some 200 years ago Novalis jotted down the following strange reflection: ‘About theatricality in the market place and in experimenting—every glass observation plate is a stage—a laboratory—a cabinet of curiosities is a theatre.’ In a way, the considerations that follow may be understood as a single footnote to this remarkable text.