This article considers the paradoxical manifestations of rejection or suspicion concerning the voice and the feminine at the very moment of the creation of tragédie lyrique at the end of the seventeenth century in France. It examines the relationship between these elements and asks what they have in common that may be perceived as threatening. What is at stake is not only the period's capacity to experiment with pleasure through the elaboration of rules, but also, beyond this delimited historical perspective, the appreciation of the element of danger that is inherent in the experience of any artistic performance, and the roles played by the voice and the feminine in such an experience.

Max Reinhardt's theatre is an intriguing example of the social function of commodification in the late nineteenth century; while critics praised him as the leading figure of a renewed theatre, they also blamed him for a merely decorative style. Notwithstanding the fact that economic success was a substantial precondition of Reinhardt's theatre, Reinhardt's style was highly eclectic and determined by a visual or pictorial order rather than by literary concepts. But this theatre not only followed an aesthetic programme, it also answered to a major change in German society: the process of urbanization which produced a new community of urban dwellers which had to be integrated in the role models of society. The paradoxical reception of Reinhardt thus is not only a matter of taste but rather the hallmark of bourgeois theatre in a period of transition, rearticulating the cultural legacy by commodifying it for a new audience.

The present paper aims at illuminating the space that theatrical art occupies in the dynamics of rewriting and rethinking colonial historiography. My main thesis is that Arabic theatrical practices are construed within a liminal space that is thoroughly hybrid. It is a third space that is located between Self and Other, East and West, as well as tradition and modernity. These negotiations are informed by the postcolonial Arab condition of hybridity, a condition that is itself situated across diasporas and diaglossia. The result of this rewriting process is the production of a new kind of performance tradition that is irreducibly different. Western theatre was represented to the nineteenth-century Arabs with a strong aura of authority. The early reception of Shakespeare and Molière had been conditioned by the general shock of encounter with the Western Other since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt – when Western plays were performed to an Arab audience for the first time. A whole apparatus of translation and theatrical reproduction of Western theatrical canons flourished in the Middle East, bringing about a difficult birth of what can now be called ‘Arab Theatre’, rather than a theatre written in Arabic language. However, The hybrid nature of Arab theatre soon emerged as a result of cultural negotiations that are not simply supplements which reproduce a palimpsest, rather they transform the conditions of the original texts, only to emerge as new and different kinds of performative agency. It is a postcolonial theatre that is located at the crossroads and a continuum of intersections, encounters, and negotiations; the outcome is a complex palimpsest that underlines the powers of impurity rather than a logocentric quest for the pure.

The essay describes ‘utopian performatives’, which are moments of performance in which utopia is ‘done’ in the intensity of exchange between performers and spectators and among the audience. As an example, the essay discusses the performance Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, an evening of slam poetry presented by a multiracial cast for a young, unusually multiethnic audience. It describes a process of feeling together over obvious differences, inspired by an intensely present moment of theatre.

This article examines elements of performance in the giving of evidence by military witnesses to the Saville Tribunal's Inquiry into the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – the day in 1972 when thirteen civilians were shot dead by British Army paratroops during a banned civil rights protest in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. The performative nature of testimony represented an unstable element in this tribunal's attempt to reconstruct the past, raising a number of provoking questions concerning the nature and process of the legal pursuit of truth, in particular the ways in which the performative aspects of proceedings – grounded in the evocation of the past through the enacted memory of witnesses – function. Through tracing and analysing the process of memory recall in the testimonial performance of particular military witnesses to the tribunal, watched by the author, the essay considers the affective impact of courtroom testimony and the effect of this on the legal context in which testimony is given.

Heiner Müller directed Shakespeare's Hamlet together with his own The Hamletmachine as Hamlet/Machine in March 1990 at the Deutsches Theater, East Berlin. This article investigates the production's conception, its rehearsal and its execution against the backdrop of the fall of the Wall. Müller, a playwright whose dramaturgies actively resist reductive interpretation, sought to put Hamlet/Machine beyond the reach of an allegorical reading. Strategies in acting, staging and design were adopted to frustrate the ease with which Hamlet could have merely illustrated the historical changes taking place outside the theatre. On the other hand, Müller was also making theatre for his fellow GDR citizens and had to take account of their experiences, too. His political theatre relied on the combination of contradictory signs in performance that would activate the audience, forcing a confrontation with the material on stage on its own terms. Such an aspiration was, almost inevitably, revealed as utopian but was in Müller's view the only way for the theatre to challenge its immediate historical context.