The ways in which we receive and perceive what we taste, hear, touch, and smell all serve as potential resources for our understanding of an artistically mediated event. Though some modes of perception are more usually associated with the visual than the performing arts, the development of forms of Live Art has begun to challenge our understanding of how the conventions of theatricalizing experience can be modulated. Using methodologies drawn from a phenomenological perspective, Stephen Di Benedetto here examines the way in which Robert Wilson's installation, H.G., presented at the Clink, near London Bridge, in 1995, triggered a journey in sensory perception for its spectators, and served as an exemplar of the ways in which the full range of sensory resources can be ‘theatrically’ deployed. Stephen Di Benedetto, having received his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London, for his thesis on Playwriting as a Visual Art, is currently an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at the School of Theatre, University of Houston, and is now actively engaged in research on the body in contemporary Live Art and new Irish and English playwriting.

Accurately tracing the process leading to the creation of a theatre within most western societies is an endeavour usually fraught with hazards, since so much needful information has been lost or remains conjectural. But the Jewish theatre arrived far later than most, due to a combination of the prohibitions against theatricality in Jewish laws and the problems of preserving a performative tradition during the long period of the Diaspora. The eventual emergence of a Jewish theatre little over a century ago thus offers a unique opportunity not only to investigate the subsequent development of that specific theatre, but also potentially to illuminate questions concerning the social, economic, and demographic variants which determine the cultural distinctiveness of other national theatres. The author, Corina Shoef, is a researcher based in Tel-Aviv who has already published several articles on related themes, and is currently working on a project to create a research database of the Jewish and Hebrew theatre.

In this article Susan Oommen looks at the plays of the popular Indian dramatist Mahesh Dattani as conversations between the writer and his audience on models of reality, and interprets their performance as moments in subjectivization. In initiating an audience into redefining identity, she argues that Dattani provides the parameters within which problematizations may be reviewed and better understood. He also seeks to queer the debate on Indian middle-class morality, thereby challenging its privileged status and underscoring the interconnection between repression and invisibility. The question for the audience is whether Dattani's plays can cue them into experiences of resistance and encourage them to reinvent narratives that may then function as personal histories. One of the plays on which this article focuses, Dance Like a Man, was seen during this year's Edinburgh Festival as part of the Celebration of Indian Contemporary Performing Arts. Susan Oommen works in the English Department in Stella Maris College, India, where she has been on the faculty since 1975. She spent the past academic year at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University.

Prompted by the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny's biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, two recent productions, Esther Vilar's Speer and David Edgar's Albert Speer, have set out to explore the reputation of Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, the only leading Nazi to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. The plays, like the biography, are concerned with the extent of Speer's knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ during his career in the Nazi hierarchy, and consequently with the integrity of the stance he adopted at Nuremberg and thereafter – that is, of his claim of guilt by association and omission rather than by active participation. In her biography, Sereny claims that as a result of her association with Speer he eventually acknowledged his guilt to her, and was repentant. But Nick White believes that the evidence – much of it unearthed by Sereny herself – suggests otherwise, and that Sereny had failed to acknowledge that between 1978 and his death in 1981 Speer consistently deceived her about crucial aspects of this evidence. How successful are Vilar and Edgar in their quite different dramatic sifting, not only of the public persona of Speer, but also of the interpretation granted their subject by the biographer upon whom their plays, to a lesser and greater degree, depend? Nick White has taught at City University, London, and his PhD dissertation, ‘In the Absence of Memory? Jewish Fate and Dramatic Representation: the Production and Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the London Stage, 1945–1989’ (1998) has been followed by a companion volume of criticism, articles, and letters, The Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the British Stage, 1939–2000.

Western assumptions of unthinking Serbian support for the policies of Slobodan Milošević were upset by the success of popular protest in securing his removal in the autumn of 2000. In fact, just three years after his accession to power in 1989, there had already been massive student protests against the Balkan War, and these were repeated and surpassed in the winter of 1996–97, when Milošević tried to disregard the success of the opposition in the local elections of that November. The student protests quickly took a theatricalized form, and their recurrent modes – graffiti, banners, street processions – were successfully carnivalized, to become popular performative events. This feature provides a chronology of the main developments to complement the more analytical study by Milena Dragićević-Šešić of the nature of this organic but ironic response to an authoritarian regime, which gave old traditions a late twentieth-century voice.

In his seminal The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggested that Samuel Beckett, in denying his characters individualized facets of humanity, achieved an ‘alienation effect’ that was more profound and assured than Brecht's. Here, Michael David Fox, while agreeing that Beckett denies actors and audiences the kinds of identification achieved in naturalistic drama through Stanislavskian techniques, argues that he demands a different quality of empathy from his audiences – not through the artifice of a character's simulated pain but through the actuality of the performer's physical suffering. While analyzing the demands and constraints upon actors which Beckett imposes in his better-known plays, he also re-evaluates the more ‘occasional’ piece Catastrophe – written in 1982 ostensibly as a homage to the then-imprisoned Czech playwright Vaclav Havel – less as a critique of political terror than as an ironic and devastating self-critique of the terror of Beckett's own tragic representation. Michael David Fox is a doctoral student in drama and critical theory in the Joint Doctoral Program in Drama at the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is on the production of empathy in Shakespeare's tragedies. He wishes to thank Robert Weimann, Wolfgang Iser, and Gabriele Schwab for their helpful and generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

The theatre of Eastern Europe has not always benefited as fully as might have been expected from the supposed freedoms which followed the collapse of Communism. State support for institutional theatre has been drastically reduced, while the ‘alternative’ theatre, though no longer constrained by a formal censorship, has had seriously to consider what it is now alternative to. Magdalena Gołaczyńska takes 1989 as starting point for a survey both of the framework within which alternative theatre now works, and of the three main strands that have emerged in the closing decade of the twentieth century – of companies continuing to produce socially critical work, of groups exploring experience at a more personal and existential level, and of ‘collective creators’ whose concerns are rather with pushing the boundaries of performance itself. Magdalena Gołaczyńska teaches at the University of Wroclaw and the State Academy of Drama in Cracow, and is author of a doctoral study of contemporary alternative theatre.

The creation of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999, argues Adrienne Scullion, has the potential to change everything that has been understood and imagined or thought and speculated about Scotland. The devolved parliament shifts the governance of the country, resets financial provisions and socio-economic management, recreates Scottish politics and Scottish society – and affects how Scotland is represented and imagined by artists of all kinds. The radical context of devolution should also afford Scottish criticism an unprecedented opportunity to rethink its more rigid paradigms and structures. Specifically, this article questions what impact political devolution might have on the rhetoric of Scottish cultural criticism by paralleling feminist analysis of three plays by women premiered in Scotland in 2000 with the flexible, even hybrid, model of the nation afford by devolution, resetting identity within Scottish culture as much less predictable and much more inclusive than has previously been understood. An earlier versions was delivered by the author on 5 March 2001 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in receipt of the biennial RSE/BP Prize Lectureship in the Humanities. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, where she is also the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research.