It is my pleasure to present the first number of Theatre Research International in 2005. This issue is the second of several under my editorship that will have a focus section. The first on ‘postdramatic theatre’ (29.1) has occasioned a great deal of interest (at least judging by the number of downloads from the journal's website) and this positive response suggests that the policy of publishing focus issues meets a genuine need. Focus issues will seek to explore a particular topic from a number of different perspectives. In keeping with the journal's international readership this invariably translates into articles from scholars working in different countries and scholarly traditions. A focus issue does not usually mean, however, that an entire issue will be given over to the topic. As the present number on the ‘director in the theatre’ indicates, three to four articles are usually sufficient to define (but certainly not exhaust) a topic. This means that some space in the journal will be reserved for articles submitted and reviewed in the normal fashion.

This article examines a spectacular example of Greek theatre-related vase iconography, the so-called ‘Cleveland Medea’, by studying the ways in which a painter appropriates iconography for his own narrative purposes. Of special interest are the interactions called for by the vessel from its prospective viewers in the symposium context. Throughout, the artefact is treated as an important document of the cultural history of Greek tragedy in the fourth century BCE.

Proceeding from the observation that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's famous Hamburgische Dramaturgie (Hamburg Dramaturgy) soon abandons the analysis of actual performances in favour of a discussion of character, the article explores Lessing's problematic relationship with the performing body, situating it in the context of an increasingly textual culture. It shows the implications of this move in terms of gender prescriptions before discussing Lessing's ‘disgust’ with a particular performance of his Emilia Galotti. Reading this example with Lessing's treatise Laokoon and drawing on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, it argues that Lessing's struggle with the performers reveals a profound crisis in subject formation in the sense that the disturbing corporality of the performing body is always threatening sympathetic identification. The article concludes that the Dramaturgie itself constitutes an ‘abjection’ of performance. A postscript opens up the view onto the contemporary relevance and refiguration of Lessing's Laokoon in the Laokoon Festival in Hamburg.

Though directors have been central to the theatre for more than a century, it is not easy to describe their function or explain fully what they do. Since they have not all done the same things, theorizing the office is a slippery enterprise. Despite this difficulty, the cultural authority of directors has become embedded in the thinking of both the commercial and subsidized sectors in most countries in the world, including many parts of Asia, so that directors are fundamental to the way we comprehend and value theatrical work. Though dictatorial modes of direction have been challenged in the past three decades by a variety of strategies, the theatre industry continues to rely heavily upon the managerial and aesthetic skills of the director, who stands as an icon of the successes and failures of twentieth-century theatre. This essay discusses two alternative histories of the director in the modern age, the modernist avant-garde model and an industrial model, showing that the two are much closer than typically claimed. Using André Antoine as case study, the essay offers a critique of certain tendencies in modernist theatre historiography. A final section looks at the interrelationship of the director and the spectator.

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacs's assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the director's history.

Stanislavsky's ‘emotion memory’, basic to Method acting, is a pretext, if not subtext, for reflections on the vicissitudes of directing, most particularly as it confronts the one inescapable emotion, stage fright, which may be seen, rather, as an existential condition – without which, actually, there would be no theatre. Or at least, without a sense of psychic or physical risk, no theatre of any consequence. If susceptibility to such risk is expected of the actor, whose technique is a way of dealing with stage fright, much of what is done in directing is an equivocal cover up, because the credibility of performance draws upon that fright, hiding it and exploiting it, all the more as we approach the limits of performance. As for the emotion memories of the essay, and the emotions about memory too, these are drawn from a long career in theatre, marked by experiment and controversy, and an insistence that, for all the stress on emotions, the mandate of performance is to bring it into thought, or what – neurally, analytically, bodies, minds, psyche, senses, every form of intelligence activated – is referred to as blooded thought.

When in 1926 Leopold Jessner (1878–1945) staged Hamlet at the Prussian State Theatre in Berlin, the production created a major scandal. This uproar was not only related to aesthetic matters but also to the discourse of national identity. With reference to Marvin Carlson's concept of the ‘haunted stage’ the article examines the traces of this scandal in the genealogy of Hamlet on the German stage and its intersection with the politics of national identity. These traces indicate that German productions of Hamlet have always been determined by an implicit politics of exclusion. Jessner's production, by contrast, offered a radical re-reading of Hamlet, aiming to adapt it for the, then newly democratized society. The rejection of this adaptation by major parts of the audience, thus revealed the still powerful and active anti-democratic forces in the Weimar Republic.