Performers in the second half of this century face an intensified confontation with physical expression in theatre. The question of how, or even whether, movement can express the ‘inner life’ of an actor/character is always present in the work of groups or individuals who wish to design innovative and physicalized performances.

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 the Prague semiotician Jiri Veltrusky maintains that ‘in theater, the linguistic sign system, which intervenes through the dramatic text, always combines and conflicts with acting, which belongs to an entirely different sign system’, he makes explicit a commonplace premise: that the performance and the play constitute two distinct and parallel sign systems. This premise underlies the standard distinction between the dramatic text and the performance text, and forms the basis of what I will call the ‘two-text’ model of the play/performance relationship. The difference between a play and its performance is a difference between the ‘languages’ in which the two ‘texts’ are ‘written’: a play is a text constructed of linguistic signs, and a performance, a text constructed of theatrical signs.

Faber gave revealing service to Steven Berkoff by issuing simultaneously two volumes, Collected Plays Volume One (East; West; Greek; Sink the Belgrano; Massage and Lunch) and Volume Two (Decadence; Kvetch; Acapulco; Harry's Christmas; Brighton Beach Scumbags; Dahling You Were Marvellous; Dog/Pitbull; Actor), priced at £9.99 each. This supplanted the earlier Faber Berkoff collection, Decadence and Other Plays (including East and West), which I lament, in that it united some of his best writing in a single volume priced at less than ten pounds, such as I felt assured in requiring my students to buy for a single week's detailed work. These volumes contain more variable material at a higher price; Volume One is the stronger, but if I set it, I expect justifiable economic complaint. With the British student grant being eroded systematically in terms of real economic worth, this provides occasion for my suspicion that if playtexts cost less, students would buy more of them, creating in turn a more theatrically and socially informed, literate and inquisitive public readership of playtexts, rather than a readership confined to economically safe, carefully predetermined limitations. Speaking of predetermined limitations, some of these presented themselves to me strikingly in a survey of Berkoff's work which seemed exhaustive to the point of repetition. The central image of Dog/Pitbull—a sketch of a ‘repulsively attractive’ man and his pet, ‘amplification of his own insane and undirected energy’—seemed the kernel of both volumes’ content.

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.