Eugenio Barba founded Odin Teatret in 1964, since when it has become one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives of the past half-century, and Eugenio Barba one of the most influential figures in world theatre. The following is his speech of thanks to the members of the Academy of Music and Theatre of Estonia for bestowing the title of Doctor Honoris Causa. It was delivered in Tallinn on 27 September 2009.

There is no scholarly consensus about the precise meaning of the term ‘über-marionette’, as coined by Edward Gordon Craig. Is it a life-size marionette? A masked dancer? Or simply a metaphor for an actor who exerts perfect control over his body and emotions? The present article, based, among other sources, on recently discovered material in the Edward Gordon Craig Collection of the National Library of France, gives a brief overview of several perspectives regarding this issue before proposing another hypothesis – that the über-marionette may actually have been a full-body puppet. Patrick Le Bœuf is a library curator at the National Library of France, and was in charge of the Edward Gordon Craig Collection from 2006 to 2009.

The received wisdom has long been that Shakespeare's plays are best seen in theatres that resemble his own – and the assumption is usually that these should aim to simulate the actor–audience relationship of the Globe, with its galleries and thrust stage. Yet, as John Russell Brown argues here, that playhouse, fashioned hastily from the timbers of the Theatre, was becoming old-fashioned when it was constructed, and ‘Shakespeare's theatre’ – already also the halls of city companies and the court – was soon to become the Blackfriars, with its much lower capacity and end-on stage. These elements, he argues, with their more direct and intimate visual relationship with audiences, enabled spectators to pick up clues in the writing that are lost on a larger, three-sided stage. The most recent of John Russell Brown's many books are Shakespeare Dancing (Palgrave, 2005) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Directors' Shakespeare (2008). In 2007 he was appointed Visiting Professor at University College London.

In this article Adam J. Ledger reflects upon his recent experience of directing Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies. The play – a triptych comprising ‘Whole Blue Sky’, ‘Face to the Wall’, and ‘Fewer Emergencies’ – is one of a number that have been described as ‘open’, a term suggesting the absence of definitive meaning, defined characters, identifiable locale, or ‘traditional’ dramaturgy, a type of writing which has also been allied to the aesthetics of Lehmann's ‘postdramatic’. Without the ‘dramatic’, the actor may need alternative points of focus in the task of performance. In Fewer Emergencies, Crimp's stage directions also state ‘time: blank, place: blank’. What implications for acting might this provoke? Further, how can physicality be developed within such a relentlessly linguistic piece? After discussing particular rehearsal exercises, this article examines how the development of the performance moved closer to devising. However, despite the apparent openness of the text, Ledger suggests how Crimp resists ‘postdramatic’ labels and that his text can be seen as ‘closed’. Adam J. Ledger completed a PhD on rehearsal process and new work at Exeter in 2007, and is now a lecturer in drama and theatre practice at the University of Hull. He publishes on performance practice and has a particular interest in the Odin Teatret. He directs and leads projects both in the UK and abroad.

Site-specific performance relies on the terms space and place as markers for discussing a performance's engagement with a site. However, practitioners and researchers are often disgruntled by the limitations such terms impose upon site-specific performance – as was Melanie Kloetzel, in the creation of The Sanitastics, a site-specific dance film created in the Calgary Walkway System. In this article, Kloetzel examines how theorists have struggled with space and place in the last four decades and how bringing in the perspective of the body allows us to reassess our assumptions about these terms. As she analyzes her creative process, she discovers the restrictions as well as possibilities in space and place, but she also notes the need for Marc Augé's idea of non-place to clarify her site-specific efforts in the homogenized, corporate landscape of the Walkway System. Kloetzel is an associate professor at the University of Calgary and the artistic director of kloetzel&co, a dance company founded in New York City in 1997 that has presented work across North America. Her site-specific films have been shown in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces, was published by the University Press of Florida in 2009.

Sarah Daniels is a playwright who has been closely identified with feminist theatre throughout her career. In this article, Carina Bartleet examines Daniels's plays from the early work of the 1980s through to her more recent output by exploring lesbian representation. Emphasis is placed on lesbian/queer representations through renegotiation with feminist theatre and gendered spectatorship. The work argues that Daniels's oftcriticized reluctance to stage lesbian desire can be viewed as a continuation of her feminist intervention into the gendered construction of the gaze in mainstream theatre. Carina Bartleet is a Lecturer in Drama at Oxford Brookes University. She read Biological Sciences at Oxford University, taking her PhD in Drama at Exeter on the intertextual dimension of the plays of Sarah Daniels. Her interests are science, gender, and performance in contemporary theatre. She is currently working on a book on theatre and science, and has published articles in Modern Drama and Studies in Theatre and Performance.

Polish student theatre was a unique artistic movement in the Soviet post-war empire, with a liberty of expression unparalleled elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. As in every political system, in any country, its creators and its public were students and young intellectuals. These theatre-makers used the umbrella of the Polish Students' Union – a surprisingly democratic institution in a totalitarian political order – and all attempts at their repression were usually appeased by the activists of the student organization, often the friends and supporters of the theatre-makers. After the creation of the Socialist Union of Polish Students these activists became more dependent on the Communist Party, but the Party establishment decided, in the period of the ‘thaw’ (1954–57), that the student artistic movement would be maintained as a kind of artistic kindergarten for avant-gardists and supporters of artistic and political revolt, to let them manifest their beliefs within the well-guarded, limited territory of student cultural centres. However, the young rebels overcame these restrictions and created a focus of artistic opposition which had a wide social and artistic influence, especially during subsequent periods of political crisis. Juliusz Tyszka was himself an activist in the student theatre movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Now an NTQ advisory editor, he is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Paget's interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Reading's 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It, his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.