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In the course of his career, James Macdonald has directed a vast array of plays and operas in London, New York, Vienna, and Berlin, but he is perhaps best known for the premiere productions of Sarah Kane's Blasted, Cleansed, and 4.48 Psychosis at the Royal Court Theatre, where he was an Associate Director from 1992 to 2006. His most recent work includes Peter Handke's The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other at the National Theatre and the Broadway revival of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. Macdonald met with R. Darren Gobert in London on 23 January 2006 to discuss the challenges of working with spare, difficult plays such as Kane's, Churchill's A Number, and Martin Crimp's Fewer Emergencies. R. Darren Gobert wishes to thank Annabel Rutherford for transcribing the conversation and, for their funding, the Faculty of Arts Committee on Research, Grants, and Scholarships at York University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the afterlife of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, this article focuses on the coterie of his primary admirers, the St Petersburg aesthetes of the World of Art group led by Sergei Diaghilev, and the circulation of Beardsley's images through the World of Art's journal Mir iskusstva. After tracing how this network acquired their initial knowledge of Beardsley, the article unpacks selective strategies and ideological choices which underpinned his representation to Russian audiences. Entrenched in the topical debates of Russian fin de siècle about national identity and cosmopolitanism, Beardsley's circulation was fashioned into a signifier of the latter. The article finds that it was the neo-rococo phase of Beardsley's work that tapped into the World of Art's vision of modernity and the group's promotion of the international Rococo Revival, which was, in its turn, tied to their reinvention of the eighteenth-century Russian cultural tradition. By examining how the group's designers, in particular, Leon Bakst, adopted Beardsley's technique, the article also shows that his stylised graphic language was uniquely suited to facilitate the traversal of boundaries between art forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the periodicals "Brolga," "Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research" and "Dance Research Journal."