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What, when it comes down to it, is a ‘conscience’? Is it a secretion of neurons inconveniently housed in the brain, and, historically speaking, peculiarly prominent in the Protestant brain? Is it our way of measuring internally what we actually are against what, but for that rash moment, we might have been? Or is it, for dramatic purposes, a disused mine-shaft, a red barn, an iron chest? This essay explores the matter of the Victorian conscience and its uncertain relationship with the consciousness of guilt.

What follows is not really a note or a query. Nor is it, strictly speaking, a review, although it has been provoked by the shock of an encounter with an extraordinary book. Donna West’s Signs of Hope: Deafhearing Family Life (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) is the expression in book form of a practice-as-research doctorate. West’s home base was the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol, but Signs of Hope speaks to students and teachers of ‘applied drama’, as well as to anyone brave enough to embark on a practice-based PhD in a performance discipline.

This is a response to a performance of David Eldridge's In Basildon at the Royal Court on 14 March 2012. It is a play insistently located in Essex. But what is Essex?

What follows is, in effect, a plea that university lecturers should question the value of competition as a route to success. Most of it consists of a paper I wrote for Drama colleagues at Exeter in July 2010. That paper was my response to an admonitory e-mail from the Dean of the College of Humanities after I had expressed my disagreement with Exeter University's positioning itself as a competitor with other universities. If that is how we view colleagues located elsewhere, I had written, ‘I hope we lose’. No, wrote the Dean, we must strive to win.

Taking its cue from Pinter's decision to name the four characters in No Man's Land after four famous cricketers of the Edwardian era, this article offers two contrasting explanations for his choice. The first, that the arbitrariness of the names was Pinter's coded admission that, having nothing new to say in the play, he was set on little more than fulfilling his commission from the National Theatre; the second, that, given his known love of cricket, his choice of names for his characters merits serious consideration. The article concludes with a speculation on the significance of alcohol in the play.

This article has its origin in the author's work on the staging of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century jigs. It offers comments on the nature of jigs, summarises their theatrical history and its afterlife and reflects on the problem of reviving them in the twenty-first century.

The article reviews the aesthetic priorities of the collaboration between Kurt Weill, Caspar Neher and Bertolt Brecht (composer, designer and poet/playwright) during the years from 1927 to 1932. Variously committed to challenging the Wagnerian urge to harmonize diversity, the three men shared an ambition to create a new kind of music theatre. Even when the relationship between Brecht and Weill became too strained, Weill and Neher collaborated on the neglected ‘epic opera’ Die Burgschaft, which is treated here. The article concludes with a review of the collaborators' understanding of the complex notion of Gestus.

Whilst there is no denying the tendency, common to actors and audiences in the twentieth century, to focus on character as the main prop of Shakespearean performance, this essay is concerned to question the historical justification for such a focus. Psychology was in its infancy at the end of the sixteenth century, and the word ‘character’ was generally confined to the vocabulary of calligraphers and printers. Hard-pressed professional actors, straining to commit a sequence of parts to memory, were better served by understanding the ‘purpose’ than what we might now call the ‘character’ of a role. It is the crossing of purposes, not the clashing of subjectivities, that drives Elizabethan drama, and it was only the exceptional actor (Edward Alleyn or Richard Burbage, say), who could seem—presumably by sheer force of personality—to control the narrative. ‘Temperament’ is a safer word than ‘character’ if we are to come to an understanding of the Elizabethan actor. Even so, there is a discernible devel...

(1995). Reflections on Quality Assessment. Studies in Theatre Production: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 137-141.

This query concerns Hieronimo's distribution of ‘abstracts’ to the amateur actors about to perform ‘his’ play in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. What did these abstracts contain?