From May 15 to 19, 2014, the symposium, “Theatre as a Laboratory for Community Interaction” convened in Holstebro, Denmark at Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret (founded in 1964 in Oslo, Norway) by the theatre’s […]

The British theatre has always derived enormous, even savage pleasure from depicting the antics of its social misfits, eccentrics, and manipulators. Two recent productions, one Jacobean and the other contemporary, […]

Pornography, perhaps the best known novel by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, has been freed from the pages of the book and has been “re-written” for one of the most famous Italian stages, thanks to an e […]

During a week’s visit to Madrid in the fall of 2014, I saw six productions. All but one of these was in the little auditorium of a larger playhouse, in a new alternative theatre, or in a cultural center. Except f […]

Luc Bondy and Ödön von Horváth

It is 1918. No less than 7,000,000 (two thirds) of the 11,000,000 Germans conscripted to fight in the “Great War”—could there be a more inappropriate epithet?—are dead, wounded, […]

One of the nine performers belonging to the Mladinsko Theatre company from Slovenia stands on the empty stage facing the Romanian audience huddled in a small black box venue and tells us how the director of the […]

The English playwright Helen Edmundson’s play, The Clearing (1993), is set in County Kildare, Ireland, during the years 1652-1655, the period when the triumphant Cromwell launched a massive campaign of retaliation […]

At the time of writing, Spain’s principal gateway to the outside world is being expensively re-branded as the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid-Barajas Airport in honor of the recently-deceased ex-President, the first […]

The Avignon Festival has a new director and a new direction. Forty-nine year-old Olivier Py, former director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe, playwright, poet, director and novelist, is determined to build a […]

2013 was a year of protests in Bulgaria. The cold, dark, early days of the year brought about what was later called “hunger revolts” and “electricity bills revolts:” people went out on the streets because they […]

This past June, as the Flemish theatre season waned, I had a chance to see a few fascinating selections from this lively theatre community. In the wake of a momentous election which saw the rise of the Extreme […]

The Avignon Fringe Festival took place between the 5th and the 27th of July. If the Avignon Theatre Festival is one of the biggest of the world, it is due to the Fringe Festival. The dimensions of the Fringe […]

In the Northwest of Northern Ireland in the county of Fermanagh lies the small island town of Enniskillen. On a hill above the town is Portora Royal, a school chartered under Queen Elizabeth I, which Samuel […]