The research collective After Performance explores how vulnerability might productively work against the norm of ‘lonely scholarship’.

Daniel Oliver and Luke Ferris’ video on/of ‘dyspraxic collaboration’ unapologetically performs the generative possibilities of ‘inattentivity’.

Special Issue: Theatre, Performance, and the Amateur Turn
Edited by Nadine Holdsworth, Jane Milling & Helen Nicholson
This special issue brings together research that examines amateurism as a cultural practice and as an aesthetic strategy, engaging with questions of shared experiences and sociability; everyday creativity; practical tools, skills, and volunteer labour; cultural legitimacy and value; and amateurism as a contested site of failure.

This issue of Interventions extends some of the ideas and practices behind this quarter’s special issue on ‘Theatre, Performance and the Amateur Turn’.

‘Evocative Objects’ collects the stories and memories behind objects brought by amateur theatre-makers to research workshops.

Nadine Holdsworth interviews 81-year-old Arthur Aldridge about a career that has moved between amateur theatre and the West End.

This slideshow of archival and contemporary images offers a guided tour of amateur theatre in the Royal Navy.

Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research, Molly Flynn reflects on the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages initiative that involved over 300 amateur theatre companies.

Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal that engages with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.

PA Skantze and Laure Fernandez reflect on the modes of permissibility and allowance that attend their movements across national borders, and how these affect their work and lives.

Emma Cox inverts the liberal terms of the editors’ provocation to construct a powerful response to recent European referenda and increasing cultural permissions of exclusion.

Olive McKeon looks at two specific examples where permission is negotiated in real time, among physical bodies: one in a theatre space, and one in a street protest.

Owen G. Parry reflects intimately on the process of writing about his own one-to-one practice and the stakes of spaces of permissibility in performance.

Special Issue: Simon Stephens: British Playwright in Dialogue with Europe, edited by David Barnett
This latest issue of Contemporary Theatre Review collects critical perspectives on the work of contemporary playwright Simon Stephens, with particular focus on his collaborative relationships with directors and the productive exchange between British and European theatre-making practices.

Louise LePage uses video as critical medium, assembling a cast of scholars to respond to Billy Smart’s provocation regarding ‘things that always tend to happen in Simon Stephens’ plays’.

Melissa Poll uses this online forum to argue that many criticisms of Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, including the main articles in this special issue, avoid grappling with its ‘modern misogyny’.

Reflecting on her staging of Stephens’ Harper Regan in the United States, Gaye Taylor Upchurch asks: ‘why is a woman with agency still such a scary notion?’

Walter Meierjohann discusses his production of Stephens’ The Funfair for the opening season at HOME, Manchester, in light of nationalist resurgence in the UK.

Read the latest issue of this international peer-reviewed journal, engaging with the crucial issues and innovations in theatre today. Each issue includes in-depth articles addressing a range of topics and forms, reflections on the creative process collected in the Documents section, book reviews, and Backpages, a forum for immediate responses to current events from scholars and practitioners.

In ‘Postmedia Performance’ Sarah Bay-Cheng offers theatre and performance scholarship a provocation to rethink its approach to making sense of the digital.