A short film by Laura Bissell and David Overend on theatre, performance, and the Scottish Referendum, featuring interviews with Christine Hamilton and Scottish theatre-makers.

The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing, guest-edited by Maria M. Delgado & Joanne Tompkins
This special issue brings together 33 short essays offering critical reflections and commentaries on the myriad practices, problems and provocations of editing. It is a conversation about how – as editors in formal and informal capacities – we write, how we curate, how we fashion and formulate, how we shape and feedback, and the changes and challenges that the digital era has introduced.

Various participants reflect on a recent ‘edit-a-thon’ that sought to redress the invisibility of feminist Live Art practices within Wikipedia.

This forum, curated by Charlotte Bell, offers five different views from postgraduates and early-career researchers on the shifting landscape of academic publishing.

NOTA, a collection of unedited responses produced and ‘archived’ in real-time, collapses the distance between performance and critical response.

‘So what is Performance if it includes this?’ asks Yelena Gluzman, editor of the deliberately non-selective compendium Emergency Index.

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of Contemporary Theatre Review, the current editors have hand-picked a selection of articles from the archive that reflect something of the breadth and distinctive character of the journal.  The articles will be freely available until the end of 2015, and are introduced by the members of the editorial team.

A Controversial Company: Debating the Casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, edited by Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe. The storm surrounding the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) 2012-13 production of The Orphan of Zhao brought to the fore issues of racial-ethnic theatrical representation in casting. This Special Issue brings together material from all sides of the debate, from the RSC and British East Asian (BEA) actors, from practitioners and academics, to offer a series of documents on what could become a decisive, and positive, moment in the history of BEA performance in Britain.

Amanda Rogers and Ashley Thorpe, co-editors of the special issue debating the casting of the RSC’s The Orphan of Zhao, introduce the online features that accompany the print issue.

In ‘Orphan à la Crouching Tiger‘, Daphne Lei reports on a production of The Orphan of Zhao in La Jolla, California, featuring an all-Asian American cast.

To accompany his analysis of why the casting of The Orphan of Zhao became so contested, Ashley Thorpe provides a critique of the marketing of the RSC production.

Watch a video of Anna Chen performing her poem Yellowface, which satirises and reappropriates this practice of racial stereotyping.

This specially commissioned video, The Orphan of Zhao Redux, features an all-British East Asian cast, performing a hybrid text edited and compiled by Daniel York.

As with a previous forum on theatre-maker Tim Crouch, this special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on a single writer, contemporary British playwright Martin Crimp. Titled ‘Dealing with Martin Crimp’, this issue documents and expands on a conference held at the Royal Court in 2013. As the articles in this issue address, the source of Crimp’s originality is composed of a variety of factors: distinctive writing strategies that continue to be refined, an understanding of internationalism but also of distinct cultural sensibilities, and the value of collaboration across a diverse range of genres and media.

Alongside our special issue on ‘Dealing with Martin Crimp’, these online Interventions complement and extend the discussion in the print journal.

Dan Rebellato teases apart the reputation for realism at the Royal Court, where many of Crimp’s plays have premiered.

Methodologies for our discipline continue to expand to recognise the cross-cultural currents that shape much scholarship across the live art, performance and theatre boundaries. As such, the articles that constitute this issue similarly demonstrate a breadth of methodologies used in contemporary theatre, performance and live art studies, through: close readings of a production from first-person viewing; study of play texts and their reception histories; cultural materialist analysis of venues and urban settings; and interdisciplinary analysis drawing particularly on the history of art (and particularly of photography).

This new website provides a gateway to Contemporary Theatre Review, as well as online Interventions that add to and complement the themes and topics of the journal.

Geraldine Harris, whose discussion of ‘post-post-feminism’ appears in the latest print issue, comments here on the proliferation of online parodies of Robin Thicke’s controversial ‘Blurred Lines’.