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.

Using the interactive storytelling tool Twine, Megan Vaughan brings recent performances, public space and spaces of encounter into conversation.

‘Listening Post’ is a curated collection of artistic projects and critical reflections that offer insight into the performance of the vox populi, the ‘voice of the people’.

David Greig: Dramaturgies of Encounter and Engagement, edited by Jacqueline Bolton
This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review focuses on the work of contemporary Scottish playwright David Greig.  The issue emerges from a symposium held around the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and addresses issues of national identity and globalization, utopianism and dissensus, and political engagement and participatory practice.

This issue of Interventions accompanies a special issue of the journal dedicated to the contemporary Scottish playwright and theatre director David Greig.

In this excerpt from a live conversation, Dan Rebellato talks with David Greig about what it’s like to have his work critically analysed and the playwright’s process of writing The Events (2013).

Victoria E. Price offers reflections on the 2015 production of Lanark: A Life in Three Acts, Greig’s adaptation of the 1981 Alasdair Gray novel of postmodern Scottish identity.

Welcome To The Fringe, a collaboration between David Greig, Forest Fringe, and London’s Gate Theatre, supported Palestinian artists in visiting and presenting at the 2015 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

‘Butterfly Mind’, a performance-text adapted especially for the web, recreates David Greig’s journey on what he calls ‘an adventure in contemporary shamanic soul retrieval’.

This second collection of hand-picked articles from Contemporary Theatre Review‘s archives celebrates the journal’s 25^th anniversary year.  These articles will be freely available for the next six months, until June 2016.

From a close reading of a recent playscript to an analysis of interventions in spectator relations, and from configurations of femininity in Japanese Butoh to the use of ‘play’ in the ceremonies of the Shona people of southern Africa, this latest journal reflects a breadth of contemporary theatre practices as well as a variety of scholarly modes of engagement with them.

In this cross-disciplinary forum, the research project and interactive performance World Factory, directed by Zoë Svendsen, is discussed from multiple perspectives ranging from social geography to marketing.