Editorial 31.4

Abstract

This issue of Contemporary Theatre Review is published at what many had hoped would be the tail-end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the moment of possibility for a kind of ‘return’ to what some might refer to as ‘normal’. Of course, the reality is that the pandemic is likely nowhere near its tailend, and for many, its reverberations continue to cause loss and devastation on a large scale, particularly in the global south. For theatre and performance, the knock-on effect of the pandemic is now at a new stage to some extent: across different parts of the globe, elements of the industry have rallied around to salvage as much from the threat of collapse as possible; theatres in some countries are re-opened and a new generation of works are in preparation; austere modes of production have been brought to the fore. Old ‘favourites’ have been re-launched in order to provide some reliable economic underpinning as compensation for the virtual halting of the theatre-making machine, now being re-booted. Many things in the field of theatre and performance have been changed by the pandemic, not least, many of the existing labour-force have been slow to return to theatre, having been thrown into unemployment overnight and finding, even during a pandemic, less precarious work elsewhere. Many have also used the time to think about what we do, how we do it and why, and whilst this is not a themed issue of the journal, there are shared currents across the articles around issues of new ways of approaching cultural production, new ways of validating labour, and new representations on stage. The pandemic has forced many of us to think differently about process and there is a great deal in this issue which concerns itself with the complexities of process as much as product. Whilst Dorota Semenowicz is concerned with the breaking of the fictional frame in theatre focusing on a performance set in a slaughterhouse, and the ensuing public outcry and withdrawal of funding the performance created, Olga Beloborodova and James Little re-examine the use of the disembodied voice in Samuel Beckett’s late plays in production. Here, the world on the stage is almost shrunk to the level of Beckett’s proposed ‘small world with its own laws’. In each article then the, at times, contentious relationship offered up and explored in performance between the fictional and the real is the direct focus of enquiry. With a socially oriented lens, Melissa Poll looks at questions and representations of indigeneity in Canadian performance through Contemporary Theatre Review, 2021 Vol. 31, No. 4, 387–389, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2021.1990471