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 younger, more varied audience in terms of age, …

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 Festival …

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 could not afford to …

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 Beckett attended from 1920-23. …

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 Right, to …

Yaël Farber, director of the international hit, Mies Julie, and writer and director of the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award winning Nirbhaya, brought her vision to London’s Old Vic theatre for a highly anticipated production of Arthur …

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 piece we are …

There are many Daniel Veroneses. There is the Veronese offering intelligent, pared-down reimaginings of Chekhov—with Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and A Seagull refashioned as Un hombre que se ahoga (A Man Drowning), Espía a una mujer que se …

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 democratically-elected leader of the post-Franco period. This decision reveals the privileged …

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 against Irish Catholics and also those Protestant settlers who …

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, or missing. An air of helpless …