This collection of interviews of actors who have played ‘real people’ on stage and screen, edited by Tom Cantrell and Mary Luckhurst, comes out of some preliminary research for a larger project which Luckhurst is currently undertaking. One feels that, keeping in mind a continuing public interest in actors and acting, the opportunity to present the words of internationally known actors such as Ian McKellen, Simon Callow and Jeremy Irons, was a publishing opportunity too good to miss and, as such, this book should find its audience amongst a general readership and undergraduate students. Cantrell and Luckhurst, perhaps in deference to their ongoing work, have allowed this collection to wear its theory lightly choosing instead to ‘let the interviews stand because we would have needed to conduct many more interviews to make informed theoretical assertions’. Nonetheless, they do use three rubrics to organise their approach to the subject – “Researching the part”, “Acting strategies” and “Performer and audience” – and these underpin the questions they ask.

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In Performance in Place of War, Jamal Al-Rozzi, director of the Theatre For Everybody in Gaza, is quoted as saying that the formation of his company ‘was the best thing to do at the right time’. The same could be said for the production of the book itself. Written by James Thompson, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour, Performance in Place of War is a long overdue addition to the well-stocked library of war books available on witnessing, pro- or anti-war literature on theatre, performance as propaganda, and plays written about war and wartime. There is often a perception that as war begins creativity ceases; this publication proves that wrong and offers a new response to the often contentious topic of producing performance on, in or around war. As the authors write, ‘The book understands how theatre makes war (its inflammatory potential) and unmakes war (its ameliorative potential)’. It looks into both professional and non-professional performance and theatre practices in places of conflict from different countries and situations.

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In her seminal essay, ‘Bodies of Evidence,’ Carol Martin defines documentary theatre as ‘created from a specific body of archived material: interviews, documents, hearings, records, video, film, photographs, etc’ (2006: 9). In other words, documentary theatre both depends on and depicts history, or at least history as it has been recorded in the archive. Yet in depicting history, documentary theatre inevitably alters and augments it and Martin identifies four historical functions for the form: (1) ‘to reopen trials’; (2) ‘to create additional historical accounts’; (3) ‘to reconstruct an event’; and (4) ‘to intermingle autobiography with history’ (12-13). In addition, she also identifies two representational tasks for the genre, namely ‘to critique the operation of both documentary and fiction’ and ‘to elaborate an oral culture of theatre’ (13). In short, documentary theatre interrogates the relationship between reality and representation through a combination of repetition (by retelling, reconstructing, re-enacting) and addition (by including formerly excluded stories, incorporating not only the archive but also the repertoire). For Martin, as for many, it is these paradoxical pairings of the actual and the fictional, the real and the representational, the personal and the political, that makes documentary theatre so complex and compelling.

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In a student unit-of-study-experience questionnaire some years ago, in response to my introductory course in performance studies, a student remarked that the course’s focus upon the origins of the discipline itself was, in her words, ‘singular’ in her experience. Leaving aside the scope of her experience (which I am unable to assess), this student’s take on the syllabus gave me pause. The material to which he or she was responding included a review of Richard Schechner’s work with Victor Turner, framing a broader inquiry into the chiasmatic twining of anthropology and theatre studies, that being the fundamental interdisciplinary underpinning of Performance Studies as we teach it at my particular university.

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Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders, edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, is the first English-language collection of essays about this extraordinary German artist. As Forrest and Scheer suggest in their introduction, ‘access to Schlingensief’s highly challenging productions has been hampered by the fact that very little has been published on his oeuvre in the English-speaking world’. This collection aims to introduce English-speaking artists, scholars and academics to Schlingensief’s extensive, experimental, and at times highly controversial body of work across film, theatre, television, live art and activism.

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On the occasion of watching “In the Public Domain,”September 2010, by the QL2 Center for Youth Dance, ‘performed live on locations throughout the NewActon precinct, these performances are the result of a four-week process entitled “Soft Landing 2″, which aimed at enhancing the skills and experience of recent graduates from Australia’s finest tertiary dance training institutions.’Acton is a district of Canberra, a city planned by the Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin. Names suggested for this created capital city of Australia included Olympus, Shakespeare, Kangaremu, Sydmeladperho and Captain Cook. The Bogong moth was a staple food at the heart of cave festivities by local Aboriginal peoples, festivities now part of the Mungabareena Ngan-Girra Festival. The moths can be seen encrusting crevices of Canberra’s public buildings in the spring time.

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This article uses an investigation of the Chubbuck Technique of actor training as a springboard to argue that happiness in performance is in fact an article of performance. It is not an end product, a static image; it is an ongoing action. I begin with an introduction to Chubbuck’s Technique that proposes the notion of struggle and conflict as areas of audience and performer interest and fulfillment. This is followed by a consideration of the idea that happiness is a by-product of the process of action-toward-goal. I argue that the concept of action-toward-goal relates to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, specifically in his discussion of the role of embodiment in creating meaning, and in the way his Fundiering model posits communication in a linear temporal sense as both sedimenting and expanding meaning within a community. I draw parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and Stanislavsky’s System, and link these to Chubbuck’s use of Stanislavsky’s linear narrative model, where scene breakdowns create a narrative structure for the character in a piece. Whilst defining Chubbuck’s Technique in terms of its contextual particularity, I then argue that the through-line of contemporary performance involves the sense of happiness as an ongoing action; happiness occurs in the struggle to avoid unhappiness, rather than in the ecstatic release of attained goal. Happiness is an active state in performance, for both audience and performer. It is not static.

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‘It is so often the case that happiness, which ought to be our most precious objective, is considered by most adults as an adolescent dream.’ Luce Irigaray

My sister Sandra’s face had changed, but yesterday when she smiled she was again the girl I used to hold down on grassy ground and tickle, she was the young woman working hard at her factory job and who would fall in love with a young soldier on leave, she was the mother of three children and the woman now retired who adores fishing. My sister Sandra smiled when I came to visit.

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Martha Nussbaum argues that to develop or engender a culture of ‘respectful compassion’ we need to take care to instil an ‘education in common human weakness and vulnerability’ in every child. She maintains that childhood should be a space in which children ‘learn to be tragic spectators and to understand with subtlety and responsiveness the predicaments to which human life is prone’ (2003: 24). Taking Nussbaum’s argument as a point of departure I want to explore in this paper whether the desire to develop, engender or indeed participate in this kind of culture still holds relevance in the current highly technologised western world. Do we still care about ‘common weakness and vulnerability’ or has our ability to respond to the pain and suffering of others become compromised by the fact that we are continually bombarded with information and that the moral frameworks of old (of say religion, or a coherent government perhaps) no longer hold as steadfastly as they once did for many western subjects? And given the focus on consumption and exchange that operates in this society of individuals, is it our level of participation in this economy that denotes our level of happiness?

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To have a name is to be guilty. And justice like magic is nameless. Happy and without a name, the creature knocks at the land of the magi who speak in gestures alone. (Giorgio Agamben, 2007: 22)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his text Profanations relates happiness to magic. Commenting on Walter Benjamin’s claim that ‘a child’s first experience of the world is not his realisation that ‘adults are stronger but rather that he cannot make magic,’ Agamben concludes that ‘whatever we can achieve through merit and effort cannot make us truly happy’ (2007: 19). The philosopher explains the connection he sees between happiness and magic via Kafka’s words, namely ‘that there is plenty of hope - but not for us’. I would argue that it is because of this intriguing relationship between happiness and hope that Agamben claims that happiness ‘awaits us only at the point where it was not destined for us’, that in other words, we experience happiness only when we feel that we are capable of magic (2007: 21). Insofar as we ‘keep the genie in the bottle to [our] side’ we will be worthy of happiness. It is only when we know the magic words that we will gain the much-desired happiness. Happiness, thus, when understood within these coordinates, can never be something we deserve. As Agamben puts it: ‘what a disaster if a woman loved you because you deserved it’.

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