Historicising production studies: Teliesyn’s second stage through the lenses of Cottle, Bourdieu and Berne

Pressures on NHS Wales means that we need to adopt new ways of providing high standards of care using available resources. One method is to work closely with patients by collecting Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) and Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs). It is hoped that collecting such data will help achieve prudent healthcare. This article provides an overview of the development of the first national collection system in Wales. Over 3 years the system has collected 66,000 PROMs and PREMs from 25,000 patients, and early uses of this data have shown the potential to improve services. The long-term aim is to make such data collection a routine part of secondary care in Wales.

The use of verbs of motion to express futurity is recognized cross-linguistically as an example of grammaticalization, whereby a construction changes over time to be less concrete and more grammatical. A number of historical and contemporary Welsh corpora are qualitatively analysed in order to identify the diachronic development of ‘mynd i’ (going to) to express the future in Welsh. Some examples of the grammaticalized form of ‘mynd i’ are found in texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, indicating that the grammaticalization process started at least 500 years ago, but the construction does not become prominent until the twentieth century. It is argued that this is an example of the influence of English grammar, where ‘BE + going to’ has also historically gone through a process of grammaticalization, and that an increase in bilingualism in Wales in the twentieth century has been a factor in normalising the grammaticalized form. A discussion is provided of how the situation of this Welsh construction informs our knowledge of the effect of language contact on grammaticalization.

This article seeks to interrogate the ways in which the citizens of Wales use the theatrical resources at their disposal to investigate and articulate their national identities and experiences. The discussion will take a recent co-production, entitled Sisters, between National Theatre Wales and Junoon Theatre Mumbai as its starting point. Sisters stimulates discussion of new ways of creating and participating in theatre that respond creatively to the challenges of a twenty-first century global, digital and post-consumerist society. In discussion, this article will use Johannes Birringer’s uncompromising vision of theatre as a transformative activity that focuses on patterns of collaboration between unfamiliar and unrooted individuals, as a measuring yard for the success and significance of Sisters. I will also argue that the social conditions that inspired Birringer’s vision also give fresh importance to Amelia Jones’s argument about the value of responding to a production or performance by means of secondary evidence, or ‘detritus’, as described by Mathew Reason.