The film of F. R. Benson's company in scenes from Richard III, released in 1911 and now available on the BFI's Silent Shakespeare video, was shot on stage in Stratford-upon-Avon, using stock scenery from the Memorial Theatre. Because of this, it is a unique document of Shakespearean production in the period, exemplifying the uneasy relationship between stage and film. The settings can be documented from a number of other sources: the original designs; a photograph of the stage set with the medieval street which appears in two episodes; and a series of postcards – the latter apparently ‘production stills’ of the film. Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Julius Caesar were also filmed, but have not survived, though the Stratford archives contain some photographic evidence of them. Russell Jackson is Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham's graduate school of Shakespeare studies in Stratford-upon-Avon. Recently he has published a translation of a work by Theodor Fontane, Shakespeare in the London Theatre, 1855–58 (Society for Theatre Research, 1999), and he is editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film.

In what would a postmodern theatrum mundi, or ‘theatre of the world’, consist? In an ironic inversion of the very concept, with the microcosm issuing a unilateral declaration of independence – or of incorporation? Or in a neo-neoplatonic recognition that it is but a cultural construct of an outer world that is itself culturally constructed? In the following article, Baz Kershaw makes connections between the high-imperial Victorian love of glasshouses, which at once created and constrained their ‘theatre of nature’, and the massive 'nineties ecological experiment of ‘Biosphere II’ – ‘a gigantic glass ark the size of an aircraft hangar situated in the Southern Arizona desert’, which embraces all the main types of terrain in the global eco-system. In the Biosphere's ambiguous position between deeply serious scientific experiment and commodified theme park, Kershaw sees an hermetically-sealed system analogous to much contemporary theatre – whose intrinsic opacity is often further blurred by a theorizing no less reductive than that of the obsessive Victorian taxonomists. He offers not answers, but ‘meditations’ on the problem of creating an ecologically meaningful theatre. Baz Kershaw, currently Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol, originally trained and worked as a design engineer. He has had extensive experience as a director and writer in radical theatre, including productions at the Drury Lane Arts Lab and as co-director of Medium Fair, the first mobile rural community arts group, and of the reminiscence theatre company Fair Old Times. He is the author of The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992) and The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (Routledge, 1999), and co-author of Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (Methuen, 1990).

In the first of two essays employing academic discourses of cultural exchange to examine the intra-cultural situation in contemporary British society, published in NTQ 61, Barnaby King analyzed the relationship between Asian arts and mainstream arts in Britain on both a professional and a community level. In this second essay he takes a similar approach towards African–Caribbean theatre in Britain, comparing the Black theatre initiatives of the regional theatres with the experiences of theatre workers themselves based in Black communities. He shows how work which relates to a specific ‘other’ culture has to struggle to get funding, while work which brings Black Arts into a mainstream ‘multicultural’ programme has fewer problems. In the process, he specifically qualifies the claim that the West Yorkshire Playhouse provides for Black communities as well as many others, while exploring the alternative, community-based projects of ‘Culturebox’, based in the deprived Chapeltown district of Leeds. Barnaby King is a theatre practitioner based in Leeds, who completed his postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds Workshop Theatre in 1998. He is now working with theatre companies and small-scale venues – currently the Blah Blah Blah company and the Studio Theatre at Leeds Metropolitan University – to develop community participation in

In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the city's growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.

In Zimbabwean society, what may not be spoken sometimes becomes acceptable in song – whether to avoid social taboos and enable a wife to complain against her mother-in-law, or in broadening the boundaries of political protest. In this article, Martin Rohmer looks back to the ways in which song enabled forms of protest against forced labour and other aspects of colonial rule – in times of outward compliance as well as of direct struggle – and considers how urban theatre groups in independent Zimbabwe have adapted the tradition to their own, contemporary ends. Martin Rohmer spent almost two years studying Zimbabwean theatre when a research assistant at the University of Bayreuth, and completed his doctorate on Theatre and Performance in Zimbabwe at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1997. Since then he has been working in the field of cultural management for the Young Artists' Festival in Bayreuth. The present paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in San Francisco in November 1996.

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.

At the cusp of the ‘eighties and ’nineties, theatre in what was soon to become the Slovak Republic had to come to terms not only with the disintegration of the communist system, but with the break-up of the former Czechoslovakia into its constituent nations. During the previous decade, the theatre had in many ways helped to undermine the decaying authoritarian regime, but now many of its practitioners found themselves disaffected by the disappointment of early ideals, and their livelihoods threatened by the loss of state funding, which had at least acknowledged the importance of theatre to the nation's cultural prestige. In this article, the authors trace the distinguishing strands of the work of major directors and writers of both the older and the younger generations, and attempt to define the changing role of theatre – not forgetting the influence of the puppet theatre tradition – as the Slovak nation seeks a renewed vitality through reclaiming its cultural past while re-defining its present. Daniela Bacova teaches English literature and drama at the Department of English and American Studies in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, Slovakia, and is one of the editors of the journal Dedicated Space. Dagmar Institorisová works in the Institute of Literary Communication in the University of Constantine the Philosopher, and has just published her doctoral thesis on Variety of Expression in a Theatrical Work.

With hopes for a repeal of Clause 28 poised for imminent realization or disappointment, a successful European challenge to Britain's policy on gays and lesbians in the armed forces, and an overwhelming House of Commons vote to equalize the gay ‘age of consent’, gay issues are high in the public consciousness. But to what extent are these political events being reflected in contemporary theatre? In this article, Brian Roberts considers the fluctuations in gay visibility, and asks what happened to the gay theatre that sprang to prominence in the 'eighties. He situates the best of present gay theatre work as standing in a critically defining role to mainstream theatre culture, not only through its political conscientizing of ‘queer’ and theatricality, but also in its opposition to an assimilationist gay subculture. Brian Roberts lectures in Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is presently revising his book Artistic Bents: Gay Sensibility and Theatre for publication.

After fifteen years absence, Jerzy Grotowski returned to Wroclaw on 6 March 1997, for the presentation of an award for his contribution to Polish Culture made by the Cultural Foundation's chairman, Stefan Starczewski. Grotowski was accompanied by his protégé and collaborator, Thomas Richards, and went to great lengths to establish Richards's equal and often major contribution to the laboratory work at Pontedera in Italy, which they had been jointly leading since 1986. This work has eschewed publicity, has never sought an audience, and has only been witnessed by chosen groups of sympathetic experts, who have been felt necessary at times for its validation. Initiated and sustained because of the reputation which had accrued to Grotowski during the various phases of his earlier career, the danger was that it might cease to attract support on the demise of its principal validator – which, as one of Grotowski's replies at the Wroclaw meeting anticipated, sadly occurred last year. By acknowledging the functional and artistic importance of Thomas Richards, Grotowski here establishes the argument for his work – described in detail in Richards's own At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions (Routledge, 1995) – to be continued, as the status of the old master passes to the new. Joanna Ostrowska, who is currently working at the Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, here offers her own impressions of the Wroclaw meeting.