First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Trained under Ekhof at Gotha, the German actor August Wilhelm Iffland began his professional career in 1779 at the Mannheim Court Theatre. He moved to Berlin to become director of the National Theatre in 1796, remaining there till his death in 1814. In between, he paid a guest visit to the Weimar Court Theatre, at the invitation of its presiding genius, Goethe. A local schoolmaster, Karl August Böttiger, published an account of several of his roles. This was, for its times, an evocative and unusually detailed record of performance style, and here George Brandt complements his analysis with extensive quotation. George Brandt, currently a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Bristol, joined the Drama Department there in 1951, served as its Head of Department over a number of years, and shaped much of its policy, creating among other things the first practical postgraduate film course at a British university. He edited British Television Drama (1981) and British Television Drama in the 1980s (1993) for Cambridge University Press. His German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848 (1993), with Wiebe Hogendoorn, was part of the CUP series ‘Theatre in Europe’, and Modern Theories of Drama was published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

The second conference called by the organizers of the ‘Practice as Research in Performance’ project (PARIP) was held from 11 to 14 September 2003 at the University of Bristol. PARIP is not an organization, but an AHRB-funded research project into the nature and academic implications of performance practice as research, in terms both of the discipline of Drama and Theatre Studies in the university, and the related issues of research assessment and funding. Its conferences aim to give academics in the field the opportunity to add their voices to the debate, and indeed to help shape its outcome. Bella Merlin, a Contributing Editor and Book Reviews Editor for NTQ, is author of Beyond Stanislavsky (Nick Hern Books, 2001). She attended the PARIP conference on the cusp of her personal decision to return to the acting profession from her post in the University of Birmingham, and as this issue goes to press is appearing in the Out of Joint production of David Hare's The Permanent Way. Here she combines a report on the conference with some personal reflections on practice, research, and practice as research.

Containing an Explanation, an (Undelivered) Funeral Oration, Divers Reminiscences, a Draft Treatment for a Docudrama (and Some Dialogue Therefrom), and Some Shandyan Digressions. When, back in 1972, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner– Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966) and Edna the Inebriate Woman (1972). The debate continues, but despite the critical esteem in which Sandford's work is held, the man himself became persona non grata on national television, and devoted himself to his many other concerns, notably the traditions and present treatment of the gypsy people. He died on 12 May 2003 – an apparent recluse, yet with websites devoted to hundreds of loving tributes from young and old alike. The leading historian of docudrame, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – here offers a tribute which refuses to fit a ‘proper’ academic format, and takes on something of the variegated style of Sandford's own work.

This essay, which is informed by the author's own practice as a playwright working in the medium of radio drama, looks at some effects of the enforced merger of radio with TV drama to create a ‘bi-media’ department at the BBC, and considers the evolution of commissioning policy since the imposition of the internal market under the Director Generalship of John Birt (from 1992 to 2000). Considering radio drama, after Adorno, as a producer in the culture industry, he suggests that the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, as described by Habermas, is a significant factor in understanding current commissioning practices and the dramaturgy of new realism in some radio drama. William Stanton is a Lecturer in Drama at Exeter University, where he teaches and researches writing for performance and intercultural performance practice through a research/practice link with the University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil, where he has an AHRB award for a new project in 2004. He is also a writer of fiction and plays for stage and radio. His most recent play for BBC Radio 4 was Dead Line in 2002, and his Route 23 is forthcoming.

Sarah Kane's notorious 1995 debut, Blasted, has been widely though belatedly recognized as a defining example of experiential or ‘in-yer-face’ theatre. However, Graham Saunders here argues that the best playwrights not only innovate in use of language and dramatic form, but also rewrite the classic plays of the past. He believes that too much stress has been placed on the play's radical structure and contemporary sensibility, with the effect of obscuring the influence of Shakespearean tradition on its genesis and content. He clarifies Kane's gradually dawning awareness of the influence of Shakespeare's King Lear on her work and how elements of that tragedy were rewritten in terms of dialogue, recast thematically, and reworked in terms of theatrical image. He sees Blasted as both a response to contemporary reality and an engagement with the history of drama. Graham Saunders is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and author of the first full-length study of Kane's work: ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester University Press, 2002). An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Crucible of Cultures: Anglophone Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium’ conference in Brussels, May 2001. Saunders is currently working on articles about Samuel Beckett and Edward Bond.

Since his account of the Birmingham Theatre Conference in NTQ51, Aleks Sierz has taken the temperature of British playwriting in articles about ‘Cool Britannia’ (NTQ56) – from which developed his influential book, In Yer Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001) – ‘Still In-Yer-Face? Towards a Critique and a Summation’ (NTQ69), and a report on the Bristol conference (NTQ73). At a time when more new writing is being staged than probably at any period of British theatre history, here he laments the insular social realism which once more characterizes English (as distinct from Irish, Scottish, and American) playwriting, however modishly its characters may now be drawn from the underclass rather than the upper; and he identifies a ‘hunger for ideas’ among British audiences which is ill-satisfied by the dystopian despair of many would-be political dramatists.

Report on the eleventh Havana International Theatre Festival, held from 18 to 28 September 2003.

Report on ‘Learning to Live’, an Intensive Actor Training Workshop for Central American actors, held in Costa Rica from 19 June to 10 July 2003.