Theatre scholarship is only just beginning to respond to the insights and emphases suggested by feminist criticism. In this introductory article to what we intend to be a strong and continuing thread in NTQ, Susan Bassnett outlines the resulting problems, and explores the historical context and conditions in terms of one central issue – the role of women as performers (and non-performers) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also examines some of the wider implications for theatre studies, affected as these also are by new historicist approaches to the study of cultural change. Susan Bassnett teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory in the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly and other journals, notably in the field of Italian theatre. Her most recent books include a feminist study of Elizabeth I, and (in collaboration with John Stokes and Michael Booth) Bernhardt. Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time.

On 7 May 1988 a meeting was held at Goldsmiths' College, London, involving a number of theatre practitioners and academics on the left, to discuss the current state of British theatre under Thatcherism and suggest some possible responses. The meeting was organized by Vera Gottlieb, and NTQ Editor Simon Trussler, who both teach in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths' College. Also present were Clive Barker, Pam Brighton, Colin Chambers, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Holland, Kate Harwood, Albert Hunt, Nesta Jones, John McGrath, Paul Moriarty, Rob Ritchie, and Juliet Stevenson. Apologies for absence were received from Caryl Churchill, Tilda Swinton, and Clare Venables. This abbreviated transcript was edited by Andy Lavender.

The First International Women Playwrights Conference took place in Buffalo, New York, from 14 to 23 October 1988. It was attended by over 200 playwrights (and a few non-playwrights) from 34 countries. That number included many eminent women – Renée (New Zealand), Alice Childress (USA), Bai Fengxi (China), Miriam Kainy (Israel), Zulu Sofola (Nigeria), Somalatha Subasinghe (Sri Lanka), Iren Kiss (Hungary) – plus women (mostly, because of the cost, American) whose plays are as yet unproduced or who are beginning to write. Much of the focus was on how much theatre work is being written by women, but which meets with obstructions to performance.

‘Jagran’ means ‘awakening’ – as Aloke Roy, the director of this Delhi-based company points out, a more immediate term for most of his marginalized Indian audiences than ‘consciousness-raising’. In a multilingual society. Roy also found in mime a more immediately expressive means of theatrical communication for the street-corners and other sites of urban dereliction where his company typically performs its fifteen to forty-minute pieces, each of which focuses upon a particular social issue or contemporary problem. Parminder Kaur Bakshi, of the University of Warwick, recently visited the company in Delhi and experienced their work, which she here introduces before discussing with Aloke Roy the origins, development, and techniques of the group. Outline scenarios of a selection of the Jagran pantomimes accompany the feature.

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.

NTQ has given considerable coverage to forms of popular theatre for conscientization and development in the so-called Third World. By contrast with such community-oriented, audience-involving activities, is there a function for conventional ‘literary’ drama, on the western model, which can probably only reach relatively comfortable and literate middle-class audiences? Tunde Lakoju examines two such plays – I Will Marry When I Want by the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo (London: Heinemann, 1982), and The Trials of Brother Jero by the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka (Oxford University Press, 1964) – in terms of their success in measuring up to the needs they identify: and he considers, too, how those ‘needs’ may be variously assessed by theoretical and practical criteria. Tunde Lakoju is Senior Lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in his native Nigeria, having been awarded his doctoral degree from the University of Wales. His own play, The Last Saturday, has been broadcast in the BBC's African Theatre series.

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.

The ‘theatre of the world’, or Theatrum Mundi, offered a pervasive emblematic view of the relationship between God, as playwright and audience, and his terrestrial creation. Although this became peculiarly appropriate during the Renaissance period, views of the theatre as microcosmic of the larger world have persisted – whether in the consciously wrought imagery of modern sociology or the unconscious colloquial useage of theatrical terms to describe everyday behaviour. In the article which follows, David E. R. George suggests that the ‘view’ of the subatomic world presented by quantum theory makes for a paradigm which is no less compelling, according to which the sense of theatrical ‘potentiality’ which characterizen much contemporary experimental theatre is illuminated and paralleled by the refusal of scientific certainty that quantum theory confronts and accommodates. David George. whose ‘Letter to a Poor Actor’ appeared in NTQ 8 (1986), taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Gottingen, Malaysia, and Peking before taking up his present post at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His books include studies of Ibsen. German tragic theory, and Indian ritual dance–drama.

In the first part of this three-part series. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacement of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. Here, she examines in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which have an existing sociological literature – looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters from Duvignaud onwards and (perhaps more pertinently) backwards, to Gramsci and Brecht. She then considers approaches to dramatic texts and genres, especially as exemplified in the explication of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Finally, she explores the implications and assumptions of the relatively new discipline of ‘theatrical anthropology’, in which theatre is taken to be the prototype of society. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International, and Theatre Papers, as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.