Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret, and more recently with the International School of Theatre Anthropology, has always been substantiated by a body of developed critical theory, and in NTQ he has specifically developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual. In NTQ1 (1985), he outlined the problems involved in analyzing theatre-works rooted in performance rather than the written word; in NTQ4 (1985) he discussed his concept of the ‘dilated body’, through which the performed taps the wellsprings of art and experience; and in NTQ16 (1988), he expanded his idea of the ‘body-in-life’, describing the balance of energies which is essential for the actor to be fully realized. Here, he looks at the way in which the body is falsely perceived as the ‘actor's instrument’, as somehow separate from himself, and discusses the processes of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ – which give the actor a true ‘second-nature’, and distinguish his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’.

Never mind the theory, face the facts: is there room in the American theatre for all the performers graduating as drama majors from American universities? Glenn Loney, who has himself been teaching drama since 1960 as well as writing widely on theatrical subjects, sketches in the background to the American system, looks at the limited horizons for the newly qualified actor, and suggests a shift in the aims and orientation of academic drama – and the expectations of those who pursue it.

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).

The Café-Concert as an object of study has tended to attract the interest of art rather than theatre historians, despite the fact that it was the major form of popular entertainment in France during the nineteenth century. Similar but not identical to the English music hall of the same period, the Café-Concert produced a number of stars of national importance, a large majority of whom were women. Through the writings of journalists and commentators of the period, this article explores how these female performers were perceived and constructed as objects of the public gaze. The author, Geraldine Harris, is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, with interests in both popular and feminist theatre.

Richard Schechner has recently come full circle back to the editorship of The Drama Review, which he earlier transformed from a quietly respected academic journal into the voice of American avant-garde theatre between 1962 and 1969. By this time, he had also joined the Drama faculty of New York University, where he still teaches, and created the Performance Group, for whom his productions included Dionysus in '69, Makbeth. The Tooth of Crime. Oedipus, and The Balcony. His early advocacy of environmental theatre, celebrated in his book of that name in 1973, developed into his present concern with theatre anthropology, the focus of his recent study. Between Theatre and Anthropology, discussed by Eugenio Barba in NTQ10 (1987). In October 1988 Schechner contributed to the Leicester conference ‘Points of Contact: Theatre. Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology’, and there Nick Kaye discussed with him the relationship between his practical and theoretical work, its evolution, and the influences upon it–also looking in more detail at his most recent production, a performance combining Don Juan and Don Giovanni.

The reception of most manifestations of Russian art and culture in Poland is linked inextricably with the political situation, and official and popular attitudes are often widely divergent. From the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to Warsaw in 1908, when most Poles boycotted the performances, through enthusiasm tempered by ignorance in the inter-war period, to the 'Stalinization' of Stanislavsky as official mediator of socialist realism in the late 'forties, Polish attitudes to the 'method' which was Stanislavsky's legacy are here examined by Juliusz Tyszka. Today, he concludes, Poles have largely consigned Stanislavsky to the lumber-room of history – though there are a few cautionary voices who urge his continuing relevance.

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.

In connection with the Eugene O'Neill centenary in 1988 Ingmar Bergman directed Long Day's Journey into Night at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where this play (like A Touch of the Poet and Hughie), also had its world premiere. While the director of the 1956 production, Bengt Ekerot, settled for a realistic approach. Bergman's pruned version, widely acclaimed both inside and outside Sweden, is existentially stylized. Here Egil Türnqvist discusses especially the visual aspects of the production, partly on the basis of information from the scenographer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. Egil Törnqvist received his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1969, and since then has been Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique (1968). Strindberg och Bergman: Spöksonaten – drama och iscensättning (1973), Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and (with Barry Jacobs) Strindberg's Miss Julie: a Play and Its Transpositions (1988). He contributed a production study of Bergman's production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, No. 11 (1973).

Pasolini was an extremely unorthodox dramatist. A cult figure in the ‘sixties for his controversial art films, he cultivated notoriety as a rebel who challenged (and was persistently persecuted by) Italy's cultural and political establishment. ‘This hid the fact that, as well as being a successful film-maker, he was an innovative novelist and consummate poet, a tireless essayist, and a provocateur in cultural and social matters, as well as an expert critic and compiler of dialect poetry – a cultural entrepreneur in the fullest sense. The year he wrote the bulk of his theatre, 1966, marked the beginning of his last phase: self-consciously, he assumed both cultural and sexual heterodoxy as an act of defiance against the ‘horrendous universe’ of neo-capitalist Italy and the intolerance of its consumerist values. In Britain, he has been almost entirely neglected except as a film-maker, and much of his work – the entire corpus of theatre and most of his essays – has still to be translated into English. This checklist by Russell Williams will thus hopefully serve as an introduction to the work of an entirely original and provocative playwright. It is followed by a more extended study by Paolo Puppa of perhaps Pasolini's best-known piece for the theatre, Affabulazione.

IN 1966 PASOLINI was confined to bed with an ulcer. While he steadily lost blood, he was reading Plato's Dialogues and going over his translations of The Oresteia and Plautus' Braggart Soldier. This is the picture given by his hagiographers, and those were the classical works that inspired the series of six texts, which he wrote in sporadic bursts of creativity during those years.