The process of rehabilitating the reputation of the great Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold began soon after Krushchev's repudiation of Stalinism in 1955. However, it was only with the recent opening of the KGB files on ‘Case No. 537’ that the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his trial and presumed execution was finally resolved. The full story, which combines the horrific torture of an old, sick man with the petty niceties of bureaucratic form-filling, has been gradually unfolding in Russian-language journals over the past three years: and here Edward Braun provides the first detailed account in English of what happened to Meyerhold – and to his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh – between the liquidation of his theatre in January 1938 and his own liquidation on 2 February 1940. Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, edited the pioneering English-language selection from Meyerhold's writings, Meyerhold on Theatre, in 1969, and in 1979 published his major critical assessment, The Theatre of Meyerhold, now in process of revision to incorporate the new material released in recent years. He also contributes to this issue of NTQ a report on the opening of the new Meyerhold Centre in Moscow.

In the first issue of NTQ, in February 1985, we included a feature on the Footsbarn company, tracing their work from its origins in a Cornish commune in the early ‘seventies to their development of a highly distinctive performing style, strong in physicality, visual imagery, and knockabout humour. By then, this was establishing the group's international reputation – and winning them audiences as much through word-of-mouth in out-of-the-way rural communities as on the festival circuit, where they achieved a more conventional critical acclaim. The compiler of that feature, Geraldine Cousin, here provides an update, complementing a company interview conducted in July 1991 with a personal response to the most recent of Footsbarn's regular encounters with Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Geraldine Cousin, who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of Churchill the Playwright for Methuen, and has also published articles on Shakespeare in performance, Stanislavsky, and Brecht.

Robert Lepage, the innovative French-Canadian director whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year joined the repertoire of the National Theatre, developed his working methods out of the resource-based technique of improvisation and creation devised by Anna and Lawrence Halprin at the San Francisco Dance Workshop. His devised shows, widely acclaimed for their arresting visual imagery, include The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, and Opium and Needles. Here he discusses in interview his ideas on interculturalism and how these influence his approach to Shakespeare. He was interviewed at the National Theatre in London by Christie Carson, a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow, who is working on a dissertation which compares the approach taken to intercultural projects by the theatre communities of Scotland and Canada. A graduate of Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Toronto, Christie Carson has also recently been a contributor to a commemorative publication analyzing the work performed as part of the C. P. Taylor retrospective at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival.

We get not only the kind of government but also the kind of theatre we deserve, argues Liisa Hakola, who here relates the new impulses behind Shakespearean productions of the 1980s to the social and economic assumptions which came to prevail in Britain during the ‘Thatcher decade’ – and seemingly beyond. Desirable though increased subsidy for the theatre may be – in particular for the RSC, as chief purveyors of Shakespeare – what determines the relevance of Shakespearean productions to their times, she suggests, transcends the availability of cash subsidies, however symptomatic of a prevailing climate their size or scarcity may be. Although based in Helsinki, Liisa Hakola spent much of the 1980s in Britain, preparing her PhD thesis, published in 1988, on three RSC productions of Richard II. She has published two other books in Finnish, and also translated five of Fay Weldon's novels into that language.

The retrospective season of plays by C. P. Taylor at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival marked a welcome revival of interest in the work of this prolific Scottish playwright, who had also put down roots in the North-East. Taylor, who was born in 1929 and died in 1981 still in his early fifties, was a committed socialist who wrote sophisticated working-class plays for working-class people – and this not only made much of what he wrote unacceptable in the West End, but also, for different reasons explored in this article, unsympathetic to such venues as the Royal Court. Thus, while the range of his work reflected certain trends in British post-war theatre – the drive for regional and community theatre, dissatisfaction with bourgeois naturalistic styles, and the growth of the fringe – in other respects Taylor was untypical as a left-wing writer. His work deserves the reappraisal here attempted in part because of previous critical neglect, and in part because the reasons for that neglect themselves merit attention for what they reveal about critical attitudes. The author, Susan Friesner, teaches in the Drama Department at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.

Following the departure of the Roy Hart Theatre for France in 1974, and the death of Hart in a car accident shortly afterwards, his pioneering work in exploring the theatrical potential of the human voice has tended to be neglected in the English-speaking world. In the following article, Paul Newham demonstrates that, despite Hart's undoubted importance in the application of his methods of vocal self-discovery to performance, those methods were firmly rooted not only in aspects of Freud's theory of abreaction and Jung's belief in the multi-aspected or ‘polyvalent personality’, but more specifically in the practical therapeutic work on the human voice conducted by Alfred Wolfsohn, first in Germany before the war, then in Britain from Wolfsohn's exile in 1938 until his death in 1962. The author, Paul Newham, is founder and director of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy in London, and has worked therapeutically with a wide range of clients, including performing artists. His book The Singing Cure: an Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy, will be published by Random House in March.

Despite widespread interest in the subject, there has been no previous attempt to collect comprehensive information concerning the history and present working conditions of feminist theatre companies in Britain: and so, with the exception of a very few assessments of particular companies, all too often what passes for critical analysis has had to depend on partial or merely anecdotal evidence. As part of her research for her book, Contemporary Feminist Theatres, forthcoming from Routledge in March, Lizbeth Goodman sent out between 1987 and 1990 a detailed questionnaire to 223 companies and organizations identified as having relevant concerns – whether in terms of company membership, production methods, policy aims, or targeted audience. With a response from 98 of these in hand, she assembled a detailed data-base from which the following article derives – describing the methods and aims of the survey itself, the nature of the response, and the needs in specific areas it revealed, both for the companies themselves and for the future assessment of their work. Lizbeth Goodman, currently a Lecturer in Literature for the Open University, has previously compiled a sequence of ‘Feminist Theatre Interviews’ for NTQ, and most recently contributed an overview of the state of contemporary Bulgarian theatre to NTQ32 (November 1992).

The paratheatrical form here described as ‘Invisible Theatre’ has been little investigated by the English-speaking academic world, beyond a nod in the direction of the work of Augusto Boal. In the following article, Martin Maria Kohtes suggests that the silent interlacing of art and life in ‘Invisible Theatre’ has historical and theoretical implications which extend beyond the specifics of ‘theatre for the oppressed’ or ‘guerrilla theatre’, to call into question our understanding of what constitutes the act of theatre itself. In tracing the history of the concept back to the Weimar Republic, Kohtes develops a hypothesis to explain the visibility of ‘Invisible Theatre’ at specific historic moments – and in so doing he hopes also to illuminate for a wider audience some of the ideas and research methods of German Theaterwissenschaft. Martin Maria Kohtes, who presently lives and works in Berlin and Cologne, studied Theatre Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His study of Guerilla Theater: Theorie und Praxis des amerikanischen Strassentheaters was published by Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, in 1990.