The theoretical writings of Eugenio Barba on the nature and disciplines of acting have been a feature of NTQ since its first issue. These writings emerge, of course, from Barba's work with Odin Teatret, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary from its base in Holstebro, Denmark – and also from his formative association with ISTA. the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Accordingly, when a leading authority recently described Barba, along with Brecht and Grotowski, as one of the three major European influences on contemporary Latin American theatre, he was paying tribute to active participation and cross-fertilization, rather than to textbook discipleship. In the following article, Ian Watson, whose study of ‘Catharsis and the Actor’ appeared in NTQ 16 (1988), looks in detail at the nature and the consequences of Barba's ‘Latin American connection’.

This paper examines two plays by Trevor Griffiths, ten years apart in the writing, which responded in different ways to burning contemporary issues. The first, Oi for England, though originally seen on television in 1982, was conceived as a theatre text, and was eventually toured to audiences closer to the age (and perhaps to some of the beliefs) of its racist rock-band central characters. The Gulf between Us, written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, was staged in Leeds in 1992 as a local theatrical ‘event’ at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, under Griffiths's own direction. Jonathan Bignell looks at the ways in which the different nature of these occasions and audiences, and the different ways in which the plays can be viewed as ‘political theatre’ – in particular, the new demands made by The Gulf upon critics who arrived with a type-cast view of its author – in both cases militated against a successful political statement being conveyed. Jonathan Bignell completed a PhD on narrative in film and television fictions in 1989, and since then has lectured in English and Media Studies in the English Department of the University of Reading. His research interests are in literary theory, and film and television analysis.

In this article Lin Chen seeks to locate the experimental chuanju production Qingtan (Sighing), directed by and starring Tian Mansha, in its special socio-political context. Based on a detailed performance analysis, she explores the aesthetics of the production and how it interweaves different performance cultures while referring continually to the deep wound of the Cultural Revolution, still felt by a significant number of ordinary people in mainland China. But while the production fully intends to present the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, it barely touches the wound of the past that it evokes. This is so because of the pervading presence of the xiqu idea of beauty, current dualistic political discourse, institutional difficulties, and, most of all, the fact that the collective cultural trauma at issue has not yet been properly articulated in Chinese culture and society. Lin Chen is an assistant professor of the Qingdao Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shandong University. She completed her doctorate at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research interests include the aesthetic ideas of Leibniz and their far-reaching influence, the aesthetics of performativity, interweaving performance cultures and cultural studies.1

Girish Karnad is not only India's leading playwright, and a practitioner across the performing arts in all that nation's media, but the first contemporary Indian writer to have achieved a major production in a regional American theatre – Naga-Mandala, seen at the Guthrie Theatre in July 1993. The following interview was recorded on the occasion of that production, and ranges widely not only over Karnad's own work and its circumstances, but the situation and problems of the Indian theatre today, and its ambivalent relationship alike to its classical and its colonial past, and to the contemporary problems of its society. The interviewer, Aparna Dharwadker, is Assistant Professor of Drama and Eighteenth-Century British Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Drama, and The Sourcebook of Post-Colonial English Literatures and Cultural Theory (Greenwood, 1995). She has also published collaborative translations of modern Hindi poetry in major anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), and is currently completing a book-length study of the politics of comic and historical forms in late seventeenth-century drama.

In this article, Linda Mackenney explores the four epic plays John McGrath wrote between 1989 and 1996 in the aftermath of his forced resignation from 7:84 Scotland in 1988. These were produced in association with David MacLennan of Wildcat Stage Productions and televised by McGrath's Freeway Films for Channel Four in the 1990s. McGrath died of leukaemia in 2002, and MacLennan died earlier this year after a battle with motor neurone disease; but the work they did together in the 1990s forms a significant part of their legacy. Linda Mackenney was introduced to McGrath's work as a student, when she attended the lectures at the University of Cambridge which were later published as his seminal critical work, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form. She carried out the research for 7:84 Scotland's Clydebuilt Season in 1982, was the creator of the Scottish Theatre Archive at Glasgow University Library, and is the author of The Activities of Popular Dramatists and Drama Groups in Scotland, 1900–1952 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). She was a member of the 7:84 Scotland Board of Directors between 1983 and 1988 and is currently completing a study of John McGrath's theatre writings.

This article is based on discussions with artistic directors and administrators of British Theatre in Education companies about past and current practice and changing funding resources. Persephone Sextou reviews developments in TiE practice since its beginnings in the 1960s, focusing upon the situation in the 1990s following the enforcement of National Curriculum requirements, the redirection of government funding to partnerships in education, and the availability of funds from the National Lottery. She describes how the remaining TiE companies are struggling not to compromise their artistic autonomy, and considers the relevance of the British TiE experience in relation to the potential for the development of the medium in other countries. Persephone Sextou is an instructor in Drama and Theatre in Education at the University of Thessaly in Greece, and is researching the transference of British TiE to a Greek context for her doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her book on School Dramatization has been published in Greece.

Despite the recognized value of semiotics in opening-out our perceptions of what constitutes the text of a performance, its literary associations have meant that most theatre semioticians concerned with reception cling to analogies between the literary reading act and the spectator's reception of a theatrical performance. For them, there is a conceptual as well as a metaphorical relationship between a literary text and what they term the performance text — and so, by implication, a similar relationship between how both are ‘read’. Taking these semioticians at their word, in the following article Ian Watson isolates the actor in the performance text, examines how s/he is read, and questions the attempts of scholars to ignore quality as an important component of this reading.

This is the text – appropriately, a ‘performance text’ – of the inaugural lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College, University of London, on 9 March 1993, by Jacky Bratton, following her appointment as Professor of Theatre and Cultural History. Although she holds her chair at a former women's college, Jacky Bratton reflects that the introduction of co-education in such institutions has in practice left them as male-dominated as the rest. Ironically, this continued marginalizing of women in academic life reflects the common view of theatre studies as itself a marginal discipline – almost as suspect as Jacky Bratton's own specialist concern with its more popular aspects. Looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized within theatre history, she challenges in particular the received wisdom that the alleged ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century was reversed by a striving for respectability usually traced to the rattle of cups-and-saucers on box sets, and apotheosized in Irving's knighthood: instead, she reflects upon the radical impulses of earlier nineteenth-century theatre, and at the ways in which the gender of three women who worked within it influenced their theatrical careers, their social standing, and their own attitudes towards both.

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.

The Lewes Bonfire Festival is an important piece of popular theatre, which has largely resisted attempts by higher authority to control and redefine it. Annually some 2,000 costumed participants, watched by up to 80,000 spectators, take over the streets of the usually staid county town of East Sussex, and effigies of contemporary politicians and of the Pope are burnt during six hours of carnivalesque rule. Here, David Wiles analyzes the history and organizational structure of the festival, and examines the ideology of Englishness upon which the event turns. David Wiles is Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His interest in popular theatre has principally been historical, and he has published books on the Robin Hood play and on the Elizabethan clown. Most recently, in Shakespeare's Almanac (D. S. Brewer, 1993) he has explored the structural logic of the festive calendar.

Oscar Wilde was punished not for failing to amuse the high society audiences for which he wrote, but for offending that society's sexual attitudes. Ironically, as Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell point out, his death transformed him ‘from a criminal outcast to a figure both redeemed and bankable’. For those who wished to exploit his theatrical legacy, the problems arose first of sufficiently dissociating the plays from what was perceived as their author's irredeemable behaviour – and then of finding a theatrical language to make the ridiculing of Victorian virtues risible for a society which had settled into the more relaxed moral corsetry of the Edwardians. Here, the authors take two contrasting cases in which audience reaction was decisive – the failure in 1913 of the attempt to dramatize Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by converting it into a moral tract; and the process by which The Importance of Being Earnest, after a few attempts to render it timeless, became firmly pinned down in its period – and so a play at which audiences could safely laugh, confident they were no longer themselves the butts of the jokes. Joel Kaplan is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. His recent publications include (with Sheila Stowell) Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes and (edited with Michael Booth) The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. Sheila Stowell is Senior Research Fellow in Drama at the University of Birmingham, and the author of A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era.

Anna Zubrzycki and Grzegorz Bral worked for a number of years with Gardzienice before founding Teatr Pieéń Kozła – Song of the Goat Theatre – in Wrocław in 1996. The conversation that follows took place on 22 June 2009, during Song of the Goat's run of Macbeth, their most recent production. Created in tandem with the Year of Grotowski theatre festival, the ‘World as a Place of Truth’ held in Wrocław on 13–30 June 2009, it was one of a series of meetings, presentations, and performances organized by Joanna Klass of Arden 2 for the US Artists Initiative, a project established in partnership with the Grotowski Institute and the Center for International Theatre Development. Macbeth will be performed at the Barbican Centre in London as part of Song of the Goat's two-month-long British tour of this production in October and November 2010, accompanied by workshops and demonstrations. Its itinerary is Eastleigh (4–9 October), Birmingham (11–15 October), Cambridge (18–23 October), Manchester Metropolitan University (25–30 October), London (3–20 November), and Brighton (21–26 November). This conversation about some of the principles of the company's work was led by Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

The closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first have seen a wide range of hybrid and cross-over performance forms, dance/theatre being prominent among them. In this article, Maria Shevtsova outlines the similarities between the working principles of director Lev Dodin and those of the choreographers Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, suggesting how they have set and still exemplify current trends in a networked world (Castells) of precarity (Bourdieu) and uncertainty. She also explores a broader socio-artistic context for her focus. This text is a slightly modified version of a belated inaugural lecture for her third appointed professorial chair, at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in March 2002. Maria Shevtsova is an Advisory Editor of NTQ, whose recent publications include ‘Theatre and Interdisciplinarity’ (2001), a special issue she guest-edited for Theatre Research International, and ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ (2002), edited for Contemporary Theatre Review, which includes her essay, ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's Champ and Habitus for a Sociology of Stage Productions’. Her book on Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg is due for publication in 2003.