Acting style is notoriously difficult to recapture, and our knowledge of how Burbage or Betterton or even Irving performed is scant indeed. This is understandable: less so is the reluctance of contemporary critics to get to grips with the description and evaluation of present-day styles of acting. In part in response to the ‘masterclasses’ given recently on London Weekend Television by John Barton with actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Andrew Rissik argues that the present ‘Stratford voice’, in contrast to that of the 'sixties and early 'seventies, does not serve Shakespeare well, and is fast becoming a new kind of declamatory self-indulgence. Andrew Rissik himself taught and worked on Shakespeare at Oxford, before becoming a full-time writer whose work has been performed on BBC Radio and TV and on Thames Television.

Over the last three decades the work of Peter Zadek in Germany has consistently aroused strong reactions, whether of lavish enthusiasm or disdainful rejection (Peter Stein is supposed to have commented that Zadek's productions of Shakespeare were ‘Shakespeare with his trousers down’). Whatever the critical reception, Zadek's work demands close attention for its free-wheeling, unpredictable, and dangerous qualities, as well as for the remarkably sensitive interplay he achieves between his actors. If Stein's productions at the Schaubühne and elsewhere are masterpieces of formal perfection, Zadek's work by contrast is characterized by a flamboyant, imaginative exploration of the text and a healthy suspicion of polished results. In the interview which follows, Roy Kift discussed with Peter Zadek not only his attitudes to the problems of acting, but also his opinions on German theatre and literature and the experiences which shaped his development as one of West Germany's leading directors. Roy Kift has been living in West Berlin since 1981, where he has written plays for stage and radio and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for theatre and television. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ 39 (1981).

The original series of Theatre Quarterly ran for ten years and forty issues, from 1971 to 1981. The relaunched journal intends to continue the best traditions of the old, while reflecting the changes that have overtaken the English-speaking theatre in the intervening years. Simon Trussler, who was an editor of the old TQ throughout its existence, here offers some personal reflections on the appearance of New Theatre Quarterly, the present mood of the theatre, and the challenges now facing theatre practitioners and researchers alike. Simon Trussler is also author of over twenty books and monographs on theatre, was drama critic of Tribune from 1966 to 1972, and currently teaches in the Drama Departments of Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and the University of Kent. Clive Barker, his associate editor on TQ since 1978, joins him as co-editor of the new journal. Formerly an actor with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, and author of the influential guide to actor training Theatre Games, Clive Barker is currently Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick.

It is a matter for pride that the old TQ was one of the first English-language journals to include material by and about the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Our ‘Theatre Checklist’ on Fo in 1978 provided the first full reference guide to his plays (notably to his work since 1970 with the theatre collective La Comune), and Tony Mitchell contributed a documented study of Fo's one-man show Mistero Buffo to TQ 35 in 1979. In between, Belt and Braces had established Fo's British reputation with their long-running productions of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay – while in TQ40 Fo's leading American director, R. G. Davis, looked at some of the problems of presenting Fo in the USA. Now, Trumpets and Raspberries looks set to repeat the success of its predecessors at London's Phoenix Theatre. What sustains Dario Fo's unique ability to create political comedy which is at once hard-hitting yet widely accessible? As he suggests in the first of these articles (which originally appeared in Italian as an introduction to a volume of his plays), the answer lies in part in Fo's very rejection of the label ‘political’. Here, he analyzes some of the features by which he would rather distinguish his work as popular theatre, notably its traditional dependence on situation rather than character. In the second article, published in Italian in 1978, Fo examines the way in which this kind of theatre also fuses the elements of past culture with a critical examination of the present. Tony Mitchell, who translated both pieces, has just published a study of Fo. People's Court Jester, in the Methuen Theatrefiles series.

The first article in the first issue of the original TQ was a piece by Jan Knott, utilizing the concept of the absurd as a means of understanding Greek tragedy. Recently, his essays, of which many first appeared in TQ, have been published in a new collection, The Theatre of Essence, from Northwestern University Press. Kott's idiosyncratic approach to the interpretation of theatre texts continues to distinguish him as one of those rare literary critics whose insights illuminate the play in production – the reflection in the Brook–Scofield King Lear of his Beckettian interpretation in the seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary being just the most famous instance. Now Jan Kott, who teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, turns to the world of Shakespeare's own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and examines Doctor Faustus as the meeting-place of many kinds of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan theatre, contributing to an understanding of the play that is rooted not in a dead theology but in a living theatricality.

Slowly, the focus of creative and critical interest in American theatre has shifted from Broadway ‘product’ to the work presented by the non-profit theatres of the regional centres – work which has not only continued and developed the native naturalistic tradition, but embraced the best of the world repertoire, past and present. Method acting, adapted from Stanislavski to produce a distinctive but limited school of interiorized performance, proved inadequate to meet the increased demands of this range of work; and in this essay John Harrop examines the process by which university and conservatory training has come to accept that ‘style’ is not a sort of applied veneer, but a matter of finding the appropriate response to the linguistic and physical requirements of any play. Presently Head of the Professional Training Programme for the BFA in Drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara, John Harrop is himself a professional actor on the regional theatre circuit. An advisory editor of NTQ, and a frequent contributor to the old Theatre Quarterly, he is also the author (with Robert Cohen) of Creative Play Direction and (with Sabin Epstein) of Acting with Style.

This year will see the completion of Max Stafford-Clark's fifth year as Artistic Director of the English Stage Company – and the thirtieth year of that company's tenure of the Royal Court Theatre, where its arrival under George Devine back in 1956 was to prove so seminal for the British theatre. Recently under threat of losing a major portion of its Arts Council grant, the company has had to struggle to maintain its reputation as the natural home for new writing in conditions where its ability to mount regular new productions has been severely curtailed: but in spite of this it has premiered some of the most important new work and writers of the past few years. Tony Dunn, who is senior lecturer in literature and drama at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and was recently appointed editor of Gambit, talked to Max Stafford-Clark about the problems and policy of the company, in the perspective of its past history. Before joining the Court, Max Stafford-Clark directed the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in its vintage years from 1968, and was a founding member of the Joint Stock Company in 1974.

Although literary criticism has moved on since the work of A. C. Bradley, his Shakespearian Tragedy (1904) is still regarded as the greatest achievement of the ‘biographical’ approach to dramatic characterization – and a reprint of that classic work, with a new introduction by John Russell Brown, has just appeared from Macmillan. But the teachings of his close contemporary Stanislavski remain more widely disseminated than disputed, though they spring from very similar assumptions and concerns. Alice Rayner, an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, investigates what the writings of the two men had in common, how their insights and approaches can be mutually revealing – and how some of their underlying beliefs can be the cause of mystification.

While Appia's name is dutifully linked in our theatre histories with the full realization of the revolution in stage lighting wrought by electricity, the nature of his broader scenographic philosophy has remained little understood, and his own writings are not readily accessible in English. Still less have English-speaking theatre people given due attention to the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of the system of eurhythmies – and virtually nothing has previously been written about the unique collaboration between these two innovators, which began in 1906, and eventually flourished in the unlikely setting of a German ‘garden city’, dedicated to the humanization of modern industrial practices – Hellerau, or ‘the bright meadow’. Here, Richard Beacham, who has published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), describes how the two men came to meet and to plan for the possibilities offered by the projected Hellerau festivals: in a subsequent article, he will assess the extent and nature of the work they achieved there.

Drama-in-education is a subject – or a set of theories – which became an educational discipline almost by historical accident, and about which strong feelings can still be aroused. That the arguments are too often confined to educationalists is symptomatic of the way the problems raised have seldom been shared with or considered by people working in professional theatre – and this in turn reflects the way that the subject has tended to be taught, with the emphasis strongly on its ‘educational’ rather than its ‘theatrical’ potential. Back in 1973. David Clegg's article ‘The Dilemma of Drama in Education’, in TQ9, caused a briefly wider flurry of interest, and in the present article David Hornbrook also attempts to put the subject into a contemporary critical perspective, looking here at what children are supposed to ‘learn’ and ‘experience’ through drama, and in the second part of his article, to follow in NTQ 5, examining present and future prospects for the subject. A repertory actor in the 1960s. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

In the first part of this feature, published in NTQ 2, Richard C. Beacham described how the pioneer of modern stage lighting, Adolphe Appia, and the creator of eurhythmics, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, came to collaborate in 1906 – in the development of the Hellerau ‘garden-city’ project. Here, they planned to provide an opportunity for active artistic participation in a specially designed performance space. The author takes up the story with the beginning of classes at Hellerau in 1911, and preparations for the two festivals which followed – including the revelatory production of Gluck's Orpheus. The First World War brought the collaboration to an end – but not before it had put into practice for the first time many of the scenic and interpretive principles of modern staging. Richard C. Beacham published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), and plans to complete the present NTQ feature with an assessment of ‘The Legacy of Hellerau’. His forthcoming full-length study of Appia will be published by Cambridge University Press.

The recent death of J. B. Priestley, in the same year as that of the finest exponent of his plays, Sir Ralph Richardson, seems to signal the close of an era. We had hoped in an early issue of New Theatre Quarterly to arrange an interview with the playwright to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, and although generous tributes have been paid to Priestley's work in the theatre, two aspects of this work (incidentally of crucial importance to the policy of this journal) have been somewhat neglected. After the end of the Second World War, during the discussions and plans for building the new Britain (and by extension Europe) from the ruins of the old, Priestley stood for a particular kind of integrity in the British theatre: and his role in the creation of the International Theatre Institute and his own conception of the British Theatre Conference of 1947 raised many interesting questions about the social, national, and international role that theatre could play. If the intervening years have not seen developments to match that vision, our theatre nevertheless owes a great deal to the various reforms that have followed from such initiatives, and in future issues we intend to return to those ideals and ideas – to see what basis they constitute for a critique of our own time, and to assess what continuing relevance they have for our future. Any theatre journal today also owes a debt to Priestley for his pioneering championship and criticism of the various forms of popular entertainment in which he so delighted, and in which he discerned strong social values – essentially, the inspiration for a line of criticism carried forward brilliantly by Raymond Williams and others over the last three decades. Tragically, two of the great comedians who earned his admiration, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe, departed before him, too far short of his own fullness of years. The world's stock of laughter has slumped since their passing and, as Priestley showed us, we have lost two innovators in the art of theatre. Tommy Cooper's deconstruction, if not demolition, of the stage was a masterly exposure of the polished sales techniques of showbusiness, and his exploitation of the art of anti-climax showed new ways through which to hold an audience and relate to them. Eric Morecambe, equally ruthless and proficient at puncturing the pretensions and posturings of glib naturalism and pseudo-aestheticism, had also the self-deflating wisdom of the true philosopher. One day, when we have grown over-familiar with the reruns of the reruns of the shows he has left behind, a retrospective examination of all the work of Morecambe and Wise will surely show that, underlying the technical brilliance of the comic playing, there is also a serious progression through the process of ageing, as brash optimism is tempered by the disillusionment of experience in the struggle to survive and extract what advantages one can from life. We learned a great deal about theatre from Tommy Cooper, and a lot about living and growing older from Eric Morecambe: they have gone leaving that education unfinished, but to commemorate them in the power of their effect, and to remind us of our debt to Priestley, we reproduce here the two pieces he wrote about them as living performers in the collection of essays Particular Pleasures, published in 1975 by Heinemann (to whom our grateful acknowledgements are extended).

Is Broadway necessary? As the focus for new writing and major experimental work in the USA shifts ever further from the old theatre district around Times Square – first to off- and then to off-off-Broadway, more recently to the flourishing regional theatres – many critics have come to regard Broadway either as an economic anachronism, failing to perpetuate past glories, or simply as an irrelevance to ‘real’ theatre. Yet Stanley Kauffmann argues that a focal point for a nation's theatre is more than the sum of sometimes fraying parts, and works on the imagination in ways that cannot be evaluated by the fragmentary assessment of succeeding productions; and here he analyses the ‘organism’ that Broadway remains, and the function it performs. Stanley Kauffmann has been theatre critic for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review, while the most recent of his full-length works is Theater Criticisms (1984).

The musical has long been recognized as one of the few distinctively American art forms. How far do these roots result in an ‘Americanism’ of ideological content – and how, indeed, does one measure the ‘content’ of a musical, with its fusion of the spoken word, song, and choreography? David Hirst, who teaches in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts of the University of Birmingham, here examines the problems of critical methodology posed by the musical form, and also traces the development of the musical as an expression (at times a critical expression) of the American way of life and the ‘American dream’. After demonstrating its reflection of themood of the Depression era, he analyzes its response to the social and political mood of the war and post-war years, and to the changing standards which made Hair an international success, yet which have consigned the work of Sondheim to Broadway failure – in a world where ‘failure’ and ‘success’ carry their own, pervasively American connotations.

Workers in ‘conscientization’ through theatre in the so-called underdeveloped countries tend to assume that this form of theatre work has a potential unique to such circumstances. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the ‘sixties, argues that the poorer sections of the richest nation in the world have no less been deprived of their cultural roots, and here describes his experiences when he was asked to direct a play dramatizing a workplace incident in the cannery town of Watsonville, northern California, when a Mexican worker was appealing for reinstatement against unfair dismissal. A regular contributor to the former Theatre Quarterly, most recently in TQ 40 (1981) on his productions of Dario Forin the USA, R. G. Davis's own version of We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay, was published last year by Samuel French, and he has recently directed a Native American play in San Jose, followed by a Brecht play in Australia.

Many dramatists have written of the world as a stage: less attention has been paid to the consequent effects upon the ‘leading players’ – the politicians who readily enough cast themselves as heroes, and consign others to the roles of villains or at best supernumeraries. Roger Howard argues that on the contemporary ‘world stage’ events all too often take the form of simulations, in which ordinary people must take their allotted parts – or face the coercion or punishment of the state. He looks also at theatre practitioners from the Japanese actor Zeami to Schiller to Heiner Müller who have, for better or worse, examined the nature of the ‘dramatic sense of life’. Roger Howard, who presently teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, is himself a widely performed playwright, currently working with Theatre Underground, and has written extensively on Chinese theatre and political playwriting, most recently as a contributor to Contradictory Theatres, for imminent publication from Theatre Action Press.

The original series of TQ included very little about the work of the pioneering Polish director Jerzy Grotowski – not for any lack of offerings on the subject, but because potential contributors seemed unable to distinguish discipleship from the need for analytical description. It is, therefore, with special pleasure that we now include, by way of introduction to the more detailed study of specific aspects of Grotowski's work, this clear overview of the director's development, from his first experiments in Opole, Poland, over 25 years ago, to his present researches into ‘objective drama’ in California. Grotowski himself has divided this work into four distinct though developmental phases, and here Richard Fowler, himself currently responsible for the Canada Project of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, outlines the distinctive nature and achievements of each successive stage of the work.

With Grotowski and Szajna, Tadeusz Kantor has become one of a trio of contemporary exponents of experimental theatre whose influence has spread far beyond the boundaries of their native Poland: and Kantor himself has toured widely with his three major works. The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? Both in his published manifestoes and in forthright interviews about his approach, as also through his personal participation as on-stage ‘conductor’ of his productions. Kantor has proclaimed a theatre philosophy rooted in his own past as surrealist painter and creator of happenings, and now exponent of what he has called ‘in-formal’ theatre, in which ‘the director must die with the actors’. While acknowledging the innovative significance of Kantor's work, Andrzej Zurowski – a leading Polish critic who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics – here questions some of the premises behind the creator's presence on his own stage.

Time in Chekhov's plays passes between the acts – not as a functional necessity, but as part of an irresistible rhythm which fascinated the dramatist, and obsessed his characters. Time for Chekhov was neither a metaphysical concept nor a thematic convenience, but the shared perspective through which humankind reconciled its hopes and fears – or failed to do so. Jovan Hristic looks in detail at the treatment of time in Chekhov's major plays, and illuminates on the one hand its role in creating an almost classical sense of inevitability – and on the other at its ability to reduce the apparently momentous to the ironically trivial. This article is taken from his full-length study, Chekhov the Dramatist, already translated into French, and originally published in Belgrade. where he works as a leading theatre critic.

After his experimental work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which bore fruit in the production of Marat/Sade in 1964 and culminated in the controversial Vietnam play US in 1966, Peter Brook returned to the classical repertoire in which he had made his name as ‘enfant terrible’ of British theatre, with Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and, two years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC. But the very success of ‘Brook's Dream’ – the way in which its transformation into an ‘event’ required actors ‘to do their duty rather than what came from life’ – heightened Brook's sense that he could no longer work creatively under such conditions, and in 1970 he formed his Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale, which developed its early work for the Persepolis festivals and in the treks across Africa chronicled by John Heilpern in Conference of the Birds. Eventually the company settled in Paris at the Théâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in 1974: but while their work there has been widely acclaimed, it has been subjected to little detailed analysis in English. In the original series of TQ, Kenneth Tynan offered a highly critical view in TQ25. Here, David Williams – a graduate of the Drama Department of the University of Kent, currently working in community theatre at Hoxton Hall in London's East End – corrects the balance with a full descriptive analysis of Brook's major productions at the Bouffes – Timon of Athens. The Ik, a conflation of Jarry's Ubu plays, and a re-creation of the Conference of the Birds