Disruption of plays by their audiences has not been an uncommon occurrence in theatre history, but the received wisdom has it that rioting more or less went out of fashion once the house lights could be lowered for the performance. But the combination in the theatre of the Weimar Republic of the politically radical and artistically experimental drama of inter-war Germany with the high political tensions of the times proved an explosive one. The frequent audience disturbances of the period were, however, less the spontaneous expression of genuine indignation than a carefully planned and orchestrated attempt to suppress radical art and opinion. In this article, James Jordan, a member of the Department of German at the University of Warwick, traces the course of theatrical disruption as a tactic of emergent Nazism – and the reactions to it of the theatres, the playwrights, and a too-often-myopic judiciary.

Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.

All too many teachers and theorists treat acting as if it were a sort of puzzle to be solved, a role as a sort of summit to be conquered. Eugenio Barba sees it rather as a process, involving the use of trained energies which often work intuitively, even contradictorily, in search of new relationships between actions and ideas. Using examples as diverse as the legend of the Flying Dutchman and his own company's work on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Barba explores the way in which the mutation of a narrative line can interweave with the presence of the actor to create that ‘sudden dilation of the senses’ which he sees as the essence of the theatrical experience. Eugenio Barba has just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his formation of Odin Teatret, now based in Holstebro, and is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

The years since independence have seen a remarkable range of work in experimental forms of theatre in the nations of Africa – ‘experimental’, that is, in their shared rejection of the imposed colonial heritage of westernized forms, and the common attempt to revitalize indigenous cultural traditions while making them relevant to present and future development priorities. Ross Kidd, who has worked and written widely in this field, here provides a case study of just one ‘Theatre for Development’ workshop, held in a small Zimbabwe village in August 1983. A member of the secretariat of the International Popular Theatre Alliance. Ross Kidd is also an advisory editor of NTQ, and will be contributing a full survey of the range of popular theatre activity in the Third World to a forthcoming issue.

In the first part of this article, published in NTQ1. Susan Bassnett introduced the two papers from ltalian contributors to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Here, she concludes her brief introduction to the work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts by providing a context for the two further papers included in this issue, both products of the French approach to the problem of describing theatre in performance. Susan Bassnett's own study of the plays of Pirandello appeared in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series in 1983.

Video recording has recently become an accessible, unobtrusive, and increasingly inexpensive way of making a permanent record of theatrical performances. This might seem to anticipate a revolution in theatre studies, once the theatre of the present has become the object of study by future generations: yet little thought has been given to the dramaturgical or the pedagogic implications of this new tool. How, for example, will the medium affect the message it transmits, by the way in which it makes permanent what is in essence ephemeral, and ‘fixes’ what is constantly changing? Marco de Marinis here offers some tentative thoughts about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the audiovisual recording of theatre, intended not so much to present a definitive methodology as to clear the ground of some prevailing mistakes and misconceptions. His paper was first presented to a round-table at the Prato Centre for Theatre Semiotics in February 1983.

Susan Bassnett's ‘Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’ appeared in TQ38 (1980). reflecting in its very title the need to make theatre people of the English-speaking world better aware of approaches to theatre analysis which had been influential on the Continent since the work of the pioneer Czech semioticians of the 'thirties. But, as she now points out. these early workers in the field were themselves theatre practitioners, while more recent approaches have suffered from a tendency to divorce creators of theatre from the process and the vocabulary of analysis. Developing her account from the papers presented at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Susan Bassnett here introduces the corrective work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts, and relates their ideas and approaches to the recent decline of energy felt in British (as in most European) theatre, paralleled as it is by a growth in the influence of non-western theatre forms.

The critical attention paid to radio drama has dwindled in almost inverse proportion to a steady increase not only in quantity but, less expectedly, in quality – though Britain has become one of the very few countries where this entirely distinctive dramatic medium is still seriously practised. As Head of BBC Radio Drama from 1963 to 1976. Martin Esslin was instrumental in developing the form, and his article in TQ 3 in 1971. ‘The Mind as a Stage’, in which he summed up his own ‘aesthetic of radio’, provides the starting point for the present article: but its authors believe that the very strength of Esslin's own artistic beliefs and authority limited his understanding of the less ‘artistic’ output of radio drama, and that it is in this area that some of the most notable of recent advances have been made. Their article thus examines not only the development of radio drama since 1971, but the way in which its changing ‘codes’ have altered the relationship between play and listener: and it analyzes two distinctive uses of the medium – to create what they call ‘alternative histories’, and a sense of ‘fragmented space’. Frances Gray, herself a radio playwright, has recently published a study of John Arden in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series, and presently teaches at the University of Sheffield, from which Janet Bray has just received her M.Phil. degree for a study of radio drama in the 'seventies.

One of the problems of applying semiotic techniques to theatre work has been a vocabulary which too often mystifies rather than clarifies the theatre experience for the non-specialist student. Patrice Pavis, in his work with students at the University of Paris III, has evolved a questionnaire about theatre performance which, while not in itself utilizing semiotic terminology, attempts to direct the respondents' attention to all the aspects of theatrical signification upon which it touches. In the following article, Patrice Pavis, whose major study of theatrical terminology, entitled Dictionnaire du Théâtre, was published by Editions Sociales in 1980, outlines the purpose of the questionnaire, and provides explanatory notes to the individual questions, outlining an approach on which many involved in theatre teaching may wish to comment and build.

Peter Weiss, who died in 1982, achieved international recognition as a playwright relatively late in his life – at the age of almost fifty when, in 1964, the Marat-Sade received its premiere in West Germany and in London. Although these productions were followed by a Marxist interpretation in East Germany in the following year, it was Peter. Brook's version for the RSC, later filmed, which shaped most English-speaking theatregoers' perceptions of the play, as a culmination of Brook's exploration of ‘theatre of cruelty’. So what is the philosophy of the Marat-Sade? In this article, John McKenzie, who teaches in the Department of German at the University of Exeter, returns to the statements made by Weiss himself – which, though numerous, were mostly in ephemeral or untranslated sources – and traces the feelings of the playwright as these evolved from the political neutrality of what he called the ‘third standpoint’ to the overtly Marxist position of Weiss's later life.

John McGrath is one of those few writers who, having begun his career in a success-fully orthodox manner, came to prefer working through ‘alternative’ channels – notably, in his formation and continuing work with the two 7:84 Companies, England and Scotland, their names reflecting the persistent fact that 84 per cent of the nation's wealth is owned by seven per cent of the population. Thus, McGrath's early work as one of the creators of the vintage TV series Z Cars, and his major ‘commercial’ success with the film version of his play Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun, has been succeeded by numerous plays and productions less familiar to conventional audiences, but which have made an enormous and often stirring impact in touring venues (frequently of a less expected kind) both north and south of the border. The full range of his work is charted in the ‘NTQ Checklist’ which follows this interview, and its development through to the mid– 'seventies was discussed in the earlier interview with McGrath in TQ19. reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). Here, Tony Mitchell talks with John McGrath about some of his more recent work, and discusses his views on the nature of popular theatre, as set out in his important study of the subject, A Good Night Out (Methuen, 1981).

Keir Elam's study The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, published in 1980. was the firstfull– length account of its subject in English. Here, he argues not only that semiotics canvaluably be employed in the study of Shakespeare, but that the playwright himself displays a sophisticated sense of the significance of signs– indeed, that Elizabethan culture was highly self-conscious, sometimes to the point of obsession, with the nature and practice of signification, both verbal and visual. Keir Elam illustrates his argument with examples from a wide range of Shakespeare's plays, also suggesting some tentative distinctions between the way in which signsare utilized in the various genres. Keir Elam. who teaches English in the University of Florence, delivered an earlier version of this paper at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held at Warwick University in May 1984

Pursuing the theme of the preceding article, on possible approaches to the teaching of theatre analysis. Susan Melrose here suggests that contemporary linguistics offers a methodology which may help us to look at dramatic texts in such a way as to discover a semantics which transcends the merely verbal. The author proceeds to test her suggested method in a comparative examination of two actual productions – a French and an English version of Pinter's No Man's Land – and looks in detail at the opening scene of Julius Caesar. She concludes that in both cases what the actor often senses intuitively may also be analyzed ‘in process’ in terms of the language and rhetoric of the text. Susan Melrose is presently a Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Tunis. She presented an earlier version of this paper to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held in May 1984 at the University of Warwick, after completing her doctorate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

The fool occupies an uneasy place in Shakespear's plays-half way between character and commentator, in part carrying over his real-life role as jester into the ‘court-world’ of the play, but also serving as a metadramatic intermediary between author and audience. And of course, Shakespeare's use of the role in turn modifies our own expectations and understanding of it. Roberta Mullini. of the University of Bologna, here examines the full range of the fools created by Shakespeare, both in terms of their specific dramatic functions, and as holders of the ‘fool's licence’ to disrupt language, action, and the very relationship between seeming and being.

A series of nearly two dozen ‘Theatre Checklists’ appeared as supplements to the old series of Theatre Quarterly, recording biographical, performance, and bibliographical information in accessible form about a wide range of mainly living playwrights. The format was subsequently extended by Simon Trussler for the ‘Writers on File’ series he now edits for Methuen London, of which the first six titles have recently appeared. However, it was felt that the former style of checklist would still provide a valuable source of information for writers not scheduled for early inclusion in the new series, expecially when this complemented other forms of documentation in the journal: and this first ‘NTQ Checklist’ on the work of John McGrath thus appears alongside Tony Mitchell's interview with the playwright. Its compiler, Malcolm Page, teaches in the English Department of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Besides contributing several of the earlier series of ‘Theatre Checklists’. Malcolm Page has published widely in the field of modern British drama: his study of John Arden appeared last year from Twayne, and his volume on Arden was among the first of the ‘Writers on File’ from Methuen.

The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.