New Theatre Quarterly does not normally include purely text-based studies of plays. since it is our feeling that journals of literary criticism offer a more appropriate home for such work. However, there are certain important plays which are in danger of becoming virtually lost to the world repertoire, when non-performance or flawed first productions have seemingly closed them off from further critical attention. One such play – or, to be precise, sequence of three plays – is The Island of the Mighty, which in a condensed form was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972, but in a production from which the authors dissociated themselves, in a dispute they described in an article in Performance (Fall 1973). Javed Malick, who has recently been awarded his doctorate from McGill University for a study of Arden's plays, here argues that The Island of the Mighty forms an important part of the Arden canon, expressing in its fullest and most coherent form themes and attitudes discernible in the earliest plays – and that its characteristic refusal to ‘do things properly’ is essential both to the authors' view of a polarized world, and to the dramaturgy they have evolved to give expression to that view, which made The Island one of their last works for the conventional theatre. Javed Malick now teaches English at Khalsa College in Delhi University.

Even to sympathetic theatrical observers, ‘feminism’ in France at the turn of the century was often regarded as merely incidental to the larger concerns of the ‘social’ drama; and dramatic debate tended to focus on the issue of a woman's assertion of ‘freedom’ versus her presumably ‘natural’ functions as wife and mother. In this article, Elaine Aston illuminates such attitudes, utilizing both the texts of contemporary plays and discussion in journals current at the time. But she also detects early theatrical evidence of a slow shift towards a questioning of prevailing assumptions – and a belief (which today strikes her as enviable) in the power of theatre to effect social change.

Slowly the theatre is coming to terms with the computer – not only in practical matters ranging from lighting control to ticket sales, but also in the collection and collation of the material which is the concern of the theatre student and scholar. Ian Herbert, whose own editorial work on Who's Who in the Theatre was largely assisted by lots of box-files and strong coffee, has converted the production of his invaluable London Theatre Record, now into its fifth year, to a computer-based system, and has recently been appointed to a fellowship at the City University to investigate the use of computerized databases for the theatre. In this capacity he helped to organize a conference held at the University in the summer of 1985, which brought together many theatre people with experience of using computers: in the following article he summarizes some of their contributions, and the conclusions of the conference.

As Alice Reyner's paper on Stanislavski and Bradley in NTQ 4 illustrated, Stanislavski remained very much a man of his own time, however enduring his approach to acting has proved. Here, Natalie Crohn Schmitt examines one of the concepts most crucial to ‘the system’ – a concept which is in its essentials, however, derived from nineteenth-century ideas, now being challenged, about the relationship between creativity and the unconscious. Pointing out that Stanislavski himself believed that his ‘system’ was simply the application of natural laws to acting technique, the author shows Stanislavski's indebtedness to the psychological theories of Théodule Armand Ribot, which interpreted all human behaviour in terms of ‘an aim towards fixed ends’. One of the reasons for the decline in influence of Stanislavski's system thus reflects, she argues, the growing belief that creativity is ‘process’, its ends ‘continually redefined by the actions, and vice-versa’ – and the author suggests examples of such a non-Stanislavskian approach among contemporary theatre companies. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is associate professor of theatre in the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her earlier essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, and she has just completed a full-length study, Actors on the Stage of Life. The present paper was written under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

THE PUBLICATION of Theatre Quarterly's feature on Australian theatre in its Summer 1977 number seemed at the time one of a number of tokens of the coming of age of ‘the new Australian drama’. It is probably a truer sign of maturity that the present revisiting of the subject offers a form of international recognition which, though still very welcome, seems now a less important and alluring prospect. Australia's cultural cringe – the over-dependence on the models and approval of the parent country which was one of our more notorious legacies of colonialism – is not as noticeable in the theatre these days as it was even in the mood of heady self-conscious nationalism of the early 'seventies.

Why does the vocabulary of the theatre become pejorative as soon as it is applied to everyday experience? Why does the use of theatre as a metaphor for the world carry implications of the deceptive and the artificial? And why, more recently, have sociologists and psychologists used theatricality as a basis for explaining the nature of behaviour in ‘real life’ – at the same time as theatrical gurus have begun to seek a kind of transcendent theatricality in ‘real’ experience? Through an analysis of the ideas of writers such as Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Burns, and of theatre workers from Diderot through Stanislavski to Grotowski, David E. R. George concludes that the apparent contradictions and paradoxes become reconcilable if one replaces the traditional alternative models of theatricality – subjective identification between actor and role versus presentational objectivity – with a triadic approach, which recognizes the partial, overlapping, and multi-faceted nature of all ‘theatrical’ behaviour, on the stage or in the street. After the award of his Cambridge doctorate in 1964, David E. R. George taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Göttingen, Malaysia, and Peking, before taking up his present post as Chairman of Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published books on Ibsen and on German tragic theory, and his study of Indian ritual dance-drama will appear later this year in the ‘Theatre in Focus’ series.

knowledge of the theatre of South America tends to be shamefully scanty in the English-speaking world: yet the forces of rapid political change, both revolutionary and repressive, often provoke innovative theatrical responses. NTQ intends to pursue the study of theatre in this huge continent. The following interview was conducted by Glenn Loney with the young director Carlos Gimenez – a refugee from Argentina presently working with his Rajatabla troupe in Caracas, Venezuela – whose production of Bolivar was brought to the Public Theatre in New York last summer, with a return visit planned to include The Death of Garcia Lorca, both discussed in the following conversation. Glenn Loney is a widely published American drama critic, teacher, and writer, presently teaching on the doctoral theatre programme of the City University of New York, and working on the American volume in the Documents of Theatre History series for publication by Cambridge University Press.

The increasing diversity of activity outlined in the introductory article to this feature creates some difficulties even for the factual enterprise which follows: the noting of significant events, and even the listing of first productions of Australian plays, is necessarily a selective one, determined partly by debatable criteria and partly by a lack of consolidated sources of information. The compiler was able to draw on the invaluable resources of the University of Queensland's theatre research project in compiling the list of first productions up to the end of 1983, when (lamentably) its funding was withdrawn; and the scale of the task of selection is indicated by the fact that those records, for the period 1977–83, include 4342 distinct productions of Australian plays. Often, of course, it takes a longer retrospective view than is possible in this feature to establish ‘significance’, and, regrettably, there are likely to be some notable omissions. The demise of Theatre Australia in 1982 and the aborting of the University of Queensland theatre research project in 1983 were disastrous for people involved with theatre, and for theatre research in particular; they leave a vacuum which must cause continuing concern, and will create mounting difficulties. Both were indispensable sources in compiling this chronology. The research assistance of Doreen Dougherty from the Monash University English Department was absolutely vital in its preparation, as was the co-operation of Veronica Kelly and Alrene Sykes from the University of Queensland, and Katharine Brisbane of Currency Press.

‘What makes one sentence into a line of poetry and another sentence dull and lifeless?’ This was one of the questions Arnold Wesker set out to answer from the point-of-view of the practising playwright rather than the critical theorist, when he delivered the following pape; to the biennial conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics in Rome in 1985. He examines the constituent elements of stage dialogue in supposdly ‘raistic’ drama and th rigorous if not always conscious process of artistic selection and shaping diotated, in his own practice, by the natur of the originating experence. He illustrates his argument with extracts from his own works. including his most recently staged play in London, Annie Wobbler – the first in a now-completed cycle of four plays for on woman of which Four Portraits, Yardsal, and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon? are the other parts. A frequent contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, Arnold Wesker's earliest works, the plays of the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ and The kitchen, were milestones in the creatior of the ‘now British drama’ of the late fifties, and he has continuec to write for the theatre in a wide range of styles – which have been known to disturb the ‘expectations of realism’ of some of the critics he was here addressing…

Our knowledge (or pervasive ignorance) of theatre in Czechoslovakia is. sadly, still shaped in part by its being perceived as a faraway country of which we know little – almost as little as when Chamberlain thus identified it at the time of Munich. But there is also the fact that its theatre has been distinguished less by the work of individual dramatists than through collective creation, through ‘small forms’ such as cabaret, and through scenography and other aspects of technical innovation. While fully analyzing such features of Czech theatre, Barbara Day relates them to the political and social conditions of a country in which various forms of repression and censorship have made it difficult for the all-too-identifiable dramatist to become spokesperson for a national theatre. Having herself lived in Czechoslovakia for several periods between 1965 and 1969, Barbara Day returned to the study of Czech theatre in 1980, when she read for a research degree at Bristol University, also collaborating with the University's drama department in staging a Czechoslovak Festival in Bristol during October 1985.

Of all Shakespeare's plays which touch on raw contemporary nerves, The Taming of the Shrew is probably the most contentious – and arguably the least acceptable, in a period of crystallizing feminist consciousness. Yet the play stubbornly remains in the repertoire, almost demanding to be reinterpreted – either against the perceived grain of the text, or by clarifying subtextual sympathy for a less chauvinist point of view than Petruchio's. Here, Geraldine Cousin, who teaches theatre studies in the University of Warwick, and contributed a study of the Footsbarn company's Hamlet and Lear to NTQ1, discusses the problems involved in staging The Taming of the Shrew at the present time, taking a closer look at two recent itinerant productions – by the Medieval Players, and by the touring group of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

David Hornbrook's articles in NTQ 4 and 5 offered a challengig perspective to the history of drama-in-education. a critique of present practices and practitioners. and some positive proposals for the future place of the subject in the clrriculum. These provoked Widespread interest and we published in NTO 7 a first selection of comments. We now continue the debate with comments from Gavin Bolton, Who has published Widely on educational drama and is Head of Drama and in the School of Education of the University of Durham. and Warwick Dobson. Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bradord and llkley College.

The Australian Labour government elected in 1972 (and sacked in highly controversial circumstances by the Governor-General in 1975) instituted under the premiership of Gough Whitlam a policy of greatly increased subsidy for the arts. But this was succeeded by a period of neglect, culminating in a drastic policy of cutbacks in 1981; and the election of a new Labour government in 1983 thus coincided with a major debate over both the nature and the distribution of arts subsidy, which has resulted in a wider spread of funding for culturally diverse forms of theatre. Malcolm Blaylock works both as director of one of the new community-based companies. Junction Theatre, and as a member of the federal funding body, the Theatre Board of the Australia Council: he talked to Graham Ley about both aspects of his work, and the background to the present funding policy.

David Hornbrook's articles in NTQ4 and 5 offered a challenging perspective to the history of drama in education, a critique of present practice and practitioners, and some positive proposals for the future place of the subject in the curriculum. These have provoked widespread interest, and we are now publishing a first selection of comments from fellow drama in education workers, and offering a welcome to further contributions in subsequent issues. These initial responses are from David Morton, adviser to the Leeds City Council's Department of Education; Jon Nixon, a research fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Sheffield; and Tony Graham. Head of Drama at Haverstock School, in the Inner London Education Authority's area.

In the interview above, Malcolm Blaylock referred to Sidetrack, a community theatre company in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, as ‘arguably the best company in Australia’. Here, Tom Burvill examines some of the company's recent work, and sets it in the context of an understanding of community theatre which he traces back to Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Tom Burvill, who has himself acted as a dramaturg for Sidetrack, lectures in English and linguistics at Macquarie University.

Despite the successful production of Ödön von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods. In the translation by Christopher Hampton at the National Theatre in 1977. the work of this inter-war contemporary of Brecht's remains little known in the English-speaking theatre. James L. Rosenberg. Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, is himself a professional playwright who has translated some of Horvath's work previously unavailable in English. In an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to this checklist, he both outlines the reasons for our ignorance of Horvath, and suggests aspects of his undervalued importance. The subsequent checklist provides a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication