bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Footsbarn: from a Tribal ‘Macbeth’ to an Intercultural ‘Dream’
Authors: Cousin Geraldine
Published: January 2009

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.
Travails of a Naked Typist: the Plays of C. P. Taylor
Authors: Friesner Susan
Published: January 2009

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.
Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: January 2009

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).
Hide and Seek: the Search for a Lesbian Theatre Aesthetic
Authors: Rapi Nina
Published: January 2009

Is there a specific lesbian theatre aesthetic? If so, is butch and femme at the heart of it? Or androgyny? Or the freedom-confinement dynamic? Or, on another level, distancing role from ‘essential being’, and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social constructs from male and female as biological entities? By focusing on a number of lesbian texts, including her own work, Nina Rapi explores both the theory and practice of an emerging aesthetic that reveals the ‘performance of being’, seeking to ‘shift the axis of categorization’, and so to create a new and exciting theatre language. Nina Rapi is a playwright and translator whose theatre work includes Ithaka (Riverside Studios, June 1989; Link Theatre, staged readings, April 1992; published in Seven Plays by Women, 1991), Critical Moments, a trilogy of shorts (Soho Poly Theatre, June 1990), Johnny Is Dead (First One Person Play Festival, Etcetera Theatre, March 1991), Dreamhouse (Oval House and Chat's Palace, April-May 1991), Dance of Guns (touring production, including King's Head and Jackson's Lane Theatres, April-May 1992), and Dangerous Oasis (Finborough, March 1993).
Women and the Women's Movement in Contemporary Spanish Theatre
Authors: Ragué Maria-José
Published: January 2009

The problems confronted by most women's theatre in reaching its own constituency and, when desired, gaining a wider hearing have been exacerbated in Spain by the long period of emergence from the Franco dictatorship, with its legacy of oppression. In this article, Maria–José Ragué offers an overview of the subject, outlining the historical context and exploring the work of women playwrights, then looking in particular at women's theatre groups based in Barcelona, at whose university she teaches theatre history. Maria–José Ragué is also a theatre critic and a playwright, having published Clytemnestra and Crits de gavina in Catalan and Gaviotas, lagartijas y mariposa in Spanish. Among her research she has published, in Catalan, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Catalan Theatre (1990), and, in Spanish, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Galician Theatre (1991). Her Themes of Greek Tragedy in Spanish Contemporary Theatre is also in print. She is currently completing a book about women and theatre in contemporary Spain, and beginning work on a study of African ritual theatre. Marias-José Ragué was born in Barcelona in 1941, and has always lived in her home town except between 1968 and 1970, when she lived and studied in Berkeley.
The Politics of the Paradigm: a Case Study in Chaos Theory
Authors: Heuvel Michael Vanden
Published: January 2009

This article continues NTQ's explorations, commenced in NTQ18 (1989) and NTQ23 (1990), of the interactions between theatrical performance and emerging views of nature coming out of the ‘new sciences’. Here, Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that analogies between quantum science and performance are productive mainly in reference to work which investigates the nature of perception, and which foregrounds the spectator's awareness of the ‘event-ness’ of theatrical performance. Models drawn from the new science of ‘chaotics’, on the other hand, appear more applicable to performances which seek to move beyond phenomenology into the sphere of cultural discourse. He offers as an example of this ‘post-quantum’ theatre the work of the renowned New York collective the Wooster Group, whose performances create a dialogics between order and disorder which acts to map dynamic interactions between hegemony and difference in American culture. Michael Vanden Heuvel is Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Arizona State University. HisPerforming Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Textwas published by the University of Michigan Press in 1991, and he has written articles and reviews forTheatre JournalandContemporary Literature.
Rabble-Rousing in St Louis with That Uppity Theatre
Authors: Lipkin Joan
Published: January 2009

Joan Lipkin, playwright, poet, and theatre director, has won considerable critical acclaim – and some calculated abuse – for the political work of her company, That Uppity Theatre, in St Louis, Missouri. Her role-reversing pro-choice musical, He's Having Her Baby, provided the focal point for the preceding article, and one of her earliest pieces, Half-Time, about football in American life, performed in front of a bank vault, launched the city's alternative space movement. Her other better-known pieces include Some of My Best Friends Are …, Love and Work and Other Four-Letter Words, Will the Real Foster Parents Please Stand Up? and Small Domestic Acts. To support her theatre work over the years, Lipkin has worked in roles as various as waitress, art critic, journalist, and television producer: initially trained as a historian, she has also taught at university level for ten years. She is, in her own words, ‘always a rabble-rouser, that's been in the family history for a while’. Lizbeth Goodman interviewed Lipkin in Canada, during the ‘Breaking the Surface’ festival and conference at the University of Calgary in November 1991.
Actor as Refusenik: Semiotics, Theatre Anthropology, and the Work of the Body
Authors: Stewart Nigel
Published: January 2009

‘Theatre’, Eugenio Barba has said, ‘is a possibility of shaping revolt’. Barba touched upon this belief in NTQ16 (1988), and he professed it again with considerable passion at the conclusion of the seventh public session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in April 1992. Directed by Barba and hosted by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR), the ‘Brecon ISTA’ was held in two parts – Working on Performances East and West, a practical exploration at Christ College, Brecon, from 4 to 10 April, being followed by a conference on 10 and 11 April at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, on Fictive Bodies, Dilated Minds, Hidden Dances. In the following exploration of the particular possibilities which theatre anthropology creates for revolt, Nigel Stewart, Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, considers Barba's direction of work in progress at the Brecon ISTA in terms of Derrida's and Kristeva's theories of the sign. Integral to this is an analysis of the relation between bios and logos – the ‘pre-expressive’ work of the body and the meanings which that work can produce – which is relevant to body-based performance theory and practice in general.
Fathers and Sons: Politics and Myth in Recent Zambian Drama
Authors: Crehan Stewart
Published: January 2009

The conflict of generations is a theme familiar enough in western drama – but less expected in an African context, with its strong traditions of ‘respectful, submissive behaviour towards the old in general, and towards one's parents in particular’. Yet a theme of aggression between fathers and sons has, argues Stewart Crehan, been discernible in a significant proportion of the plays staged in the last three festivals of the Zambian National Theatre Arts Association. He analyzes some of these plays, and examines the implications of the theme in the various social circumstances of contemporary Zambian society, besides discussing the ‘mythical dimension’ which is also involved. Stewart Crehan is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Zambia, and has been active in Zambian theatre as a playwright, actor, director, and adjudicator. He is author of a critical study and selected edition of the work of William Blake, and has published various articles on literature from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and on African drama and literature.
The Field Day Theatre Company and the New Irish Drama
Authors: Etherton Michael
Published: January 2009

In the previous article, the author exempted one company's work from her strictures on the present state of Ulster playwriting. That company was Field Day, based in the town whose very choice of name distinguishes Catholic from Protestant, Derry or Londonderry. Here, Michael Etherton outlines the aims of the company, which extend far beyond the theatrical, and also describes and assesses three plays which, although not all originating from Field Day, seem to him to reflect the distinctive ‘poetic and political view’ which he believes the company has nurtured. Most notable, be believes, is its attempt to reveal and replace the arid rhetoric to which beliefs and argument on both ‘sides’ have been reduced. Michael Etherton, presently teaching at King Alfred's College, Winchester, has previously published widely in the field of African theatre, on which he wrote in TQ10 of our original series, and he is preparing a volume on contemporary Irish drama for the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series.
There Are at Least Three Americas…
Authors: Feral Josette
Published: January 2009

The Theatre Festival of the Americas, launched in the summer of 1985. attempts to bring this huge continent – perhaps too often preoccupied with looking back to European and other antecedents – into mutual self-awareness: between North America and South, and between both hemispheres and the newly-assertive states of Central America. Josette Feral, currently teaching in the Département de Théâtre at the Université du Québec in Montreal, reports on the companies represented at the inaugural festival, and at what their work seems to suggest about present preoccupations and potential cross-fertilization.
New Terms for Old Turns: the Rise of Alternative Cabaret
Authors: Lidington Tony
Published: January 2009

It is ironic that interest in the roots of ‘alternative comedy’ is probably greater than ever before just as the most successful of its exponents are moving, in commercial terms, firmly into the mainstream. Perhaps that process is inevitable – and perhaps the drift into sitcoms and voice-overs does not matter so long as there remains a ferment of new activity, jostling for the less lucrative exposure of the smaller venues and the new cabaret circuit. The author of this survey, Tony Lidington, was himself in at the beginning of the ‘Pierrotters’ – which claims to be the first concert party to have existed in Brighton since the war, having now played four summer seasons there – and in 1983 he also founded the Bright Red Theatre Company. Here, he traces the development of the phenomenon of ‘alternative cabaret’ from its social and cultural beginnings, and looks at the present scene from the perspective of some fellow south coast performers – whose problems and ambitions are, he feels, representative of a nationwide network of diverse and, thankfully, often diverting talent.
On Playing Madame Butterfly
Authors: Soviero Diana
Published: January 2009

We rehearsed here at the Bastille for eight weeks, very slowly. Every finger, every movement was specific because of the lighting. The lighting is one of the most important things in the show. He has about four hundred and fifty lights on the sides and above. We could not, for instance, be parallel to each other. We always had to be on a diagonal, because the lights from the side would shadow. My hands are very important in the production because they are lit at every angle. They are made up very much. My whole body's made up. Every gesture, every point of every finger, is at the character; and every movement reflects the light. If my fingers are open, the light comes through. If I close them, that means I'm angry and I let no light in. It's really incredible. He's a genius, the man, he's a genius.
‘Best Betrayal’: the Documentation of Performance on Video and Film, Part 2
Authors: Melzer Annabelle
Published: January 2009

Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article, of which the first part appeared in NTQ42 (May 1995), deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents.Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography,Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving theChoiceand American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of that year. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared inArtforum, Theatre Research International, andComparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning bookDada and Surrealist Performancehas recently been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.
The ‘Art‘ of Political Theatre-Making for Educational Contexts
Authors: Whybrow Nicolas
Published: January 2009

In NTQ 39 (August 1994) Nicolas Whybrow provided an analysis of ideological changes which have recently occurred in the organization and running of schools and youth clubs. He went on to discuss the ways in which theatre in education (TIE) and theatre in youth work – commonly grouped under the title of Young People's Theatre (YPT) – were being affected by these changes. Here, in the second of two articles, he shifts his perspective towards the standpoint of theatre companies themselves, with a view to locating where the political efficacy of their practices might lie. Nicolas Whybrow is a lecturer at the Workshop Theatre, School of English, Leeds University.
Performance, Meaning, and the Materials of Modern Indian Theatre
Authors: Karnad Girish
Published: January 2009

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.
Crude Thinking: John Fuegi and Recent Brecht Criticism
Authors: Taxidou Olga
Published: January 2009

ALL LEFT-WING cultural practitioners and theoreticians have, at one time or another, been accused of Stalinism. Indeed, in many cases, this charge has to be taken on board, particularly after the collapse of existing state socialism. During the first few decades of this century most cultural activities, schools, and theories in many ways defined themselves within the context of existing or imaginary and utopian marxisms.
English Acting, Interactive Technology, and the Elusive Quality of Englishness
Authors: Trussler Simon
Published: January 2009

Acting style is arguably the most elusive of the theatre's always ephemeral traces – not least because each generation, while proclaiming its own actors to be more ‘natural’ than their predecessors, has tended in its criticism, as in actors' memoirs, to take style as a ‘given’. Anecdotage and plot synopsis have accordingly taken precedence over analysis of how performers actually worked and appeared on stage – let alone prepared their performances. Here, Simon Trussler introduces a project being launched at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Reader in Drama, to utilize the immense storage capacity of the CD-ROM both to record the evidence, verbal and pictorial, that has come down to us from the past, and to assess its relevance to present approaches to acting and to the playing of the classical repertoire. Specifically, the project aims to explore the ways in which the national identity – the quality of ‘Englishness’ – has been both reflected in and influenced by the ways in which it has been rendered on stage. In the succeeding article, Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues its consideration raises in relation to the Goldsmiths project. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the original Theatre Quarterly in 1971, and has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since its inception. The most recent of his many books on theatre and drama, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, was runner-up for the 1994 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Libraries Association, being cited as ‘an outstanding contribution to the literature of the theatre’.
Palimpsestus: Frank Wedekind's Theatre of Self-Performance
Authors: Kuhns David F.
Published: January 2009

Frank Wedekind's theatre art is usually approached through his dramatic writing: but the argument of this article is that the clearest understanding of the dramatist's career is to be gained through an encounter with his work as a performer. The stage was for Wedekind always a deeply personal and reflexive arena: as he once wrote, ‘the critics have often reproached me that my dramas are about myself. I would like to show that it's worth the trouble to bring myself onto the stage.’ In the following article, David Kuhns seeks to demonstrate the complicated nature of ‘performance’ as the term is applied to Wedekind – for his controversial plays and essays, scandalous satirical poems, cabaret appearances, and acting for the legitimate stage were all eclipsed by the notorious public persona which they constituted. This persona, Kuhns argues, became, even for Wedekind himself, inseparable from his self-perceived identity: it was both the real subject of his dramatic art and the essential character he performed. In short, Wedekind's career from beginning to end pursued a performative autobiographical dialectic of self-inscription and self-revision. The author, David Kuhns, teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory at Washington University in St. Louis.
John Osborne and the Myth of Anger
Authors: Sierz Aleks
Published: January 2009

John Osborne'sLook Back in Angeris one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Aleks Sierz examinesLook Back in Angernot as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. After showing how the anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, he goes on to show how John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in makingLook Back in Angerpart of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. He then questions the prevailing assumption, common in radical drama, that culture can be revolutionary, and asks whether radicalism in culture is a substitute for political radicalism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic forTribune.
Ta'wil of Action: the New World Performance Laboratory's Persian Cycle
Authors: Wolford Lisa
Published: January 2009

The New World Performance Laboratory is an experimental theatre company based in Cleveland, Ohio, founded by a number of artists who originally collaborated in the context of Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme. NWPL investigates traditional performance techniques of various cultures, conducting private research as well as mounting publicly-accessible productions. Iranian director Massoud Saidpour, a founding member of the company, has developed a series of performances based on Sufi teaching stories which explore the adaptation of traditional Persian materials and performance idioms for presentation by a culturally-diverse ensemble. Here, Lisa Wolford examines the traditions and source materials from which Saidpour's performance structures are derived, and considers the potential impact, both for participants and spectators, of working with material drawn from esoteric or initiatory genres. Lisa Wolford participated in Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme from 1989 to its conclusion in 1992. Her book on Objective Drama Research,The Intersection of the Timeless Moment, is forthcoming, and she is also co-editor with Richard Schechner ofThe Grotowski Sourcebook, to be published by Routledge. Her writings on Grotowski and the New World Performance Laboratory have appeared inThe Drama Review, and she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on Grotowski's recent work at Northwestern University.
Democracy and Deconstruction
Authors: Barnes Peter
Published: January 2009

In August 1995 I directed a studio production of an unfinished piece called Luna Park Eclipses for the National Theatre Studio. The production was non-public and experimental. We rehearsed for two weeks, and then put on a one-off show for an audience of about twenty-five. The cast comprised Peter Bayliss, Timothy Bateson, Dilys Laye, Diana Fairfax, Sheila Burrell, and David Neal.

The words ‘success’ and ‘failure’, mercifully, are not relevant in this context. If they were, the project could be called ‘sucessful’ if only because it threw up questions and I was encouraged to continue: the old mould had cracked open for a moment and I saw, briefly, drama in a new light again. A year later I decided to write about what I am trying to do in Luna Park Eclipses.
Performance, Theatre Training, and Research
Authors: Brown John Russell
Published: January 2009

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.
Oscar Asche: an Edwardian in Transition
Authors: Jackson Russell
Published: January 2009

Oscar Asche is one of a number of Edwardian actor-managers who have been largely ignored by theatre historians in favour of the dominant figure of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. Asche was one of that generation of directors, which also included Lewis Waller, Sir John Martin-Harvey, and Arthur Bourchier, who regarded the staging of pictorial productions of Shakespeare as a sign of status – a claim to be taken seriously in his profession. He had an adventurous career, representative in many respects of the energy and enterprise that characterized the Edwardian theatre – yet his work also exemplified attitudes and practices that would be discounted by a generation of playgoers enthused by different ways of interpreting Shakespearean drama, a new theatrical aesthetic, and the broader social and educational aims of the non-commercial stage. After his death in 1936, he was remembered more as the author of one of the new century's most successful romantic fantasies – Chu Chin Chow – than as a Shakespearean actor-manager. The author of this reassessment, Russell Jackson, is Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His publications include editions of plays by Wilde and Jones, and Victorian Theatre: a New Mermaid Background Book (1989). He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in Victorian criticism and performance.
Theatre of Witness: Passage into a New Millennium
Authors: Malpede Karen
Published: January 2009

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's playGoing to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, inThe Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder,Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. HerPeople's Theater in America(1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was herWomen in Theater(1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.
The Crystal of Acting
Authors: Risum Janne
Published: January 2009

‘An actor is seen as if through crystals’, wrote Artaud in 1925, and Janne Risum here uses the analogy of the prism within which to discuss the range of inter-reflecting and interpenetrating analogies the theatre has borrowed from the other arts and from life in its attempts to define itself – analyzing also why it seems impelled to do so through the use of metaphor. Drawing upon the work of major theatre practitioners including Decroux, Stanislavsky, Craig, Meyerhold, Lecoq, Mnouchkine, and Barba, she explores terms which have sometimes been sharply redefined, sometimes allowed to remain indeterminate but allusive. She concludes that ‘in acting, many crystals are possible. There is an infinite number of ways to cut your own crystal, and some pieces of basic advice. There is only one condition: you have to cut one.’ Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also an active participant in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published widely in the fields of acting, theatre history, and women in theatre, and contributed ‘The Voice of Ophelia’, a study of the performance of Julia Varley inThe Castle of Holstebro, to NTQ38 (May 1994).
When José Met Sally: Chicano Theatre in L.A. at Grassroots and Mainstream
Authors: van Erven Eugene
Published: January 2009

Playscript development programmes have been a significant breeding ground for new American drama since the mid'sixties, and in 1986 the Chicano playwright and director José Cruz González started a playwright development workshop specifically for the Latino community. Here, Eugene van Erven provides a bipolar view of the current Latino theatre scene in southern California by documenting the tenth anniversary session of González' Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep, and at the same takes a wider look at grassroots community theatre initiatives in the Chicano neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Eugene van Erven teaches in the American Studies programme at Utrecht University. Author of The Playful Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Radical People's Theatre (Indiana UP, 1988), he also designs and produces intercultural theatre projects.
Good Nights Out: Activating the Audience with 7:84 (England)
Authors: Holdsworth Nadine
Published: January 2009

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.
Behind the Arras, through the Wall: Wajda's ‘Hamlet’ in Krakow, 1989
Authors: Howard Tony
Published: January 2009

The list of female Hamlets, in which the most familiar names range from Siddons and Bemhardt to Frances de la Tour, is extraordinarily long. Tony Howard here discusses a great but much less familiar production featuring a female Hamlet, both in its socio-political context and in the context of the earlier work of its director, Andrzej Wajda. Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska was Wajda's Hamlet in Hamlet (IV) – which, momentously, opened in Poland in 1989, just as the Solidarity-led opposition came to power. Tony Howard, who is writing a cultural history of the phenomenon of female Hamlets, teaches at Warwick University. He has written for NTQ on Polish subjects ranging from the Marxist work of Jozef Szajna to such oppositional groups as Theatre of the Eighth Day and
Bernard-Marie Koltès: Chronology, Contexts, Connections
Authors: Bradby David , Chéreau Patrice
Published: January 2009

The plays of Bernard-Marie Koltès have been phenomenally successful, not just in Europe, but worldwide – his last work before his death in 1989, Roberto Zucco, having been performed in seventeen countries. Despite an early production of Twilight Zone by Pierre Audi at the Almeida Theatre in 1981, English appreciation has been tardy, but now this situation is set to change, with the Royal Court Theatre commissioning Martin Crimp to make a translation of Roberto Zucco, to be directed by James Macdonald, and Methuen bringing out a volume of Koltès's plays. These present a unique fusion of the French classical tradition combined with Shakespeare (he translated The Winter's Tale into French) and modern influences such as Genet and Fugard (he also translated The Blood Knot). After his death, Giles Croft wrote of Koltès: ‘He considered himself an outsider, rootless, and this perception of himself is reflected in his characters, whose tragedy is their inability to connect with one another, often despite their ability to articulate their despair. He created dark, mythic, polyglot worlds where people are dwarfed by or divorced from their surroundings: hotel rooms, construction sites, quaysides.’ Koltès's career was closely linked with that of Patrice Chéreau, who produced all his major plays, and who performed in his own production of In The Solitude of the Cotton Fields at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Here, David Bradby, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, contributes his own assessments of both men's life and work, to complement full chronological and bibliographical details of Koltès's career.
Modern and Postmodern Theatres
Authors: Bond Edward
Published: January 2009

The work of Edward Bond has featured regularly both in NTQ and the earlier Theatre Quarterly, from the interview and casebook published in TQ5 (1972) following the production of his version of Lear to Ian Stuart's study in NTQ39 (1994) of the concept of ‘Theatre Events’, as developed during Bond's workshops with Royal Shakespeare Company actors in 1992. A few months before his RSC production of his new play In the Company of Men last autumn, Edward Bond talked with Ulrich Köppen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Mainz, about the relevance of Theatre Events to the debate over modernism and postmodernism, in which Bond has also actively participated – not only through his dramatic works but in prefatory statements and published letters – and the ways in which such ideas illuminate and underpin his plays.
Theatre of Conflict in the Eritrean Independence Struggle
Authors: Plastow Jane
Published: January 2009

Eritrea is a newly independent country whose performing arts history, based on the music and dance of her nine ethnic groups, is only just beginning to be systematically researched. Western-influenced drama was introduced to the country by the Italians in the early twentieth century, but Eritreans only began to use this form of theatre in the 1940s. The three-part series here inaugurated is the first attempt to piece together the history of Eritrean drama, beginning below with an outline of its history from the 1940s to national independence in 1991. The author explores the highly political role drama played from the outset in Eritrea's struggle towards independence and the effort to mould this alien performance form into a public voice at least for urban Eritreans. Later articles will look at the cultural troupes of the Eritrean liberation forces and at post-independence work on developing community-based theatre. The research took place as part of the continuing Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project, which is involved with practical theatre development as well as theatre research. Although this opening article is written by Jane Plastow, she wishes to stress that it is the upshot of a collaborative research exercise, for which Elias Lucas and Jonathan Stephanus were research trainees. Most of the information used here is the result of interviews they conducted and of translations of articles in Tigrinya or Amharic which they located. Training in interview techniques and collaboration over translation of material into English was conducted by the project research assistant, Paul Warwick. Jane Plastow is the director of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project and a lecturer at Leeds University. She initiated the project at the invitation of the Eritrean government, after working in theatre for some years in a number of African countries, notably Ethiopia. She supervised the research for this project, and used her experience of African theatre and of the politics and history of the region to draw the available material into its present state as a preliminary history of Eritrean drama.
Gesture, Pop Culture, and Intertextuality in the Work of Lea Anderson
Authors: Dodds Sherril , Adshead-Lansdale Janet
Published: January 2009

Lea Anderson is one of the leading choreographers to have emerged over the past decade, her most characteristic work having been with the all-female group she co-founded, the Cholmondeleys, and its all-male counterpart, the Featherstonehaughs. This article explores the distinctively intertextual elements in Lea Anderson's work – elements which, the authors suggest, make it at once accessible, distinctive, and distinctively postmodern. Sherril Dodds addressed the relationships between postmodernism and popular culture in Anderson's work, with particular focus on the television image and the dance image, in her MA dissertation for the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she is currently a research student. Her co-author, Janet Adshead-Lansdale, is Head of Department at Surrey, and has also edited Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (1988) and co-edited Dance History: an Introduction (1994).
The Play of Eros: Paradoxes of Gender in English Pantomime
Authors: Holland Peter
Published: January 2009

Christmas pantomime, that peculiarly English form whose uncertain origins go back to the early eighteenth century, has evolved its own distinctive typology of cross-dressed characters, with a Principal Boy who is a girl, a Dame who is indisputably male, and even those humanoid visitors from the animal kingdom known as ‘skin parts’. David Mayer explored ‘The Sexuality of English Pantomime’ in the seminal ‘People's Theatre’ issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (TQ4, 1974), and twenty years on Peter Holland takes up the debate in the light of recent developments in sexual politics, critical approaches to gender – and, not least, the continuing and not always expected evolution of what remains a very live form indeed. Peter Holland is about to move from his present post as Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre in the Faculty of English at Cambridge to become the new Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. An earlier version of his present article was presented as a paper at the conference on ‘Eros e commedia sulla scena inglese’, at the Terza Università in Rome in December 1995.
Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968—1989
Authors: Kershaw Baz
Published: January 2009

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized – in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications includeEngineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook(with Tony Coult, 1983) andthe Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention(1992).
Theatre as a Complex Adaptive System
Authors: Armstrong Gordon
Published: January 2009

The functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is, as Gordon Armstrong argues in this article, among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to physical science. According to this view, the theatre, as a substrate of consciousness, was part of the package that defined modern man as a reflective species: whereas for the first four million years of human existence man was silent about a probable inner life, the dawn of empathy some 200,000 years ago saw a neural explosion – the enlargement of the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere of the brain, unlocking a new kind of reflective consciousness. In isolation, this aberrant neurological connection proved so advantageous for hunting and for communication that members of a tribe who possessed this aberration prospered: and adaptation to the ice ages that began 200,000 years ago was a motivating factor in stimulating the emergence of what we can recognize as art. Gordon Armstrong is immediate past Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Review Editor for Theatre Research International. He has taught at UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His full-length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words.
Releasing the ‘Profound Physicality of Performance’
Authors: Akalaitis JoAnne
Published: January 2009

In the following interview, JoAnne Akalaitis discusses her experiences as an actress and director with the Mabou Mines company; her artistic encounters with Beckett, Brecht, and Genet; her thoughts about the relationship between art and politics; and her belief in the connection between the physical and the emotional in performance. Deborah Saivetz is a director and performer who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey. She assisted JoAnne Akalaitis on her production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy Tis Pity She's aWhore at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and performed in Akalaitis's workshop production of The Mormon Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She had several opportunities to talk at length with Akalaitis during the months that they worked together.
Messing with Molière
Authors: Ebrahim Vincent
Published: January 2009

I came from Cape Town, South Africa, to Britain in 1976, after graduating at a drama school, and for the next fifteen years worked for InterAction, Common Stock, Joint Stock, the RSC, and the National, and in other theatres. In 1990 I began my association with Tara Arts by Playing the Mayor in Gogol's The Government Inspector.
The Multimedia Bard: Plugged and Unplugged
Authors: Goodman Lizbeth , Coe Tony , Williams Huw
Published: January 2009

The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare
Deus ex Machina: Navigating between the Lines
Authors: Hill Leslie
Published: January 2009

GOOD EVENING. Tonight I've been asked to talk to you about HTML – hypertext markup language – and its performative characteristics; its multimedia capacity; its non-linear structure; its interactive possibilities; its real-time relationship with its readers slash navigators slash audience; and its potential interest to writers cum artists cum performers.