bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Thatcher's Theatre — or, After ‘Equus’
Authors: Gottlieb Vera
Published: January 2009

A dozen years after the political and theatrical watershed of 1956 came those further shifts in social thinking of 1968. which were also reflected in major changes on the theatrical scene. Another twelve years on, any theatre people who were expecting such a collision of events in 1980 appeared to be waiting in vain. Yet, in retrospect, the impact of that first full year of a new kind of Conservative government can be seen as no less decisive, though its effects on the theatrical scene are only now beginning to make a kind of negative sense. Here, Vera Gottlieb argues that the tone of ‘Thatcher's theatre’ was already being set by such earlier plays as Peter Shaffer's Equus, in which she detects both the despair of rational solutions and the willing subjection to supposedly implacable forces that have since become characteristic of our national theatre as of our national mood. Vera Gottlieb. who is Principal Lecturer in Drama at Goldsmiths’ College. University of London, is the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982), is presently collaborating with Peter Holland on a study of Stanislavsky as director, and has been co-author and director of Red Earth (Hampstead, 1985) and Waterloo Road (Young Vic Studio. 1987).
Resources for a Journey of Hope: the Work of Welfare State International
Authors: White Michael
Published: January 2009

Founded by John Fox in Bradford in 1968, Welfare State International – WSI for short – is a consortium of freelance associates, many of whom have a fine art background. Funded by the Arts Council to research prototype forms of visual, celebratory theatre and ceremonial art, the company has achieved an international reputation for its original and pioneering work, having worked for and with communities throughout Britain and Europe, and as far afield as Japan, Australia, the USA, Canada, and Tanzania. Handcrafted celebratory events may variously incorporate specially made pyrotechnic animations, iceworks, architectural lanterns, carnival orchestras, oratorios of popular song, clay grottoes, mobile tableaux of performance art, theatrical transformations, surreal films, and infernal sculptural machines. WSI has consistently explored the territory between theatrical product and applied anthropology. In the original series of Theatre Quarterly, a feature in TQ8 (1972), compiled by John Fox, described and illustrated the company's early years, and in 1983 Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw edited a ‘Welfare State Handbook’ for Methuen, entitled Engineers of the Imagination. As the company celebrates its twentieth anniversary, its Development Director, Michael White, looks at some current directions and preoccupations in WSI's work and thinking.
The Professional's Guilty Conscience: a Letter from Poland
Authors: Hübner Zygmunt
Published: January 2009

Too often, western thinking about the Polish theatre is limited by its ‘exportable’ names – or, more insidiously, by the expectation that it should satisfy our own assumptions about how theatre ‘ought’ to be participating in the national struggle. Zygmunt Hubner is probably more typical of theatre professionals in Poland. As director of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, he neither supports the government, nor regards himself primarily as a maker of ‘political’ theatre: and here he describes the dilemma of the theatre worker who, while depending on state subsidy, nevertheless wishes to speak to his audiences in ways that matter. It is a dilemma which seems scarcely less conducive to arousing a ‘professional's guilty conscience’ in the theatre of the so-called ‘free world’.
David Jones Directs Chekhov's ‘Ivanov’
Authors: Allen David
Published: January 2009

In NTQ 13, David Allen began his exploration of the diverse approaches to Chekhóv by modern British directors with an analysis of Mike Alfreds's work on the plays. Here, he looks in detail at the production of one of Chekhov's least-revived but most controversial works. Ivanov, by David Jones. This revival, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, opened at the Aldwych Theatre. London, on 2 September 1976, with John Wood in the title role. David Allen places the production in the context of Chekhov's own comments on the play and its characters, of contemporary Russian society, and of earlier British productions: he then intercuts his own act-by-act description of Jones's production with the comments and recollections of the director and his leading players.
‘Oversights’: Notes on Theatrical Montage
Authors: Ceriani Giulia
Published: January 2009

In NTQ 5, Franco Ruffini analyzed the filmic concept of ‘montage’ as it could be applied to the study of live theatrical performance. Here, Giulia Ceriani offers the outline of a further proposal – to analyze theatrical techniques of montage in relation to the ‘point of sight’ of the spectator, acknowledging both the existence and the significance of the ‘oversights’ or ‘points of distorted view’ implicit in such a recognition of the nature of an audience's perception.
‘Brothers in Suffering and Joy’:the Appia–Craig Correspondence
Authors: Beacham Richard C.
Published: January 2009

The names of Appia and Craig are often linked as prophets of the ‘new’ theatre – and as early as 1915 critics were beginning to stake invidious claims as to which was the dominant ‘influence’. In fact, they arrived by separate paths at artistic conclusions some of which were compatible – and some of which reflected their very different temperaments and sense of theatrical priorities. At last, in 1914, the two men met, and until a few years before Appia's death in 1928 conducted an intermittent but intimate correspondence, which has previously been unpublished. Richard C. Beacham, who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, published a study of the relationship between Appia and Jaques-Dalcroze at Hellerau in NTQ 2 and 3, and here provides an illuminating commentary to extensive extracts from the Appia–Craig correspondence. His full-length study of Appia appears in the ‘Directors in Perspective’ series from Cambridge University Press.
Entertaining Mr. Loney: an Early Interview with Joe Orton
Authors: Loney Glenn
Published: January 2009

It is now twenty-one years since Joe Orton's death, though his relatively slender theatrical output has retained its freshness and power. After the modest West End success achieved by his first play to reach the stage. Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the New York production proved a failure, and the interview given by Orton to Glenn Loney in New York in October 1965, a few days before the Broadway opening, therefore went unpublished at the time. We print it now, as an intriguing sidelight on the attitudes and opinions of the playwright. It is placed in context by the widely-published theatre critic and teacher Glenn Loney, who also describes the brief, mainly epistolatory friendship with Orton that sprang from this first meeting.
Middlesex Music Hall: Fragment from a London Journal, 1894
Authors: Wedekind Frank
Published: January 2009

AT DINNER I mention that a few days before I had been to the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane. My neighbour to the left tells me that it is the commonest theatre in all London, and my neighbour to the right says that of its kind it ranks as the poshest. My neighbour across the way, Herr Mess of Frankfurt, asks me to take him along, please, if I ever go somewhere like that again. Did I have anything on for tonight? I say I meant to go to a music hall in Whitechapel. He is wildly enthusiastic, but takes so long to put on his overcoat that we shall be too late. Meanwhile we are joined by a young French Swiss and we go to the Middlesex Music Hall. Neither gentleman seems to have the foggiest notion of what sort of place it is. The dances bore them, the music isn't pretty enough for them. The girls on stage are too young for them, the audience too loud, they don't hear the tunes, they don't see the costumes and they don't feel the century-old atmosphere surrounding them. One of them takes his hometown paper out of his pocket, the other regrets he is unable to strike up an ‘acquaintance’ in his vicinity.
The Sign of the Light Heart: Jonson's ‘The New Inn’, 1629 and 1987
Authors: Womack Peter
Published: January 2009

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.
Hands off the Mask!
Authors: Fo Dario
Published: January 2009

Dario Fo needs no introduction, though he is less well known for his work as a critical theorist of theatre than in his role as a playwright. The original Theatre Quarterly was the first journal to publish his critical writing in English, and two of his more recent essays-‘Theatre of Situation’ and ‘Retrieving the Past. Exposing the Present’ - appeared in one of the earliest issues of New Theatre Quarterly. NTQ2 (1985). Here, we are pleased to publish Fo's brief but stimulating study of the conventions and the ‘language’ of theatrical masks, in which he outlines typologies stretching from Ancient Greece to commedia and beyond, and suggests some of the distinctive requirements for the contemporary actor of performing in mask. The translation is by Gail Macdonald.
The Theatres of Józef Szajna
Authors: Howard Tony , Łubienski Tomasz
Published: January 2009

In the summer of 1988 two events focused British attention on the great Polish scenographer Józef Szajna: he participated in an ambitious seminar at the Young Vic on the legacy of the absurd, and in a BBC documentary on the art produced by holocaust victims and survivors. After the war, Szajna emerged as a central figure for Polish theatre and then for the international avant-garde. He became a stage designer, sculptor, director, environmental artist, manager, scenarist and teacher. In the 1970s, Szajna created his famous series of dramatic ‘open theatre’ spectacles inspired by the lives and art of Witkiewicz, Dante, Cervantes, Mayakovsky - and Szajna. For Józef Szajna's biography has been extraordinary, harrowing, and iconic. His work has questioned the functions of theatre after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In his Warsaw flat-cum-studio and at the Studio Theatre, he surveyed forty years of work for New Theatre Quarterly, in conversation with the playwright Tomasz Lubienski - from a more literary theatrical tradition - and with Tony Howard, who here compiles a collage portrait of his career. The translations are by Barbara Plebanek.
The Sociology of the Theatre, Part Three: Performance
Authors: Shevtsova Maria
Published: January 2009

In the first part of this series, published in NTQ17. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacements of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. In Part Two, published in NTQ18. she examined in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which had an existing sociological literature—looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters, and then considering approaches to dramatic texts and genres. From the assessment of the relatively new discipline of theatre anthropology which concluded Part Two. she now turns to examine sociological approaches to the act of performance itself, analyzing in particular the various attempts by semioticians to provide an appropriately comprehensive vocabulary for its description, and measuring these against the pioneering work of Mikhail Bakhtin. She concludes her study with some practical examples of productions which illuminate the sociology of performance. Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed toModern Drama, Theatre International, andTheatre Papers, as well as to the originalTheatre Quarterlyand other journals.
The Fiction of Duality
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret, and more recently with the International School of Theatre Anthropology, has always been substantiated by a body of developed critical theory, and in NTQ he has specifically developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual. In NTQ1 (1985), he outlined the problems involved in analyzing theatre-works rooted in performance rather than the written word; in NTQ4 (1985) he discussed his concept of the ‘dilated body’, through which the performed taps the wellsprings of art and experience; and in NTQ16 (1988), he expanded his idea of the ‘body-in-life’, describing the balance of energies which is essential for the actor to be fully realized. Here, he looks at the way in which the body is falsely perceived as the ‘actor's instrument’, as somehow separate from himself, and discusses the processes of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ – which give the actor a true ‘second-nature’, and distinguish his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’.
But Is It Art? Female Performers in the Café-Concert
Authors: Harris Geraldine
Published: January 2009

The Café-Concert as an object of study has tended to attract the interest of art rather than theatre historians, despite the fact that it was the major form of popular entertainment in France during the nineteenth century. Similar but not identical to the English music hall of the same period, the Café-Concert produced a number of stars of national importance, a large majority of whom were women. Through the writings of journalists and commentators of the period, this article explores how these female performers were perceived and constructed as objects of the public gaze. The author, Geraldine Harris, is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, with interests in both popular and feminist theatre.
NTQ Checklist No. 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Authors: Williams Russell
Published: January 2009

Pasolini was an extremely unorthodox dramatist. A cult figure in the ‘sixties for his controversial art films, he cultivated notoriety as a rebel who challenged (and was persistently persecuted by) Italy's cultural and political establishment. ‘This hid the fact that, as well as being a successful film-maker, he was an innovative novelist and consummate poet, a tireless essayist, and a provocateur in cultural and social matters, as well as an expert critic and compiler of dialect poetry – a cultural entrepreneur in the fullest sense. The year he wrote the bulk of his theatre, 1966, marked the beginning of his last phase: self-consciously, he assumed both cultural and sexual heterodoxy as an act of defiance against the ‘horrendous universe’ of neo-capitalist Italy and the intolerance of its consumerist values. In Britain, he has been almost entirely neglected except as a film-maker, and much of his work – the entire corpus of theatre and most of his essays – has still to be translated into English. This checklist by Russell Williams will thus hopefully serve as an introduction to the work of an entirely original and provocative playwright. It is followed by a more extended study by Paolo Puppa of perhaps Pasolini's best-known piece for the theatre, Affabulazione.
‘Between Me and My Country’: Fugard's ‘My Children! My Africa!’ at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg
Authors: Gray Stephen
Published: January 2009

Continuing our coverage of South African theatre, which most recently featured a critical view of the policy of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, by David Graver and Loren Kruger (in NTQ19), we now include a consideration by South African writer Stephen Gray of one of the Market's most recent productions, by assuredly its best-known playwright, Athol Fugard. My Children! My Africa! is, claims Fugard, ‘between me and my country’. Here, Stephen Gray acknowledges and analyzes the ways in which the play focuses with a new intensity upon the agony of Fugard's native land, as realized by a cast of three: two unknowns, plus the veteran John Kani – here cast, controversially, as a coward and traitor to his people. Stephen Gray has also edited the documentary volume on Athol Fugard in McGraw-Hill's ‘Southern African Literature’ series.
Towards a Biological Theory of the Body in Performance
Authors: Pradier Jean-Marie
Published: January 2009

In previous issues of NTQ. we have begun to explore the complex questions raised by the interaction of the study of theatrical performance with other disciplines – notably, in the various interpretations of ‘theatre anthropology’, in the widely divergent approaches to ‘theatre sociology’, and even in terms of its application to quantum theory. Many of these studies have made necessary assumptions in the area of human biology without, however, fully following through their implications. Jean-Marie Pradier. who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Paris 8, here looks at theatre and other modes of performance as ‘biological events’, exploring their importance in the manifestation (and correction) of the way the human body works – in the process touching on areas as diverse as the bio-dramatic function of dreams, the significance of neo-natal rhythms, and olfactory stimulation as one of the influences upon crowd behaviour. Acknowledging the need for further research in the field. Pradier argues for the importance of the ‘body in performance’ being perceived in its biological context.
Political Theatre in Present-Day Chile: a Duality of Approaches
Authors: Cozzi Enzo
Published: January 2009

In NTQ15 (1988) Catherine Boyle surveyed the paradoxically rich variety of theatrical practices that have come to life in Chile under conditions of extreme hardship since the military takeover of 1973. She concluded that ‘there is more to be said about Chilean theatre and other interpretations to be made’. The following piece puts forward one such interpretation, by examining some of those practices in terms of the larger social and political questions at stake, and by drawing theatrical and historical parallels between the work of the two most important dramatists of the period – Juan Radrigán and Marco Antonio de la Parra – and the work and thought of Piscator. This article was written well before the developments that have brought Chile to the brink of a re-establishment of some kind of democracy, with the elections of December 1989 won by the opposition to Pinochet: but it still reaches an optimistic conclusion, which we can only hope is borne out by events. Enzo Cozzi is a Chilean who came to exile in Britain in the aftermath of the military coup. He now teaches in the Department of Drama at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. University of London, and runs a puppet theatre company. Travesura, devoted to Latin American popular culture.
‘Art and Working Life’: Australian Trade Unions and the Theatre
Authors: Watt David
Published: January 2009

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986). Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue – while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council – the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain – introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.
Grotowski, or The Limit
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

Jan Kott meets Jerzy Grotowski: a theatre critic, who has achieved in his work the merging of the interpretive and the creative acts, encounters the guru, as Kott describes him, whose life has been spent breaking down other boundaries – between ritual and theatre, between theatre and life itself. Both the original Theatre Quarterly and NTQ have been fortunate in publishing regular contributions from Jan Kott, and in his long-standing role as one of our advisory editors. Grotowski we have observed, even criticized, from a greater distance. Here, Jan Kott narrows the gap.
The Theatre Will Die with the Last of the Actors
Authors: Chkhikvadze Ramaz
Published: January 2009

A brilliant Richard III and King Lear, Ramaz Chkhikvadze has firmly established himself among the world's greatest Shakespearean actors, for whom Robert Sturua, director of the famous Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, orients all his productions. Here, the theatre critic Sergei Parkhomenko talks to Chkhikvadze about his work, and his personal definition of acting and the human qualities it demands.
‘Oh What a Lovely War’: the Texts and Their Context
Authors: Paget Derek
Published: January 2009

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.
The Parallel Chile: an Open Letter to Eugenio Barba
Authors: Noguera Hector
Published: January 2009

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist–Communist coalition government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The coup marked the beginning of severe repression against leftists, trade unionists, journalists, and artists, many of whom were exiled, killed, or merely ‘disappeared’ after being arrested. This letter focuses on the years following the coup: it was written almost one year before the plebiscite on 5 October 1988 when Chileans voted against Pinochet continuing in power as president for another eight years, preparing the way for the elections of December 1989. Despite these hopeful developments – and previous coverage of theatre under the dictatorship, by Catherine Boyle in NTQ 15 (1988) and Enzo Cozzi in NTQ 22 (1989) – we felt it important to publish this moving account by a Chilean actively involved in the struggle, written to Eugenio Barba following the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre they both attended in Lima, Peru, in April 1987. Its author, Hector Noguera, is a professor in the Theatre Department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as director of the university's professional theatre company, a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act, and president of the International Theatre Institute in Chile.
From ‘Büchner's Death’ —to Stalin's
Authors: Salvatore Gaston
Published: January 2009

Gaston Salvatore was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1941, of an upper middle class Chilean mother and an Italian father. After completing a degree in law, he went to Berlin in 1965, where he studied sociology, and together with Rudi Dutschke became one of the leaders of the student protest movement. He was arrested and obliged to leave Germany in 1969, returning briefly to Chile. In the early ‘seventies he went to Rome, where he worked with Michelangelo Antonioni. One of the results of that collaboration was his novel. Der Kaiser von China, published in 1979. He began his work in German with a cycle of poems, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung Natascha Ungeheurs, set to music by Hans Werner Henze, in 1970. His German theatre pieces include Büchners Tod (1972), Fossilien (1975), Freibrief (1977), Tauroggen (1978), Stalin (1985), and Lektionen der Finsternis (1989). A novel, Der Mann mit der Trommel, was published in 1974, and Salvatore's most recent work in that form, Waldemar Müller – ein deutsches Schicksal, appeared in 1982. Gaston Salvatore is co-editor with Hans Magnus Enzensberger of the Trans-Atlantik review, and also writes for Stern, Der Spiegel, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He now lives in Venice. The following interview with Salvatore by Alessandro Tinterri, one of the directors of the Actors’ Museum of Genova, took place in Venice in 1989, following two Italian productions of Salvatore's Stalin in a single season – one by the Compagnia del Collettivo di Parma, with Gigi Dall' Aglio and Michele De Marchi, and another by the Teatro di Sardegna, with Raf Vallone. The original German production opened in Berlin, at the Schiller-Theater on 31 October 1987, and was followed by several other productions, including one directed by Salvatore himself at Karlsruhe. In 1988 George Tabori staged the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with a woman, Angelica Damrose, in the title role. Alessandro Tinterri sets out in this interview to examine the background to Gaston Salvatore's work and to trace the multi-cultural pathways that have led to his present standing in the European, and especially German, theatre.
‘How Are the Mighty Fallen’: Aspects of Contemporary Israeli Theatre
Authors: Levy Shimon
Published: January 2009

Even at its most political, contemporary Israeli theatre tends to be self-referential – nowhere more so, suggests Shimon Levy, than in the theatre festivals held at Acre, where year by year over the past decade the plays selected seem to have reflected, more than coincidentally, the preoccupations of the nation, with its haunted past, its militaristic present, and a future full of uncertain or resented accommodations with neighbours for so long perceived as enemies. But Shimon Levy, who teaches in the Theatre Department at Tel Aviv University, also notes two exceptions in a generally gloomy theatrical scene: the exuberant entertainment Yanti Parazi – ‘a metaphor for the yearning for this screwed-up Holy Land’ – and a long-unperformed play on the ‘difficult’ subject of the West Bank occupation, Ephraim Returns to the Army, with its schitzoid title-character ‘deconstructing’ the conflicting elements of Israeli hopes and beliefs, for audiences not presumed to share the play's own progressive but unsentimentalized sympathies.
From Shakespeare to Shakespeare: the Theatre Transcended
Authors: de Berardinis Leo
Published: January 2009

In spite of periods of withdrawal, Leo de Berardinis is one of the few author-directors from the new Italian theatre of the 1960s and 1970s who has remained faithful to the spirit of experiment, and attempted consistently to renew himself and his processes of theatremaking. In an introduction to the interview which follows, Marco de Marinis outlines the earlier years of de Berardinis's career, and notes the characteristic features of the productions of that period. The interview itself explores his view of the theatre and theatricality from the standpoint of the mid-1980s. At its core is a discussion of de Berardinis's 1985 production of King Lear – the director's second encounter with the play – in relation to his own aims, to the interpretive views of other theatre people and critics, and to what de Berardinis believes we may still perceive of Shakespeare's intentions. A postscript by Marco de Marinis outlines subsequent developments in the director's work.
Decentralization as Chiaroscuro
Authors: Vinaver Michel
Published: January 2009

Michel Vinaver is a French playwright, born in 1927, who was exiled to the USA during the German occupation, and began to write in the 1950s – alongside a business career until 1982, when he became Professor of Drama Studies in the University of Paris. His complete plays have recently been published in two volumes by Actes Sud, and are widely-produced in France – but in the following article he claims that his few British productions, at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the Traverse in Edinburgh, have often been closer to his textual intentions. This is one of the problems he examines in the following wide-ranging article on the successes and limitations of the French post-war policy of theatrical Decentralization. Against the benefits of financial security and non-metropolitan bias, he weighs the failures to reflect regional cultures, and the cult of the director, with its continuous pressures to be ‘different’ in the interests of promotion and critical prestige. This paper was first presented at a conference at Birmingham University in April 1990. Readers with access to copies of the original Theatre Quarterly may also find it useful to refer to the special issue on People's Theatre in France, TQ23 (1976).
Why This Farce?
Authors: Gottlieb Vera
Published: January 2009

In exploring the repertoire of farce from its nineteenth-century exponents in France and England through the ‘typically British’ pre- and post-war varieties at the Aldwych and the Whitehall, to the work of such contemporary exponents as Alan Ayckboum and Michael Frayn, Vera Gottlieb also analyzes the ways in which ‘mechanistic’ or ‘clockwork’ kinds of farce are philosophically akin to absurdist drama. She suggests that English approaches to Chekhov have overlaid his work with similar assumptions – as in the contention of Michael Frayn, himself both a Chekhov translator and a highly successful farceur, that Chekhov's characters are ‘reduced by their passions to the level of blind and inflexible machines’. In arguing that this is not the case, she elaborates a crucial distinction between farces which, in effect, assume the impotence of human aspirations, and those in which behaviour derives from character rather than from imposed situations, thus offering at least the potential for change. Vera Gottlieb is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982) and Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Chadwyck-Healey, 1984). She was also translator and director of A Chekhov Quartet, first seen at the New End Theatre, London, in 1990, and subsequently at the Chekhov Festival in Yalta and the GITIS Theatre in Moscow.
Kantor, Memory, Memoire
Authors: Kott Jan
Published: January 2009

The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died in December 1990 at the age of seventy-five. Also a poet and painter, who designed his own work for the stage, Kantor brought to the traumatized and Stalinized post-war Polish theatre a sensibility saturated in the pre-war avant-garde: but he was only able to give theatrical expression to this after 1956, when a marginally more liberal climate allowed him to form his own company. For this company, Cricot-2, Kantor created a sequence of scrupulously orchestrated works in which he was always present, half witness, half auteur – works which were redolent of an apocalypse that had already occurred, yet remained eternally imminent. The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and, most recently, Today Is My Birthday all toured widely, evoking for their audiences a past at once scrupulously ‘real’ in its physical texture yet macabre in its experiential pain. Kantor's fellow countryman and near-contemporary Jan Kott here evokes the distinctive sources and qualities of memory in Kantor's work. An advisory editor of New Theatre Quarterly and of Theatre Quarterly, Jan Kott has been a frequent contributor to both journals, most recently with a study of ‘The Gender of Rosalind’ in NTQ26, which extended the line of thinking of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.
Anti-Oedipus? Dada and Surrealist Theatre, 1916–35
Authors: Nicholls Peter
Published: January 2009

In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.
Women' Theatre in Ireland
Authors: Wilmer Steve
Published: January 2009

So close was the relationship between women and the Irish literary and theatrical renaissance that the severely diminished feminist role in contemporary Irish cultural and theatrical life contrasts all the more revealingly with the early achievements. In this article, which is an expanded version of a paper given at the 1990 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at Glasgow University, Steve Wilmer etches in the historical perspective, notably the significance of women's writing to the nationalist as well as the suffragist movement, and outlines the present situation, in which the solid advances being made by women directors and administrators are only slowly being reflected in an increase in women's theatre writing and support for feminist theatre groups, let alone the assumption of real theatrical power. Steve Wilmer teaches in the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is the author of several plays, including Scenes from Soweto.
Drawing the Black and White Line: Defining Black Women's Theatre
Authors: Brewster Yvonne
Published: January 2009

Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.
The Indigenous Theatre of Kanhailal
Authors: Bharucha Rustom
Published: January 2009

Our coverage of Indian theatre in NTQ, as in the original Theatre Quarterly, has been as full as opportunities allowed — notably, including a major four-part assessment by Kenneth Rea in TQ30–34 (1978–79), and a three-part personal casebook by Rustom Bharucha of his production of Kroetz's Request Concert, as adapted to the needs of different Indian cities, in NTQ11–13 (1987–88). The fact that we have never covered the theatre of the state of Manipur, which adjoins Burma and Bangladesh on India's north-eastern border, is all too symptomatic of its more general neglect – at one extreme by central government, and at the other by those who might usefully learn from and contribute to the development of its indigenous theatre. Here, Rustom Bharucha – now based once more in his home city of Calcutta, after a period of work in the United States – explains the background of exploitation and deprivation against which he proceeds to set the indigenous theatre work of the director Kanhailal. Looking in particular at Pebet, a play from the 'seventies based on folk tradition, and at the more recent Memories of Africa, Bharucha attempts to draw some conclusions about the problems and the potential of ‘seeing our cultures from below’ by means of a theatre that springs from and connects with the needs of the people.
From Ulro – to Gardzienice
Authors: Majcherek Janusz
Published: January 2009

TO GET TO GARDZIENICE, you have to go by train or car for two or three hours. This is the journey in the ordinary sense of the word. Once you have arrived at the village, you begin a very different kind of journey as you hike the country paths, struggle down ravines, run over meadows – as you walk by the light of the sun during the day or torches at night.
Responses to Revolution: the Soviet Union Portrayed in the British Theatre, 1917–29
Authors: Nicholson Steve
Published: January 2009

In theatrical parlance, ‘political’ is often taken to be synonymous with ‘left-wing’, and research into political theatre movements of the first half of this century has perpetuated the assumption that the right has generally avoided taking politics as subject matter. This article, the first of two about British political theatre in the 1920s, concentrates on plays about Communism and the Soviet Union during the decade following the Russian Revolution, and offers some contrasting conclusions. Steve Nicholson, Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds, argues that, whether such plays shaped or merely reflected conventional views, they were used by the establishment for the most blatant and explicit propaganda, at a time when it felt itself under threat from the Left. The article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays, housed in the British Library, and derives from a broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre from 1917 to 1945.
Cole Porter in Britain
Authors: Moore James Ross
Published: January 2009

The place of Cole Porter – the centenary of whose birth fell last June – within the tradition of the American musical has been well documented and fully discussed. Usually, however, this is at the expense of his earliest work, first as an exponent of Gilbertian pastiche, later as a dilettante ex-legionnaire in France – and then, as he grew aware of his own potential as a professional, in his work for the London theatre in the 1920s and early 1930s. Much of this was for revues mounted by the legendary impresario C. B. Cochran, though in 1933 the production of Nymph Errant proved to be his first and last original, full scale book musical for Britain, shortly before Porter's decision to move his home as well as his ambitions to Broadway. James Moore is a Cambridge-based writer, whose current work in progress includes a book on the British–American musical theatre and a full-length biography of Cochran's great rival, André Chariot – with whom Cole Porter finally collaborated in 1934, contributing ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ to the topical revue Hi Diddle Diddle.
Body Language, the Idea of the Actress, and Some Nineteenth-Century Actress-Heroines
Authors: Hankey Julie
Published: January 2009

The actor, as a reminder of personal mutability, has always provoked the condemnation of absolutist philosophers and churchmen. Historically, this anti-theatrical prejudice has pressed even harder on the actress, for in her case ‘personal’ connotes sexual mutability. In Victorian times, when purity was enjoined on Woman for Man's sake as well as her own, the actress's situation was further complicated. In the following article, Julie Hankey examines the treatment of actress-characters in certain novels of the nineteenth century – Wilkie Collin's No Name, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Henry James's The Tragic Muse, among others – exploring in particular their peculiarly physical system of representation, a system which reproduced the social and moral attitudes of the day on a more visceral level of irrational prejudice. Irrespective of their artistry or sympathies, authors were remarkably consistent in their use of the same relatively narrow but at the same time powerful range of signals – dress, pose, interiors, gardens, flowers, and so on – clearly confident that by this means the actress could be adequately expressed. Julie Hankey is presently co-editor of the ‘Plays and Performance’ series, now published by Cambridge University Press, and has herself prepared the individual volumes on Richard III and Othello.
Meyerhold and Evreinov: ‘Originals’ at Each Other's Expense
Authors: Pearson Tony
Published: January 2009

Our occasional series of original theatre documents continues with this translation, the first in English, of an article written in 1915 by the Russian director Nikolai Evreinov attacking his contemporary and erstwhile colleague Vsevolod Meyerhold for artistic plagiarism – an attack which, of course, reveals as much about the susceptibilities and private jealousies of its perpetrator as it does about its object. Tony Pearson, who currently teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, accompanies his translation with a full introduction and commentary, setting the polemics within the context of the Russian and early Soviet theatre, and the subsequent, separate careers of the two personalities involved.
Which Freedom? An Overview of Contemporary Bulgarian Theatre
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella , Goodman Lizbeth
Published: January 2009

Our ‘Update from Eastern Europe’, following this article, includes reports from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia – on all of which countries we have published earlier features concerning the problems faced by theatre people in the wake of the disintegration of the Communist bloc. However, the theatre of Bulgaria has been little previously noticed, whether by NTQ or its contemporaries, and requires a more detailed overview. This is now provided by Gabriella Giannachi and Lizbeth Goodman, who visited the country in October 1991, interviewing a wide range of people working in its theatres and seeing a selection of productions in which they were involved. Gabriella Giannachi is a graduate student based at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, whose series of feminist theatres interviews has been published in earlier issues of NTQ.
Stary Theatre: Ensemble in a New Climate
Authors: Raper Kate
Published: January 2009

ARTISTICALLY, Stary Theatre, Krakow, has maintained an impressive record since the 1950s. It has been a source of innovative directors including such giants as Swinarski, Jarocki, and Wajda, as well as a talented younger generation – Bradecki, Gzegor-zewski, and Lupa. It has also been a focus for good actors and designers: quite simply, it is a company for which almost everybody wants to work.
Meyerhold: the Final Act
Authors: Braun Edward
Published: January 2009

The process of rehabilitating the reputation of the great Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold began soon after Krushchev's repudiation of Stalinism in 1955. However, it was only with the recent opening of the KGB files on ‘Case No. 537’ that the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his trial and presumed execution was finally resolved. The full story, which combines the horrific torture of an old, sick man with the petty niceties of bureaucratic form-filling, has been gradually unfolding in Russian-language journals over the past three years: and here Edward Braun provides the first detailed account in English of what happened to Meyerhold – and to his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh – between the liquidation of his theatre in January 1938 and his own liquidation on 2 February 1940. Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, edited the pioneering English-language selection from Meyerhold's writings, Meyerhold on Theatre, in 1969, and in 1979 published his major critical assessment, The Theatre of Meyerhold, now in process of revision to incorporate the new material released in recent years. He also contributes to this issue of NTQ a report on the opening of the new Meyerhold Centre in Moscow.
Feminist Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect
Authors: Goodman Lizbeth
Published: January 2009

Despite widespread interest in the subject, there has been no previous attempt to collect comprehensive information concerning the history and present working conditions of feminist theatre companies in Britain: and so, with the exception of a very few assessments of particular companies, all too often what passes for critical analysis has had to depend on partial or merely anecdotal evidence. As part of her research for her book, Contemporary Feminist Theatres, forthcoming from Routledge in March, Lizbeth Goodman sent out between 1987 and 1990 a detailed questionnaire to 223 companies and organizations identified as having relevant concerns – whether in terms of company membership, production methods, policy aims, or targeted audience. With a response from 98 of these in hand, she assembled a detailed data-base from which the following article derives – describing the methods and aims of the survey itself, the nature of the response, and the needs in specific areas it revealed, both for the companies themselves and for the future assessment of their work. Lizbeth Goodman, currently a Lecturer in Literature for the Open University, has previously compiled a sequence of ‘Feminist Theatre Interviews’ for NTQ, and most recently contributed an overview of the state of contemporary Bulgarian theatre to NTQ32 (November 1992).
The Heroine, the Harpy, and the Human Being
Authors: Walter Harriet
Published: January 2009

An earlier version of this paper was written by Harriet Walter in December 1991 for the second Divina Conference in Torino, in response to an invitation to speak from the actress's point of view about playing Shakespeare's women. In the event, she ranged much more widely across the typology of women's roles in the theatre, and the actress's response to their challenges – and limitations. The paper has since been delivered, in roughly the present form at the University of Cambridge Graduate Drama Seminar in February 1992, and in March 1992 was read in extract and discussed on a BBC Radio programme in the Art Works Series for the Open University. Opposite, Lizbeth Goodman sets the paper in the context of Harriet Walter's theatrical career.