bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Circumstances of an Attempt
Authors: Duff R. A.
Published: January 2009

This paper defends a version of the doctrine that the mens rea of a criminal attempt should consist in intention as to the central or consequential aspects of the actus reus of the complete offence, even when such intention is not required for that complete offence, but need only involve recklessness as to the circumstantial aspects of the complete offence if such recklessness suffices for the complete offence. Attempted rape should require an intention to have sexual intercourse, but only recklessness as to the fact that the woman does not consent. Attempted criminal damage should require an intention to destroy or damage (though the complete offence requires no such intention), but only recklessness as to the fact that what is destroyed or damaged is“property belonging to another”.
The Attribution of Culpability to Limited Companies
Authors: Sullivan G. R.
Published: January 2009

Legally, it is possible to say of a particular company that it is a party to a criminal conspiracy, that it has acted dishonestly or that its conduct in matters of safety is so deficient as to amount to manslaughter. The mechanism which has brought most serious crimes within the competence of companies to commit is, of course, the concept of corporatealter egoor, more precisely, the doctrine of identification. This concept takes the conduct and state of mind of certain high-ranking officials to be the conduct and state of mind of the company itself, so that it may commit directly crimes which are not attributable to a company merely on a basis of vicarious liability.
The Law and the Courts of Palestine
Authors: Bentwich Norman
Published: January 2009

In his Introduction to the Handbook of Palestine, which appeared last year, the High Commissioner, the Eight Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel, wrote: “If I were called upon to express in a single word the distinguishing characteristic of Palestine, I should say ‘diversity.’” What is true of the physical characteristics, the climate, the religions, the peoples, and the civilizations of that little country is equally true of its laws and its judicial systems.
Motor-cars and the Rule in Rylands v. Fletcher: a Chapter of Accidents in the History of Law and Motoring
Authors: Spencer J. R.
Published: January 2009

Readers of A. P. Herbert's Misleading Cases will recall the fictitious decision in Haddock v. Thwaile, where the Court of Appeal extended strict liability under Rylands v. Fletcher to motor-cars on the highway, and—carried away on a tide of Luddite eloquence—revived and extended the law of deodand by ordering the unfortunate motorist's car to be destroyed. Nowadays it is almost forgotten that this story is nearly based on fact. Before the First World War, at the dawn of the motor age, the English courts came within a whisker of imposing strict liability upon the owner of a motor-car for all the damage which it causes in use.
Transnational Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Public Laws
Authors: Carter P. B.
Published: January 2009

The title of this article is not felicitous, but the author has not been able to think of one which would be palpably less infelicitous.

The word “transnational” is used simply to indicate that the article is not concerned with inter-state or inter-Provincial situations of the sort liable to arise in federal or composite constitutional structures.
Some Problems about Precedent
Authors: Goldstein Laurence
Published: January 2009

Before this article went to press, I was fortunate enough to receive a set of comments from Jim Evans. These comments are contained in his “The Status of Rules of Precedent: A Brief Reply” which is printed in this volume, and I have adopted the editor's suggestion of incorporating a response to Evans in my text. Remarks provoked by Evans's note occur at the end of Section II and the end of Section III.
Beyond O'Reilly V. Mackman: The Foundations and Nature of Procedural Exclusivity
Authors: Forsyth C. F.
Published: January 2009

The position of applicants for judicial review has been drastically ameliorated by the new Order 53. It has removed all those disadvantages, particularly in relation to discovery, that were manifestly unfair to them and had, in many cases, made applications for prerogative orders an inadequate remedy if justice was to be done … Now that those disadvantages to applicants have been removed and all remedies for infringements of rights protected by public law can be obtained upon an application for judicial review, as can also remedies for infringements of rights under private law if such infringements should also be involved, it would in my view as a general rule be contrary to public policy, and as such an abuse of the process of the court, to permit a person seeking to establish that a decision of a public authority infringed rights to which he was entitled to protection under public law to proceed by way of an ordinary action and by this means to evade the provisions of Order 53 for the protection of such authorities.

(per Lord Diplock in O'Reilly v. Mackman [1983] 2 A.C. 237 at 285)
Restating the Scope of the Derivative Action
Authors: Sullivan G. R.
Published: January 2009

By equitable concession a shareholder may bring a representative action, ostensibly on behalf of himself and fellow shareholders, but in reality for the company, to permit corporate recovery against persons in a position of control who have perpetrated a fraud on the company. Such “derivative” actions form an exception to the axiom, expressed as one aspect of the rule in Foss v. Harbottle, that in matters of corporate recovery the proper plaintiff is the company itself.
The Lords and Impossible Attempts, or Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Authors: Williams Glanville
Published: January 2009

Stephen J. once said that the drafting of a statute should aim at a degree of precision which a person reading in bad faith cannot misunderstand; and it is all the better if he cannot pretend to misunderstand it. The decision of the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in Anderton v. Ryanshows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to achieve these objectives.
How Esau Sold his Birthright
Authors: Daube David
Published: January 2009

Wherever there exists any kind of administration of justice, people will soon realize that a man who makes, or receives, a declaration has to be very careful if he wants to be quite sure of its ultimate legal effect; and the same, of course, is true of all manner of legal business. A man may believe that the promise he is giving has one meaning, but later be told by the judge that it has another; or he may enter into an agreement on the assumption of the existence of certain facts, which afterwards turn out not to be as assumed. There are many ways in which such a discrepancy between verba and voluntas, or letter and spirit, or act and intent, can come about; and a not infrequent one seems to be that the two parties to a contract wish to cheat one another. Very naturally, the temptation to take advantage of a person's lack of forethought must be particularly great in an age when it is permissible to interpret the words of an agreement in a strict and narrow fashion, and when a formal undertaking is considered valid no matter by what trickery you have been led to give it. The Spartan king, Cleomenes, concluded a truce with Argos for thirty days; but he broke it by night, the truce having been made for thirty days. Q. Fabius Labeo, for the Roman senate, arbitrated a boundary dispute between Nola and Naples. He interviewed the parties separately, appealed to their generosity and induced them to make substantial concessions. In the end, there was a large strip of territory left between Nola and Naples, which Labeo awarded to Rome. By the time of Cicero, both these cases were regarded as cases of fraud and as illustrating the maxim summum ius summa iniuria. The history in Roman law of the problem of verba and voluntas has been the subject of much discussion during the past few years. I may, perhaps, be forgiven for drawing attention to a Biblical narrative which is dominated by this problem, though the commentators do not appear to have noticed it. It is the story of the sale of his birthright by Esau.
Child Custody Appeals: The Search for Principle
Authors: Forder Caroline , Ward Robert
Published: January 2009

The vagueness and uncertainty of application of the principles used to determine child custody appeals continue to cause great problems for the legal practitioner who must advise a client aggrieved by a decision at first instance. Child custody is an area where the right of appeal is unrestricted, but appeal court judges have nonetheless shown a marked tendency towards self-restraint in the exercise of their appellate jurisdiction. Two principal reasons are commonly given for this: first, the trial court in a child custody dispute often has a special advantage not possessed by the appeal court, in that it has seen and heard the witnesses; secondly, and more generally, the determination of a child custody dispute involves an exercise of discretion on the part of the trial court, in which the paramount consideration is the welfare of the child. For these reasons, which are considered in detail in the following section, it is perceived to be necessary to allow trial courts a degree of latitude. However, although the necessity for appellate self-restraint is generally accepted, there has been and continues to be wide disagreement as to the form which that self-restraint should take. In addition, there are many reported cases in which an appeal court has acknowledged the need for self-restraint, only to succumb to the temptation to intervene on the facts before it. The result of the absence of a principled justification for intervention is that there is no rational basis upon which parties can assess the strengths of their respective positions.
The Nature of Contractual Obligation
Authors: Buckland W. W.
Published: January 2009

In his ‘Common Law’ Mr. Justice Holmes expressed the view (see pp. 300, 301), that a contract is properly to be regarded as the taking of a risk creating a liability to pay damages in a certain event. ‘The only universal consequence of a legally binding promise is, that the law makes the promisor pay damages if the promised event does not come to pass.’ In the Pollock-Holmes'Letters the matter is frequently discussed, and there are various passages from which we can get his views in detail (see vol. i, pp. 21, 119, 177; vol. ii, pp. 55, 200, 234). His position seems to be that liability in Contract is completely analogous to that in Tort. If you commit a tort you are liable to pay damages. If you commit a contract you are liable to pay damages, unless something happens, i.e., performance, over which you may or may not have control (i, 177). It is a conditional liability to pay damages. There is, he holds, no reason to speak of ‘promise’ in the matter at all, in particular, the performance and the payment of damages are not to be thought of as alternative obligations (this in answer to an objection by Pollock).
The Development Risk Defence of the Consumer Protection Act 1987
Authors: Newdick Christopher
Published: January 2009

The European Directive on Product Liability introduces a new regime of strict product liability to the member states of the Community. Those injured by products may recover by showing that the product is “defective,” i.e., that it “does not provide the safety which a person is entitled to expect. …” The advantage of this approach for the individual is that liability turns on the existence of a defect alone. Unlike the law of Negligence, no question of foresight of the danger, or of the precautions taken to avoid it, arises for consideration. Strict product liability depends on the condition of the product, not the fault of its maker or supplier.
The Balance of Power in Family Decisions
Authors: Bainham Andrew
Published: January 2009

The Decision of the House of Lords in Gillick v. West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority raises fundamental questions concerning the nature of the legal relationship between parents and children and the role of the State in regulating decision-making within the family. Public attention has been focused on the issue of the provision of contraceptives to girls under the age of sixteen years, yet the decision has implications which go well beyond this specific matter. First, the decision invites a re-examination of the approach of English law to the concept of parental rights. Secondly, Lord Scarman's reference to “the child's right to make his own decisions” suggests that it may not be long before a coherent concept of children's rights is incorporated into the law. This would constitute a significant development since although the welfare of children is considered paramount in legal disputes concerning their custody or upbringing, references to the “rights” of children either in statute or case law are comparatively rare. On the occasions when the judiciary recognise that children have rights it is considered a matter of some note.
‘To A and his Issue’: The Law of Property Act, 1925, Section 130 (2)
Authors: Bailey S. J.
Published: January 2009

Before 1926, entailed interests could exist in real property but were impossible in personal property. In order to create an entailed interest in real property, strict words of limitation (e.g., ‘in tail’ or ‘and the heirs of his body’) were essential except in the case of gifts by will. In a will, certain informal phrases, such as ‘and his issue,’ were sufficient. This situation was altered by section 130 of the Law of Property Act, 1925, whereby (a) even personal property may now be entailed, (b) strict words of limitation are now essential in every case.
Warranties of Land in the Reign of Richard I
Authors: Bailey S. J.
Published: January 2009

The reign of Richard I offers certain advantages to those who would A study the land law of that time. Glanvill's De Legibus shows the law as it stood immediately before the reign began; and, five years later, the earliest surviving rolls of the Curia Regis show the King's Justices applying it. These rolls have been printed and so are easily available. They carry the story from the summer of thé year 1194 to the end of the century and beyond. Unfortunately, however, they present certain difficulties. In those days, a plea of land before the King's Justices was ordinarily a lengthy matter, extended by essoins and adjournments over several terms or even years. And when one attempts to trace such a plea to its substantial hearing or to judgment one often fails. Perhaps the roll of the crucial term is missing, or the Justices have adjourned the case from Westminster into the Eyre—whereof few records survive. Perhaps the official scribe has so spelled or altered or contracted the names of the parties as to defy recognition; or the case may have ended prematurely by the death of a party or by some compromise not discoverable among the Feet of Fines. Meanwhile, moreover, one is conscious that these records of the law administered by the King's Justices tell us little or nothing of Shire Court and Court Baron, wherein much of the litigation still lay.
Some Notes on the Office of Master of the Rolls
Authors: Hanworth Lord
Published: January 2009

The origins of the Office of Master of the Rolls are to be sought in the history of the development of the Chancery. The Chancery was at first a branch of the royal household closely connected with the king's chapel. The Chancellor was simply the king's chaplain who in the intervals of his proper duties acted as the king's secretary. As such he became the custodian of the king's seal,—later to be called the great seal to distinguish it from other and smaller seals,—and at length his secretarial duties increased so far that he became the head of a great administrative department.
The Statute of Uses and the Power to Devise
Authors: Megarry R. E.
Published: January 2009

It is commonly stated that one of the many effects of the Statute of Uses, 1535, was that the power of devising land which had been acquired by means of uses was abolished. It has also been said that this power ‘would subsequently have been recovered through that construction of the Statute which afterwards gave rise to the modern system of trusts’,i.e.by the enforcement of a use upon a use as a trust. The object of this article is to suggest that on the construction of the Statute which became generally accepted by the Courts the Statute never in fact made it impossible to make what was in effect a devise by means of a use, but augmented the power to devise by making it possible to pass the legal estate; and further, that this fact was recognized long before the Restoration when uses upon a use were first regularly enforced as trusts.
Departmental Legislation
Authors: Wade E. C. S.
Published: January 2009

The Report of the Committee on Ministers' Powers has now been available for more than a year, and the Committee's recommendations as to how far steps should be taken to secure the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of law in the sphere of delegated legislation and judicial or quasijudicial powers exercised by Ministers of the Crown are well known. The Report has been reviewed and criticized by (inter alios) Dr. W. A. Robson, one of the principal witnesses before the Committee, and Mr. W. I. Jennings. Both of these writers are teachers of law, and their observations should be carefully studied.
Pleading and Proof at Common Law
Authors: Hollond H. A.
Published: January 2009

Few laymen know that the expression ‘the pleadings’ in an action denotes the written allegations of fact which each party is required to communicate to his opponent before trial, in order that each may know what contentions he will have to meet, if possible, by evidence, and that an issue, or issues, of fact or of law may emerge. This unexpected meaning comes down in direct descent from the Middle Ages, when opposing counsel strove in Court to extract an issue from the conflicting pleas (placita) submitted by them orally.

Thirteenth century.

During the earlier part of this country proof was formal and the function of the Court was to declare which of the parties must go to proof and how. In certain classes of cases proof by battle was appropriate, in others proof by oath—either the oath of the party, supported by oath-helpers, or the oath of witnesses.
Blackstone's Commentaries
Authors: Dicey A. V.
Published: January 2009

BLACKSTONE'S Commentaries on the Laws of England was on its appearance received with unbounded admiration. It was felt to be a work of untold originality. The author became at once the Great Commentator. In the eyes of his earliest readers he was not only an erudite lawyer and a charming writer, but also a profound jurist. The Annual Register for 1767—then edited by Burke—contained a lengthy eulogy of the book. The review may well have been written by Burke himself.
From Half-Century to Millennium: the Theatre and the Electric Spectator
Authors: Bentley Eric
Published: January 2009

Well into his eighth decade, Eric Bentley now regards himself as primarily a playwright, having redefined the agenda of serious criticism during the early post-war years, pioneered the understanding, translation, and production of Brecht in the West, and for long combined academic work at Columbia with producing the best kind of regular theatre reviews. Apart from several collections of that ‘occasional’ writing, and anthologies of plays in translation which have helped to extend the range of the English-language repertoire, he has produced several full-length studies of seminal importance – from his early re-evaluation of Shaw and, in The Playwright as Thinker, of other major modern dramatists, to the more theoretical but invariably stimulating ‘rethink’ of dramatic genres in The Life of the Drama. More recently, he has devoted his time to active playwriting, and it was during a production of his Lord Alfred's Lover in Miami that the director and self-proclaimed ‘counterfeit critic’ Charles Marowitz persuaded him to discuss the present state of both the active theatre in the West – and of the condition of the critical trade he had once pursued.
Wole Soyinka's ‘Death and the King's Horseman’, Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Authors: Rohmer Martin
Published: January 2009

In large part due to the relative lack of productions in Europe, the plays of Wole Soyinka have mostly been approached from a literary point of view rather than analyzed as theatrical events. Because the plays rely heavily on non-verbal conventions, this neglect of visual and acoustic patterns promotes an incomplete understanding of Soyinka's idea of theatre. Here, for the first time, a play by Soyinka is analyzed from the point of view of performance – specifically, the production of Death and the King's Horseman staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1990. Martin Rohmer examines the transformation of playscript into mise-en-scène, focusing in particular on the use of music and dance, but looking also at the production as an intercultural event – asking not only how far a European company has to rely on African performing skills, but how far a European cast and audience is capable of a proper understanding of the play. This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held in Bayreuth in June 1992. Martin Rohmer studied Drama, German Literature, Anthropology, and Philosophy in Munich, and Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, before completing his MA in Munich in 1992. Presently he is a Research Assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he is working on a PhD on the performing arts in Zimbabwe.
From Bankside to the West End: a Comparative View of London Audiences
Authors: Gardiner Caroline
Published: January 2009

The received wisdom regarding the composition of the audience for Shakespeare's theatre has shifted in accordance with the social assumptions of the times – from Alfred Harbage's assertion of a popular, homogeneous audience, evolved for the egalitarian 'forties, to Ann Jennalie Cook's argument for a ‘privileged’ audience, put forward in the elitist 'eighties. While Andrew Gurr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London corrects the worst excesses of both views, it remains dependent upon a great deal of inference from inadequate documentation, often directed to other purposes, and sometimes upon necessary guesswork, however rooted in common-sense. Caroline Gardiner teaches and researches in the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, whence have emerged the most detailed attempts to ‘profile’ the theatregoing populace of contemporary London: and here she suggests that some of the approaches and even the findings of modern audience researchers may shed new light on the controversy. Sometimes the results are surprising – and include the possibility that, relative to the pool of population available, theatre is now actually a more popular activity than in Shakespeare's London. However, she concludes that, overall, the percentage attending the theatre has remained remarkably constant, and constantly low.
Working in the Margin: Women in Theatre History
Authors: Bratton Jacky
Published: January 2009

This is the text – appropriately, a ‘performance text’ – of the inaugural lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College, University of London, on 9 March 1993, by Jacky Bratton, following her appointment as Professor of Theatre and Cultural History. Although she holds her chair at a former women's college, Jacky Bratton reflects that the introduction of co-education in such institutions has in practice left them as male-dominated as the rest. Ironically, this continued marginalizing of women in academic life reflects the common view of theatre studies as itself a marginal discipline – almost as suspect as Jacky Bratton's own specialist concern with its more popular aspects. Looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized within theatre history, she challenges in particular the received wisdom that the alleged ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century was reversed by a striving for respectability usually traced to the rattle of cups-and-saucers on box sets, and apotheosized in Irving's knighthood: instead, she reflects upon the radical impulses of earlier nineteenth-century theatre, and at the ways in which the gender of three women who worked within it influenced their theatrical careers, their social standing, and their own attitudes towards both.
Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties
Authors: Wallis Mick
Published: January 2009

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning ‘high art’ poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.
Realizing a Postpositivist Theatre History
Authors: McConachie Bruce A.
Published: January 2009

Bruce McConachie teaches in the Theatre Department at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He is one of the leading theatre historians in the United States, who has, as David Mayer put it in his review of McConachie's most recent book, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, ‘been examining, criticizing, and improving the practice of theatre historiography’ for many years. McConachie's re-examination of how history is researched, analyzed, and written has its origins in an article, ‘Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History’, which he published in Theatre Journal in 1985, criticizing scholars who limit their theatre histories to events in the theatre. He called for historians to realize that theatre is only one part of a much larger socio-cultural complex, and that it is the historian's job to analyze theatre in terms of that complex. this article was the point of departure for the following interview, which Ian Watson conducted with McConachie in Philadelphia in January 1993.
‘The Last Great Bourgeois’: on the Plays of Henrik Ibsen
Authors: Lunacharsky Anatoly
Published: January 2009

The death of Ibsen in 1906 prompted a number of appraisals of the dramatist by Marxist critics, notably Clara Zetkin, Henrietta Roland-Holst, and George Plekhanov. The most extended of these was Anatoly Lunacharsky's article, ‘Ibsen and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, published in three parts in Obrazovanie, St. Petersburg, Nos. 5–7 (June-August 1907). The central section, ‘Ibsen's Dramas’, is printed below. Born in the Ukraine in 1875, Lunacharsky became a Marxist in his teens and joined the Moscow Social Democrat group in 1899. Arrested for his political activities, he was exiled to Northern Russia, where he wrote his first theoretical treatise, An Essay in Positive Aesthetics. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but broke with Lenin after 1905, having identified himself with the so-called ‘God-seeking’ tendency. Following the fall of Tsarism in 1917 Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks, and after the October Revolution he was appointed to Lenin's first ‘Cabinet’ as Commissar for Enlightenment, a post embracing the arts and education. Exceptionally, he retained this position up until 1930, when he became one of the Soviet Union's two representatives to the League of Nations. He died in 1933, shortly before he was due to become Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lunacharsky's published output runs to some 1,500 articles, embracing philosophy, aesthetics, and theoretical and critical writings on all the arts. He also wrote a number of plays, including Faust and the City (1918) and Oliver Cromwell (1920). He was an intellectual of wide erudition and acute critical perception, balancing respect for the old and the traditional with encouragement for the new and the inconoclastic. As Commissar for Enlightenment, he did much to defend the early avant garde's freedom to experiment, making the Soviet Union a power-house of artistic innovation.
Laughing All the Way to the Bank? Alternative Comedy in the Provinces
Authors: Double Oliver
Published: January 2009

Metropolitan snobbery and the logistics of scale both militate against the success of comedians working in the regions. Yet, as Oliver Double here argues, the scene has been a lively one, often daring in its style and range alike – at least until the absorption of its big names into the London circuits by the agencies which increasingly control most of the bookings and much of the talent. Oliver Double, himself a working comic, describes the distinctive characteristics of regional alternative comedy, and the now very real dangers of stagnation, illustrating his argument from interviews with leading comics on the regional circuits – Nick Toczek, Stu Who?, Roger Monkhouse, Malcolm Bailey, Anvil Springsteen, Adam Caveleri, Kevin Seisay, Henry Normal, and John Simmit. Offering some hopes for the future, he points out the relatively low audience figures required to ensure a vigorous growth – if only emerging talent can be nurtured rather than condemned to still birth.
The Man who Makes Connections
Authors: Elsom John
Published: January 2009

IT IS A STRANGE and little-known fact that even scholars and critics can be characterized in terms of changing light bulbs. A classicist can change a light bulb, but the old one was essentially better. The modernist may change a light bulb, but only after the house has been completely rewired. In their respective contexts, most structuralists are able to change a light bulb, provided, since these processes are always two-way, that the light bulb doesn't change them first. But when Jan Kott changes a light bulb, he has the unfortunate knack of switching on the whole Christmas tree.
Two Contemporary Antigones
Authors: Krajewska-Wieczorek Anna
Published: January 2009

FROM THE TIME of Sophocles' Antigone, his version of the myth – which relates how Oedipus' daughter buried her brother Polyneices against the decree of Creon and, upon being sentenced to death, died by her own hand – became invariable. It was in modern treatments of the story that changes began to be introduced: these concerned the person or authorities representing the law; the time when the events occur, and their location; the person whom Antigone buries; and why she dies. But a continuing, necessary determinant in such modern incarnations of the myth has been the conflict between the ethos of authority and the ethos of moral belief – this latter being motivated by religion, duty to the family, or love. Without such an opposition, Antigone loses its ground as tragedy.
‘Nice Girls’: the Vic Gives a Voice to Women of the Working Class
Authors: Woodruff Graham
Published: January 2009

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue ofTheatre Quarterly(1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, TheStaffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary,Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.
Source Theatre Company and the Mandate of the NEA: a Case Study
Authors: Resing Mary C.
Published: January 2009

The controversy in the United States surrounding the funding of ‘offensive‐ and ‘pornographic‐ works by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has centered on whether or not the organization should espouse a morally conservative outlook in regard to the public funding of artistic works. However, the NEA arguably already pursues conservative policies rooted in its vision of the form, function, and outlook of the arts it exists to serve. The appointment of the actress Jane Alexander as chair of the NEA may have indicated that the organization would become more liberal in its moral stance, but the question remains: can government-supported art be anything but conservative? The following is a case study of one theatre's relationship to the NEA in the context of the Washington, DC, theatre community. The author, Mary C. Resing, is a former business manager of New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, DC, and a former grant writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently working on her dissertation on the actress-manager Vera Kommissarzhevskaia.
The Nature of Dramaturgy: Describing Actions at Work
Authors: Barba Eugenio
Published: January 2009

Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.
Shakespeare from Scratch: the Footsbarn ‘Hamlet’ and ‘King Lear’
Authors: Cousin Geraldine
Published: January 2009

The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.
Appia, Jaques-Dalcroze, and Hellerau, Part One: ‘Music Made Visible’
Authors: Beacham Richard C.
Published: January 2009

While Appia's name is dutifully linked in our theatre histories with the full realization of the revolution in stage lighting wrought by electricity, the nature of his broader scenographic philosophy has remained little understood, and his own writings are not readily accessible in English. Still less have English-speaking theatre people given due attention to the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of the system of eurhythmies – and virtually nothing has previously been written about the unique collaboration between these two innovators, which began in 1906, and eventually flourished in the unlikely setting of a German ‘garden city’, dedicated to the humanization of modern industrial practices – Hellerau, or ‘the bright meadow’. Here, Richard Beacham, who has published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), describes how the two men came to meet and to plan for the possibilities offered by the projected Hellerau festivals: in a subsequent article, he will assess the extent and nature of the work they achieved there.
The Four Theatres of Jerzy Grotowski: an Introductory Assessment
Authors: Fowler Richard
Published: January 2009

The original series of TQ included very little about the work of the pioneering Polish director Jerzy Grotowski – not for any lack of offerings on the subject, but because potential contributors seemed unable to distinguish discipleship from the need for analytical description. It is, therefore, with special pleasure that we now include, by way of introduction to the more detailed study of specific aspects of Grotowski's work, this clear overview of the director's development, from his first experiments in Opole, Poland, over 25 years ago, to his present researches into ‘objective drama’ in California. Grotowski himself has divided this work into four distinct though developmental phases, and here Richard Fowler, himself currently responsible for the Canada Project of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, outlines the distinctive nature and achievements of each successive stage of the work.
‘The Dramatic Sense of Life’: Theatre and Historical Simulation
Authors: Howard Roger
Published: January 2009

Many dramatists have written of the world as a stage: less attention has been paid to the consequent effects upon the ‘leading players’ – the politicians who readily enough cast themselves as heroes, and consign others to the roles of villains or at best supernumeraries. Roger Howard argues that on the contemporary ‘world stage’ events all too often take the form of simulations, in which ordinary people must take their allotted parts – or face the coercion or punishment of the state. He looks also at theatre practitioners from the Japanese actor Zeami to Schiller to Heiner Müller who have, for better or worse, examined the nature of the ‘dramatic sense of life’. Roger Howard, who presently teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, is himself a widely performed playwright, currently working with Theatre Underground, and has written extensively on Chinese theatre and political playwriting, most recently as a contributor toContradictory Theatres, for imminent publication from Theatre Action Press.
‘Pulling Faces at the Audience’: the Lonely Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor
Authors: Zurowski Andrzej
Published: January 2009

With Grotowski and Szajna, Tadeusz Kantor has become one of a trio of contemporary exponents of experimental theatre whose influence has spread far beyond the boundaries of their native Poland: and Kantor himself has toured widely with his three major works. The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? Both in his published manifestoes and in forthright interviews about his approach, as also through his personal participation as on-stage ‘conductor’ of his productions. Kantor has proclaimed a theatre philosophy rooted in his own past as surrealist painter and creator of happenings, and now exponent of what he has called ‘in-formal’ theatre, in which ‘the director must die with the actors’. While acknowledging the innovative significance of Kantor's work, Andrzej Zurowski – a leading Polish critic who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics – here questions some of the premises behind the creator's presence on his own stage.
A Critical State: Theatre Reviewing in Australia
Authors: Morley Michael
Published: January 2009

As in most English-speaking nations, the success or otherwise of a production in Australia is heavily dependent upon its critical reception: yet, argues Michael Morley, much Australian reviewing is both ill-equipped and ill-informed for such a responsibility. Michael Morley is himself currently theatre critic of The National Times, and has also written for The Advertiser, Theatre Australia, and the Sydney Morning Herald. A Brecht-Weill scholar, who has worked as musical director on a number of productions in Sydney and Adelaide, Michael Morley is Professor of Drama at Flinders University in South Australia.
Acting with the Berliner Ensemble
Authors: Schall Ekkehard
Published: January 2009

Ekkehard Schall, born in 1930, has been a member of the Berliner Ensemble since 1952, and is now among its leading players. He has also directed for the company, having first undertaken the production of Brecht's version of Edward II in 1974. During a visit to London in 1981. when he gave a one-man performance at Riverside Studios, he also visited Rose Bruford College, where, with his wife and fellow-player Barbara Brecht-Schall, he talked with staff and students of the school. During the discussion, chaired by Beth Chatten, he explained the practical application of concepts relating to Brechtian acting, and also described his own approach to such major roles as the Brecht-Shakespeare Coriolanus, which he first created for the Ensemble in 1964.
The Touring of the Shrew
Authors: Cousin Geraldine
Published: January 2009

Of all Shakespeare's plays which touch on raw contemporary nerves, The Taming of the Shrew is probably the most contentious – and arguably the least acceptable, in a period of crystallizing feminist consciousness. Yet the play stubbornly remains in the repertoire, almost demanding to be reinterpreted – either against the perceived grain of the text, or by clarifying subtextual sympathy for a less chauvinist point of view than Petruchio's. Here, Geraldine Cousin, who teaches theatre studies in the University of Warwick, and contributed a study of the Footsbarn company's Hamlet and Lear to NTQ1, discusses the problems involved in staging The Taming of the Shrew at the present time, taking a closer look at two recent itinerant productions – by the Medieval Players, and by the touring group of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Solidarity, with Differences
Authors: Nixon Jon
Published: January 2009

DAVID HORNBROOK'S articles in New Theatre Quarterly are a timely and significant contribution to the debate on drama in schools. They articulate a persuasive critique of the ‘progressive’ roots of educational drama, raise important questions about where drama should be placed in the curriculum, and rightly stress the need for teachers to define clearly the content of their discipline.
On the Horns of a Dilemma
Authors: Graham Tony
Published: January 2009

BASED ON A critique of the progressive North-East orthodoxy, David Hornbrook has made an excellent contribution to the debate on the future of schools' drama. His is an eloquent and lucid case for an alternative direction that should be read by all drama teachers and advisers. Yet there are problems with his proposals, which need to be rescored in the light of the very worrying trends in state education that he correctly identifies.
Letter to a Poor Actor
Authors: George David E. R.
Published: January 2009

Why does the vocabulary of the theatre become pejorative as soon as it is applied to everyday experience? Why does the use of theatre as a metaphor for the world carry implications of the deceptive and the artificial? And why, more recently, have sociologists and psychologists used theatricality as a basis for explaining the nature of behaviour in ‘real life’ – at the same time as theatrical gurus have begun to seek a kind of transcendent theatricality in ‘real’ experience? Through an analysis of the ideas of writers such as Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Burns, and of theatre workers from Diderot through Stanislavski to Grotowski, David E. R. George concludes that the apparent contradictions and paradoxes become reconcilable if one replaces the traditional alternative models of theatricality – subjective identification between actor and role versus presentational objectivity – with a triadic approach, which recognizes the partial, overlapping, and multi-faceted nature of all ‘theatrical’ behaviour, on the stage or in the street. After the award of his Cambridge doctorate in 1964, David E. R. George taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Göttingen, Malaysia, and Peking, before taking up his present post as Chairman of Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published books on Ibsen and on German tragic theory, and his study of Indian ritual dance-drama will appear later this year in the ‘Theatre in Focus’ series.
Going South: the San Francisco Mime Troupe in Nicaragua
Authors: Chumley Daniel
Published: January 2009

Defiantly, Nicaragua mounted its International Theatre Festival in 1986 while the country remained on a war footing against the contras and their American backers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe were invited, and found the experience very different from other such occasions, east or west. Despite problems of logistics – which left the company without their equipment for much of the visit and virtually having to camp-out in an American-owned hotel – the experience, as recorded here by Daniel Chumley, who has been an actor and director with the group since 1968. was finally and triumphantly affirmative.
Pirandello's Debut as Director: the Opening of the Teatro d' Arte
Authors: Bassnett Susan
Published: January 2009

In this, the centenary year of Pirandello's birth, there has been a revival, hopefully more than just circumstantial, of interest in his work in the English-speaking theatre – which has previously tended to acknowledge his influence without often producing his plays. But Pirandello's own theatrical ambitions, which came quite late in his creative life, were initially as a director – indeed, the association with Mussolini which has sometimes cast a pall upon his reputation was largely in the interests of obtaining state patronage for his Teatro d' Arte company, which struggled unsuccessfully for survival between 1925 and 1928. Initially, however, hopes were high, and the inaugural productions both artistically and technically exciting. In the following feature. Susan Bassnett, a Pirandello specialist who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick and is a regular contributor to NTQ, describes the circumstances behind the opening of the company, while Alessandro Tinterri, of the Actors' Museum of Genoa, analyzes the curious encounter in the first major production. The Gods of the Mountain, between Pirandello as director and the now little-remembered Irish cricketer-dramatist. Lord Dunsany.