By way of coda to our earlier coverage in NTQ of Nicaraguan theatre under the Sandinista government, we include here an interview with Alan Bolt, one of the best-known and most controversial of the playwrights of the revolutionary period. The interview was conducted in September 1989, just a few months before the free elections ended the fragile, insidiously-obstructed Sandinista experiment in socialism with a South American face. While dedicated to the ideals of the Sandinistas, for whom he had fought underground during the Somoza dictatorship, Alan Bolt found himself increasingly opposed to some of those who were putting the revolution into practice, and he chose to work instead with his own theatre group and agricultural collective for a better understanding both of the issues which made revolution necessary, and those which were now prejudicing its success. Bernard Bloom, who introduces this interview with a brief outline of Alan Bolt's career, is a Canadian writer and photographer who lived in Nicaragua during 1987 and 1989. He has lectured extensively about the country, and his photographs have been widely exhibited.

In this issue, we present two contrasting views on the issue of gender in Shakespeare – specifically, the gender of the heroine-hero of As you Like It, Rosalind-Ganymede. Both articles relate the character to conventions of acting and of sexuality in Shakespeare's England and our own: but in this first essay Jan Kott connects the play also with another ‘historic moment’ when androgyny became a recurrent theme, the period following the Revolution and the Restoration in nineteenth-century France – notably as reflected in Gautier's novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which an amateur performance of As You Like It, and the sex of its leading player, assume a central significance. Jan Kott has been an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly and of NTQ since the journals began publication, and a regular contributor to both – most recently, on the current preoccupations of Grotowski, in NTQ23. Since the seminal publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, he has been a leading exponent of a critical approach which links the study of drama, the practice of performance, and the forms of culture in which both have their roots.

The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender in As You Like It largely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.

New Theatre Quarterly has provided extensive coverage of the work of Odin Teatret, based since 1966 at Holstebro in Denmark, as also of the approach and ideas of its director, Eugenio Barba, who first wrote for us on ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy’ in NTQ1 (1985). Most recently, we documented Odin's twelfth production, Talabot, through David Shoemaker's analysis in NTQ24 (1990). Here, we offer an actor's experience of the creation of a one-person production – uniting personal circumstances, experiences in training, and exploratory research in the process which led towards the creation of Judith, based on the apocryphal story of the woman who seduced an enemy general in order to murder him. Its performer, Roberta Carreri, joined Odin Teatret in 1974, since when she has also performed in The Book of Dance (1974–80), Come! and the Day Will Be Ours (1976–80), Anabasis (1977–84), The Million (1978–84), Brecht's Ashes (1980–84), and The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985–87). Her evocation here of the process which led to the creation of Judith is based on an interview with Exe Christoffersen, who also provides a detailed scenario of the production in performance. This feature forms part of Exe Christoffersen's Skuespillerens Vandring, published in Denmark by Klim in 1989. It has been excerpted and translated for NTQ by Gordi Roberts.

The ‘two worlds’ of Peter Brook's theatre are its audience and its actors. According to Brook, the actors bring their ‘world of the imagination’ to meet with the audience's ‘world of the everyday’: but instead of the temporary suspension of belief in the ‘everyday world’ which a western audience has traditionally forced upon itself, Brook conceives the true theatrical experience as an interaction between the two modes of reality – those of the ‘imagination’ and the mundane. In the following article, Paul Cohen assesses the importance of this basic philosophy to Brook's productions since 1968, paying particular attention to the tour of Africa with The Conference of the Birds and the recent epic production of The Mahabharata, attempting to show that Brook's theory still directly informs the methodology and the performance orientation of his productions. Paul Cohen originally presented this paper as an MA dissertation for Vanderbilt University, and is currently on the Professional Writing Program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

In the first of two essays, Peter Nicholls explores connections between ideas of an ‘absolute’ or non-representational theatre and the forms of narrative and discursivity which have traditionally invested dramatic forms. In one of the earliest Expressionist plays – Oskar Kokoschka's Murder, Hope of Women – the tension between these ideas is powerfully in evidence. Nicholls shows how Kokoschka's formal experimentalism is grounded in contemporary polemics about gender and sexuality, tracing the ways in which theatrical innovation seeks to evade the Oedipal constraints of plot and narrative. That tension, he believes, informs subsequent Expressionist drama, where an almost obsessive preoccupation with the working-through of family histories is contested by forms of theatrical ‘affect’ which undermine structure from within. Peter Nicholls's second essay will pursue the ‘anti-Oedipal’ implications of Dada and Surrealist theatre. The author teaches English and American literature at the University of Sussex, and 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 later this year.

Sustaining his reputation for production work that is both original and challenging, Edward Bond worked closely with the directors of Jackets during its productions at Lancaster and in Leicester and London in 1989–90. After a mixed experience with the RSC directing his War Plays, Bond continued to develop his concept of ‘theatre events’, and to work towards the particular style of acting that is necessary for his work in performance. Ian Stuart, a doctoral candidate in dramatic art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzes here how the resulting twin concepts of ‘theatre events’ and ‘theatre acting’ translated into practice, exploring both the workin-progress and its realization through setting, lighting, and critical response. Earlier reconstructions and analyses of Bond's plays in production in TQ and NTQ have included features on Lear in TQ5 (1972) and The Fool in TQ21 (1976), both at the Royal Court, and on his own production at the Cottesloe of Summer in NTQ6 (1986).

BRIAN PARKER'S article ‘Bowers of Bliss’ attempts to place the 1986 Oxford edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in its scholarly, intellectual, and theatrical context, and in the course of doing so offers a number of criticisms of the procedures adopted in that volume, with particular reference to its use in the theatre. Of course, single-volume editions of the complete works are rarely selected for theatrical use, but a number of directors have chosen to base productions on this edition, having photocopies made of the text on which they are working. For them, at least, the edition has seemed to have something special to offer. It seems to me that Professor Parker's criticisms are based on imprecisions of detail and on logical fallacies, and I should like to attempt to correct them.