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.

Largely as a result of the experimentation and stability of the university theatres founded in the early 'forties, Chilean theatre is among the best-established in Latin America. But how far has its survival since 1973 depended on the regime's sense of the theatre's relative impotence to effect change? Little is known about Chilean theatre in Britain, few plays have been translated, and with rare exceptions those that have found their way here have been limited to ‘solidarity’ audiences. In this article. Catherine M. Boyle, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Strathclyde, considers the various kinds and qualities of theatre that have been produced in Chile since 1973, and draws some conclusions about the nature of freedom of expression and its repression.

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’.

Playwrights in the West remain under threat not only from the ever-increasing dominance of the director and the loss of autonomy carried over from film and television, but from sheer economic deprivation – which makes playwriting impossible as a full-time profession for most of its members. Is the best way to remedy this the assertion of collective responsibility and power advocated in this country by the Theatre Writers Union, or by a frank acceptance that artistic strength is seldom likely to be matched by economic or ‘political’ power – as James L. Rosenberg now argues? NTQ does not necessarily endorse the viewpoint here expressed, but feels that it is a forceful statement of a ‘new realism’ about the role of the playwright in the likely western future – in this respect also making an illuminating contrast to the foregoing article by Zygmunt Hübner. The author, James L. Rosenberg, is a widely-performed American dramatist, who has also translated numerous plays from the German, and is presently Visiting Professor of Theatre at Williams College. Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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.

Music hall has only recently been treated to ‘serious’ as distinct from anecdotal study, and the ‘turns’ of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators – whose ancestry in ‘legit’ performance had been a long one, yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and ‘pre-Freudian innocence’. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley, whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the ‘messages’ they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston.

While statistical information on certain sectors of the British theatre is slowly becoming available – notably from the Arts Council and the Society of West End Theatre, as also from researchers in the Department of Arts Administration at the City University – few attempts have yet been made to draw useful conclusions from these figures, or to deduce how they might be helpful in terms of forward-planning and projections. In the following article. Paul Huntington examines the relationship between theatre revenue and total consumer expenditure, in the context of published figures which illustrate the changing national economic picture of the past decade. He examines not only the way in which these figures tend, naturally enough, to confirm certain expectations – for example, concerning the impact of tourism on the theatre – but also less expected findings, such as the relative upsurge in the fortunes of the regional theatres at a time of slump in the commercial sector of the West End.

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.

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.