Eugenio Barba here discusses the desires and ideas driving his early years as a practitioner, some of the creative, social, and ethical principles underlying the work of the Odin Teatret, which he founded in 1964, and the group's most recent, new-style ‘barter’ events with and within local communities. His public dialogue with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova and members of the audience provides fresh insight into the workings of one of the most influential figures, and one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives, of the late twentieth century. The conversation took place on 31 October 2005 at Goldsmiths College, University of London, during the Odin's UK tour (as documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ 86), and included questions from the audience and concluding words from Odin performer Iben Nagel Rasmussen, who had performed White as Jasmin earlier in the evening. The transcript of this conversation, inaugurating a series of such public conversations at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, was edited for publication with the full and warm collaboration of Eugenio Barba.

This article considers the origins of Stanislavski's system and his insistence that the actor's skills, like the musician's, must be honed through daily exercises. Such practice must become the actor's ‘second nature’, as Stanislavski terms it. Rose Whyman here compares what Stanislavski has to say about skill acquisition with the psychologist William James's discussion of the role of habit in learning. This raises some problems in theorizing the system today, as it was rooted in the science of more than a century ago, when much less was known about the mechanisms of memory and learning. Rose Whyman worked previously in community and experimental theatre and is now a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Her book The Stanislavski System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance is to be published by CUP later this year.

The well-known ‘banishment’ of the popular comic figure Hanswurst from the German stage by Gottsched and the Neuber acting troupe in the early eighteenth century is usually read as part of the historical movement from improvised folk theatre to bourgeois literary theatre. In this article Karen Jürs-Munby goes beyond that received wisdom to discuss what kind of acting, what kind of body, and what kind of relationship between stage and audience were censored by banishing Hanswurst. Considering this censorship as part of the larger historical relationship between discourses on acting and the emergence of a modern self in the Enlightenment, she argues that the osmotic body and stage that Hanswurst stood for prevented the aesthetic mirroring relationship sought by eighteenth-century stage reformers in an increasing need for bourgeois self-representation. The Hanswurst banishment can be theorized with reference to Julia Kristeva as an abjection of grotesque acting – a form of acting whose political power to question the autonomous bourgeois subject was to be rediscovered by practitioners in the twentieth century. Karen Jürs-Munby is a lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University; she has published articles on theories and discourses of acting in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and recently translated Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre.

British pantomime between 1985 and 2005 has undergone an evolutionary reconstruction based on practices of branding. Within this broad field, Martina Lipton distinguishes two competing pantomime models, investigating the contrasting ideological and cultural positioning of dominant representations of modern pantomime by a major production group, Qdos Entertainment, and the Nottingham Playhouse and York Theatre Royal repertory companies. She reads these models as identifying collective experiences and taste communities after the categories identified by Pierre Bourdieu as conferring ‘distinction’. While these companies both offer a somewhat similar mediatized product, they successfully co-exist within a dynamic and competitive marketplace by branding their pantomimes as respectively embracing and resisting the influence of mass-media popular culture. Both branding practices have succeeded in restoring the genre to high visibility and economic success. Martina Lipton is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland.

In this article, Beliz Güçbilmez argues that ‘offstage’ is not a place but an idea, a world minus a stage. It is ‘anywhere but here’, and its time is time-minus-now, making it impossible to determine its scale. It is a foreign tongue – a language with an unknown grammar carrying us to the borders of the uncanny. Güçbilmez rereads the offstage as the unconscious of the stage, looking at its more conventional use in the realistic and naturalistic plays of the nineteenth century and after, but also looking forward to the work of Samuel Beckett. Borrowing from Blanchot's interpretation of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth, she characterizes the Beckettian struggle to represent the unrepresentable as the act of bringing Eurydice into daylight – the invisible content of the offstage onto the stage, which is by definition the space of the gaze. Beliz Güçbilmez is an author, playwright, and translator, currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Ankara University in Turkey. She is the author of Irony and Drama from Sophocles to Stoppard (Ankara: Deniz, 2005) and Time, Space and Appearance: the Form of Miniature in the Turkish Realist Theatre (Ankara: Deniz, 2006). A shorter version of this article was presented at the Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR) at its 2005 meeting in Krakow.

It has become axiomatic that theatre not only depends on conflict but also deploys it in its structure and function. Theatre is therefore working in familiar territory when it is utilized in a project dealing with conflict resolution and transformation, based on direct interaction with and intervention by the audience. In this paper Samuel Ayedime Kafewo examines one such experiment in which Boal's Forum Theatre techniques were used to address the issues of ethnic and religious intolerance in the northern region of Nigeria. The paper discusses how the process of choices, decisions, and consequences was used to explore the varying dimensions and manifestations of conflict with the members of the various communities, and how far this contributed to resolving the issues in conflict and led to positive lessons for those involved. The paper concludes by looking at some of the shortcomings of the experiment and suggests ways of strengthening future practice. Samuel Ayedime Kafewo teaches in the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.

The National Theatre of Scotland was constituted in 2003, following a debate in the newly devolved Scottish Parliament. Its first artistic director was appointed in 2004, and its inaugural production was presented in February 2006. Within another year, some twenty productions had been seen in over forty urban and rural locations – a rate of development in marked contrast to the slow crawl over more than half a century towards a National Theatre in London. Personal and political drive apart, a major reason for the speed with which the National Theatre of Scotland has not only established itself but gained respect far beyond national boundaries is the simple fact that it does not possess a theatre building, so that all its work must of necessity tour nationwide – or involve co-productions with building-based companies. Home, the opening event, was in fact a multiplicity of different shows tailored to ten different locations; later work has ranged from the classic Mary Stuart to Anthony Neilson's surrealist Wonderful World of Dissocia, from a reinvention of Macbeth to Gregory Burke's astonishing Black Watch, which interweaves the history of the famous but doomed Scottish regiment with the raw actuality of young soldiers serving in Iraq. In this article, based on a paper presented to the fourth Forum for Arabic Theatre in Sharjah in January 2007, Robert Leach surveys both the brief history of the company and the highlights of its prolific first year's work. Robert Leach lives in Scotland but teaches in England, at Cumbria Institute of the Arts in Carlisle. His latest book is Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre, published by Exeter University Press in 2006.

Ian Herbert reports on the fiftieth anniversary congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics, held in Seoul during the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, 7–29 September 2006.

Peter Hepple, who died on 12 October 2006, had been an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly from the first issue of the relaunched journal back in 1985, and worked with us in the late 1970s during the old Theatre Quarterly's successful campaign to recreate a British Centre of the International Theatre Institute, of which he remained a council member. Here, in a tribute first published in The Independent on 14 October 2006, Ian Herbert remembers the man in the mac who was welcomed everywhere.