The reputation of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg has been growing steadily in this country and elsewhere – ironically, since the economic problems of its native Russia have made touring as much a matter of economic necessity as of cultural cross-fertilization. In the following article, Maria Shevtsova offers a detailed explication of four of the Maly's most notable productions under its present director, Lev Dodin – Aleksandr Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky, appropriately one of the final offerings within the ambit of the former Soviet Union; Brothers and Sisters, a view of a Russia in ‘perpetual motion’ in the immediate post-war years which has come to be regarded as the company's ‘signature piece’; a transposition onto the stage of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The Devils; and – following briefer studies of Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia – a revival of The Cherry Orchard which, like so much of Dodin's work, offers a bleak vision of disintegration as Chekhov's portrayal of a crumbling society at the turn of the last century comes full circle to reflect our own fin de siecle. Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, and has published on a wide range of subjects including the work of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Patrice Chereau, and Robert Wilson, having also contributed a three-part study of ‘The Sociology of Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989). Her most recent full-length work is Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993).

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.

In the following interview, JoAnne Akalaitis discusses her experiences as an actress and director with the Mabou Mines company; her artistic encounters with Beckett, Brecht, and Genet; her thoughts about the relationship between art and politics; and her belief in the connection between the physical and the emotional in performance. Deborah Saivetz is a director and performer who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey. She assisted JoAnne Akalaitis on her production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy Tis Pity She's aWhore at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and performed in Akalaitis's workshop production of The Mormon Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She had several opportunities to talk at length with Akalaitis during the months that they worked together.

In contemporary culture, an ‘Uncle Tom’ has become so derided a figure of complicity in racism that it is perhaps only with difficulty, and a corrective historicist awareness, that we can come to acknowledge both the good intentions and the undeniable effectiveness of Harriet Beecher Stowe's original – a novel in which, interestingly, women play no less prominent a part than black characters. Indeed, it is likely that the proliferating stage adaptations of Mrs. Stowe's novel were largely responsible for creating the stereotype Uncle Tom in a popular imagination on which such melodramatized accounts had a lasting impact: and it was partly in response to such perversions that Mrs. Stowe herself set out to dramatize her novel. The result, The Christian Slave, has remained relatively unknown not least because of the premature death of its solo performer, Mary Webb – herself a pioneer among black performers who achieved recognition from white audiences. In the following article, Susan F. Clark examines the play in its contemporary context, contrasts it both with other stage versions and with the seminal novel, and examines the relationship between its black performer and her audiences. Susan F. Clark is Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Smith College, Massachusetts, and is currently working on a full-length study of interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the American stage.

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the foremost British-Asian ‘company of identity’, Tara Arts, directed throughout that time by Jatinder Verma – a major interview with whom forms the core of this celebratory feature. This traces the history and evolving philosophy of the company, from its origins in outrage at a racist murder, through changing perceptions of how multicultural identity can best find its dramatic expression, to a discussion of Verma's own recent work for Contact Theatre and the National. Contributions from other leading participants in the company's work are complemented by a selection of press reactions to major productions, and a survey of bibliographical and other resources. The compiler of this feature, Graham Ley, presently lectures in the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently in ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993) and ‘The Significance of Diderot’ (NTQ44, 1995). Among his publications on ancient performance, A short introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of chicago Press in 1991.

TARA presented its first production, Tagore's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's Sacrifice, in 1977, so this year marks the company's twentieth anniversary. How did it come into being?

It was, as with most companies, a mixture of accident and intention. The intention part of it relates to 4 June 1976, which was a day when this young Sikh lad in Southall, Gurdeep Singh Chaggar, was killed. It became very obvious within a day or so that this was a racist murder. In retrospect it doesn't seem to be a terribly significant thing, because we've had so many; but at the time it galvanized a particular generation of Asians.

I have worked with Tara Arts for over ten years, as the company's designer for most productions during that time. And one of the reasons that I enjoy working with Tara is that I can use my own mixed nationality both politically and artistically: I feel at home.

My relationship with Tara Arts began in 1989, with the production of Danton's Death. Jatinder had made it very clear that none of the assembled actors would know the roles they were to play until at least the third week of rehearsal. Unsure about this process, I scanned the list of Büchner's characters full of doubt. Then, in the certainty that none of them was called Patel, I decided to put whatever reputation I had amassed during my previous twelve years as an actor in Jatinder's hands. Patel is a fine name, but I had played four characters called Patel in the last twelve months, and was just about to play another. And I was feeling claustrophobic. In the end, Jatinder cast me as Robespierre opposite the splendid Muraly Menon from Trivandrum in South India, who played Danton. Since then I have played various characters of both genders for Jatinder and Tara, and I have visited countries and continents where I have worked with performers whose skill and knowledge have humbled me.

In one sense Tara belongs to a loose grouping which could be described as ‘companies of identity’, which might include the Black Theatre Co-operative, Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group), Graeae, and Gay Sweatshop. The classic funding pattern here is that the company is initially founded by individuals with shared educational, cultural and political backgrounds: then, after a number of projects or productions, the group receives funding for a specific proposal, either from a special-interest organization, a trust, or local government.

I came from Cape Town, South Africa, to Britain in 1976, after graduating at a drama school, and for the next fifteen years worked for InterAction, Common Stock, Joint Stock, the RSC, and the National, and in other theatres. In 1990 I began my association with Tara Arts by Playing the Mayor in Gogol's The Government Inspector.

In the 1990s, Vietnamese traditional theatre has seen its popular base eroded by foreign videos, television imports, and the films that have poured into the country since the advent of the ‘open door’ policy, or doi moi. As that policy is primarily economic in purpose, the advantages offered to the national culture have been questionable. The traditional forms here discussed by Catherine Diamond – tuong, hat boi, and cheo – have lost much of their status in the urban areas, though still popular in the countryside. However, the forms which address contemporary issues – ‘renovated theatre’ (cai luong), spoken theatre (kich noi), and, most recently, ‘mini-theatre’ (san khau nho) – play to significant numbers in Saigon and Hanoi, often employing a distinctive vein of satirical humour. Though trained in the academies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese dramatists have now broken away from the socialist realist ideal and are looking towards the West and China for new artistic developments. The author of this survey, Catherine Diamond, is a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan. She has recently published Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about the traditional dancers in Southeast Asia.

Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in NTQ50, Paul Warwick gave an account in the following issue of its previously undocumented role during the thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence, describing the efforts of the freedom fighters to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only deployed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating the people in matters ranging from women's rights to the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods: and with victory came measures further to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Jane Plastow, in this third and concluding article, takes up the story with the invitation issued by the new government to her and her colleagues to initiate the ‘Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project’, in an attempt both to widen the perspectives of Eritrean actors and to draw upon all relevant traditions, African and European, in developing a popular but distinctive theatre for the people. In addition to her role as director of the project, Jane Plastow is a lecturer at Leeds University, having worked in theatre for some years in a number of other African nations.