How to accommodate and utilize the insights and the methodology of marxism – and, simply, its potential as a vehicle for social change – at a time when the popular perception of its political ideology stands discredited? Dorrian Lambley explores the dilemma through the specifics of developments in British theatre since 1968 – the stifling of the early radical impulses under political and economic pressures, which has produced, at best, a sense of marginalization, at worst a conviction of impotence. In proposing ways of working within this situation, Lambley draws on the writings of dramatists such as Edward Bond to suggest that marxism must recognize the most important of the liberal humanist emphases – ‘the presence of the subject’, but perceived within a marxist understanding of social relations. Dorrian Lambley is presently working on her doctoral thesis in the University of Exeter, where she helped to organize the conference ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’, on which she wrote in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ28 (1991).

Following his analysis in NTQ 4 of the origins and effects of the ‘philosophy’ of drama-in-education which prevails in most schools. David Hornbrook here complements his critique with specific proposals for a positive future approach – building upon existing teaching strengths, but also giving the subject a greater curricular authority in the present educational climate, while correcting the ‘romantic fallacies’ from which current practice is too often derived. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

Among the three or four leading contemporary American playwrights, John Guare is probably least known in Britain: yet in many ways he is the most clear-sighted about the nature of American society, and the most ‘European’ in the often ironic viewpoint which informs his work. His career now spans the period from the 'sixties years of protest against the Vietnam War to the recent Lydie Breeze tetralogy, which approached the past with something of the sweep of a nineteenth-century novel. John Harrop begins this three-part NTQ feature on Guare with a brief critical overview of the man and his plays. His interview with Guare. conducted last September following the successful New York revival of his House of Blue Leaves, follows, and a detailed bio-bibliographical NTQ Checklist of Guare's work provides a full factual complement. John Harrop. an advisory editor of NTQ. is Professor of Drama at the University of California. Santa Barbara, and was a frequent contributor to the original Theatre Quarterly. His study of American actor training was published in NTQ3, and he is author of Creative Play Direction (with Robert Cohen) and of Acting with Style (with Sabin Epstein). He also acts and directs professionally, and has himself directed two of John Guare's plays

The play deals with one of the characters, Ronnie, who is trying to kill the Pope. Now if you wrote about trying to blow up the Pope in 1971, people would say, ‘Where do you get your ideas? It's bizarre…’. I went to see the play in 1981 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival just after the Pope had been shot, because I wondered what that event would do to the play. Would it make audiences gasp? What it did was strange. People used to look at the play in some skewed fashion and say, ‘Oh, what a kooky… what a funny…’. Suddenly, with the shooting of the Pope, I felt as if a protective wall had shattered and the audience had tumbled onto the same side of the mirror as the play, and I felt that their perception allowed them to see the characters' needs and hungers with much more directness than in 1971.

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.

Variously raising hackles and acclaim, the work of Peter Sellars is wider-ranging than the occasional observer might suppose – rooted in an apprenticeship as a puppeteer, followed by some sixty productions in a variety of media during the decade of the ‘eighties. But it is for his eclectic approach to opera that Sellars has become best known on the international festival circuit – which, suggests Maria M. Delgado, he is forced to travel by default, since his socially critical stance combined with an anti-realist aesthetic deters the sponsorship on which so much American theatre depends. Maria M. Delgado here offers an overview and an assessment of a career and a philosophy dedicated to an awareness ‘both of theatre’ s role as a force of political and social responsibility and understanding and of the need to rise above the literal’. The author teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary College in the University of London.

In ‘Artaud at Rodez’, published in the sixth issue of the original Theatre Quarterly, Charles Marowitz pursued an investigation into the nature of the alleged madness of Antonin Artaud, for which he was confined during the Second World War – eventually being transferred to the asylum at Rodez where he was subjected to electric shock ‘therapy’. Marowitz's article, which later formed the basis for his play of the same title, explored the motivations and responses of those involved: here, Nigel Ward focuses rather on the nature and effects of the treatment itself, inflicted on Artaud no less than fifty-one times – a treatment which, however controversial, was ironically appropriate for the creator of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ which itself claimed to purge its audience of weaknesses and to heal through shock. Nigel Ward is a tutor on the MA in Performance Studies course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.

In 2006 Odin Teatret performed its multicultural version of Ur-Hamlet, derived from its early thirteenth-century origins in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus, in the castle courtyard of Kronborg – the Elsinore setting for Shakespeare's version four centuries later. But the performance here followed years of preparation, and involved a multiplicity of theatre styles and performing traditions. The production had its beginnings at sessions of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Seville in 2004 and Wroclaw in 2005, and preparations continued in Holstebro, Copenhagen, and Bali from 2004 to 2006. Erik Exe Christoffersen followed the final rehearsals in Ravenna, and here gives an account of the Kronborg performance. Erik Exe Christoffersen is Associate Professor at the Institut for Æstetiske Fag, Department for Dramaturgy, Aarhus University, Denmark. His most recent publications include The Actor's Way (Routledge, 1993) and Teaterhandlinger (Theatre Actions, 2007). He is Editor of the Danish theatre journal Peripeti:Tidskrift for Dramaturgiske Studier.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

This article examines the meaning of the ‘impolitical’ regarding cases of impolitical theatre and associated critical discourse, with reference to Rodolfo Usigli and Raymond Williams, among others. It is argued that ‘impolitical’ theatre represents social relations from the standpoint of the ideal of culture. The analysis starts with Richard Schechner’s critique of the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and discusses this play, segueing into The Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69. The author indicates the differences of theatre practice between the examples chosen, and shows that these theatres nevertheless participate in the same form of theatrical representation as they broach similar social questions of moment in the Unites States in the 1960s. John Yves Pinder has recently received his PhD from the University of Leeds. He is currently teaching at Leuphana University of Lüneberg.

In this profoundly dialogical exchange, Peter Sellars, theatre director, researcher, and teacher, and Maria Shevtsova open out a whole array of questions on the integral relation between politics and the theatre in its multiple manifestations. These questions not only concern the damages inflicted by the present Covid-19 pandemic but also those developed by the neoliberal economics and politics of the past forty years and more. In Sellars’s view, neoliberalism has been the hotbed of social injustices, inequities, market and other forms of current enslavement, migrations, refugee and related precarities, and the havoc of the world climate in which the plight of humanity and that of the planet are indelibly interconnected. His and Shevtsova’s discussion links such vital concerns with his theatre practice, which ranges from his engagement with local communities and indigenous peoples – he details some of his work with the collective, community organization of two Los Angeles Festivals of the early 1990s – to the various forms of his music theatre in which he collaborates, in institutional structures, with highly proficient musicians, singers and dancers. The focus chosen here from his music theatre is The Indian Queen (2013), which Sellars dramaturgically invents using pieces by Henry Purcell combined with prose fragments by Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar. Peter Sellars is an internationally renowned theatre director among whose more recent productions is Mozart’s Idomeneo, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2019. Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, is editor of New Theatre Quarterly. This conversation took place on 16 August 2020, was transcribed from the recording by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova.

In this article Maiya Murphy uses the enactive paradigm of cognition to take a fresh look at Edward Gordon Craig’s experiments in the theatre. By focusing on his obsession with movement, Maiya Murphy argues that an autopoietic conception of life can recategorize his problems with, ideas about, and experiments in the theatre as a coherent but multifaceted effort to create a very particular kind of cognitive engagement. She explores how enaction’s concept of the continuity of life and mind can map out a meaningful logic embedded in Craig’s intuitions about the connections between cognition, aesthetic experience, epistemology, and ontology. She also considers how the many media in which he worked and his interest in Asian arts – along with his major concepts such as the übermarionette and the kinetic stage – can be seen as attempts to think through theatre as an embodied and emergent event that is at once concrete, aesthetic, cognitive, and metaphysical. Finally, she traces the philosophical heritages that gave Craig his frameworks for understanding movement, arguing that his limitations and frustrations were fundamentally philosophical. Maiya Murphy is an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Programme at the National University of Singapore and makes theatre with her movementbased collective, Autopoetics. She is author of Enacting Lecoq: Movement in Theatre, Cognition, and Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and of essays in Theatre Survey and The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq, among others.

Anatoli Vassiliev must be ranked with the most prominent of the internationally acclaimed directors of the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first; and history will surely place him among the great director-researcher-pedagogues of the Russian and world theatre, starting with Stanislavsky and including Meyerhold and Vakhtangov. In this conversation, Vassiliev discusses the unique situation of theatre activity in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century, where the studio, or laboratory, was integral to the very life of the theatre as a specific, collaborative, and ensemble practice and a comprehensive artistic institution. He situates the School of Dramatic Art, which he founded in 1987, in this context, extending the latter's reach to Maria Knebel and Andrey Popov, who were his teachers on the directing course at GITIS in Moscow (State Institute of Theatre Art, now known as the Russian Academy of Theatre Art). He graduated from GITIS in 1973. Vassa Zheleznova, referred to in this interview, was the acme of Vassiliev's explorations of psychological realism, after which he developed forms of what he calls ‘play structures’ (or ‘ludic structures’). Actors working in these structures project externally in clearly articulated ways rather than go inwards, towards and within emotional states of being, as is typical of psychological-realist performance in the Russian tradition. Vassiliev's reversal of established performance modes led to his current preoccupation with ‘verbal structures’, which are underpinned by his understanding of words as ideas oriented to symbolic and metaphysical sense rather than to psycho-emotional interpretation. The spatial and luminary dimensions of play, together with movement, music, and song that is formal, operatic, rather than in any other kind of vein, defines such later works as Mozart and Salieri (2000) and Onegin's Journey (2003). They have won him great acclaim in Russia and abroad for their innovative approach outside the parameters not only of realism but also of a range of other familiar aesthetic configurations. Vassiliev has directed productions in various countries in Europe, and has also conducted prolonged research workshops as well as working demonstrations there. In this conversation, which took place in June 2009, Vassiliev refers to several underlying principles of his work and reflects upon the importance to him of Grotowski, his last mentor.

An overview of an ‘event’ which has become an indispensable element of London's theatre life, with a closer look at productions of 2009–10.

Report on the circus events during the International Cultural Festival accompanying the Melbourne Commonwealth Games from 15 to 26 March 2006

Robert Armin, one of the ‘principal actors’ of Shakespeare’s plays named in the First Folio, probably joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 to take the place of Will Kempe as the company’s clown; and it was for him that Shakespeare wrote the parts of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in King Lear. Received wisdom, in part extrapolated from the nature of Armin’s roles, sees him as a more serious, even morose character than his predecessor, and he took his clowning seriously enough to write a book on ‘natural’ fools, Foole Upon Foole (1600), in addition to some minor verse, and a play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, whence the only known illustration of him in performance derives. Although virtually disregarded by critics as little more than a jest book, Foole Upon Foole was also, argues Peter Cockett, a serious attempt to survey the variety of qualities and conditions of natural folly. It not only reveals much about Armin’s likely approach to his roles, but questions the conventional distinctions between the natural and the artificial fool. With close reference to Armin’s description of one of his subjects, Lean Leanard, Peter Cockett compares what this tells us about Armin’s possible approach to the role of Touchstone with the problems faced by the actor, David Tennant, in the RSC As You Like It of 1996. The author is a professional actor who emigrated to Canada in 1994. He now teaches acting and directing at McMaster University, Ontario, and is working with the University of Toronto’s medieval and renaissance players on a two-year project on the work and repertoire of the Queen’s Men.

The folllowing article is a revised and edited version of a keynote address given by Faye Chunfang Fei at the Michael Chekhov Symposium, ‘Theatre of the Future?’, in November 2005 – held at Dartington Hall, where the actor and director Huang Zuolin worked under Chekhov’s guidance in 1936, an experience which helped to shape his lifelong work in uniting the best in western theatrical traditions with those of his native China. Faye Chunfang Fei traces this formative influence, along with those of Stanislavsky, of Brechtian Epic Theatre, and of traditional and modern Chinese forms, in shaping some of the major productions of probably the most influential figure in the Chinese theatre of the later twentieth century. Faye Chunfang Fei received her doctorate in Theatre Studies from the Graduate Center of City University of New York in 1991, and taught theatre in the United States for nine years before taking her present position of Professor of English and Drama at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Her publications include Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from Confucius to the Present (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and she is also an internationally produced playwright.