Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.

Despite widespread interest in the subject, there has been no previous attempt to collect comprehensive information concerning the history and present working conditions of feminist theatre companies in Britain: and so, with the exception of a very few assessments of particular companies, all too often what passes for critical analysis has had to depend on partial or merely anecdotal evidence. As part of her research for her book, Contemporary Feminist Theatres, forthcoming from Routledge in March, Lizbeth Goodman sent out between 1987 and 1990 a detailed questionnaire to 223 companies and organizations identified as having relevant concerns – whether in terms of company membership, production methods, policy aims, or targeted audience. With a response from 98 of these in hand, she assembled a detailed data-base from which the following article derives – describing the methods and aims of the survey itself, the nature of the response, and the needs in specific areas it revealed, both for the companies themselves and for the future assessment of their work. Lizbeth Goodman, currently a Lecturer in Literature for the Open University, has previously compiled a sequence of ‘Feminist Theatre Interviews’ for NTQ, and most recently contributed an overview of the state of contemporary Bulgarian theatre to NTQ32 (November 1992).

The fictionalized account in the recent film The Queen of Tony Blair's coaching of Her Majesty into a more voter-friendly response to the death of Princess Diana, largely through the medium of television, is a pertinent reminder of how the presentation of self on television subtly modifies the presentation of self in everyday life. In this article, Ian Watson considers how the now-ritualized debates between the main contenders in American presidential elections are stage-managed to enhance what their supporters suppose to be their candidate's most sympathetic features – supposedly learning the lessons of the first such debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which displayed Nixon in such an unappealing light. However, what are ostensibly strengths or weaknesses may be read as quite other by an audience attuned to reading signifiers in film or television drama – or simply empathic towards what others perceive as failings, as in the case of reactions to George W. Bush's inarticulacies, awkward mannerisms, and failed jokes, which some read not as signs of ineptness but of an endearing humanity. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

In the early issues of New Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, already reflects at its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.

The years since independence have seen a remarkable range of work in experimental forms of theatre in the nations of Africa – ‘experimental’, that is, in their shared rejection of the imposed colonial heritage of westernized forms, and the common attempt to revitalize indigenous cultural traditions while making them relevant to present and future development priorities. Ross Kidd, who has worked and written widely in this field, here provides a case study of just one ‘Theatre for Development’ workshop, held in a small Zimbabwe village in August 1983. A member of the secretariat of the International Popular Theatre Alliance. Ross Kidd is also an advisory editor of NTQ, and will be contributing a full survey of the range of popular theatre activity in the Third World to a forthcoming issue.

Theatre scholarship is only just beginning to respond to the insights and emphases suggested by feminist criticism. In this introductory article to what we intend to be a strong and continuing thread in NTQ, Susan Bassnett outlines the resulting problems, and explores the historical context and conditions in terms of one central issue – the role of women as performers (and non-performers) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also examines some of the wider implications for theatre studies, affected as these also are by new historicist approaches to the study of cultural change. Susan Bassnett teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory in the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly and other journals, notably in the field of Italian theatre. Her most recent books include a feminist study of Elizabeth I, and (in collaboration with John Stokes and Michael Booth) Bernhardt. Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time.

Drama training in Britain at the present time is replete with horror stories. In the academic sector, intake numbers have been pushed far beyond the strength of the resources – whether of personnel or performing spaces – designed to accommodate them. In the actor training sector, those students who have somehow managed to cope with the heavy fees struggle for subsistence – often by working at full-time jobs during the night and at weekends, while some have even joined the homeless on the streets. In the following article, Clive Barker attempts to disentangle the complex web of factors which have led to this situation, and to suggest how some of the artistic, if not the economic problems might begin to be tackled. Clive Barker, who recently retired from the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Formerly an actor with Theatre Workshop, he is also author of the seminal text, Theatre Games.

In this essay Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, founder of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, and a Contributing Editor of NTQ, traces his own ‘orphanage’ from a professional family – and his discovery not only of an ‘elder brother’ in Grotowski, but of his two ‘grandfathers’, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. He extends the metaphor to suggest how these two branches of a theatrical family tree, apparently of quite different impulses and temperaments, shared a working language, however differently this translated into their theatre practice. He sums this up as a common concern with ‘showing how thoughts move’, and relates this in particular to the ways in which the theatre lost, preserved, and has slowly rediscovered the work of Meyerhold, and to how the ‘disconnected tradition’ of his work re-emerges in unexpected places. This takes Barba on a journey from the home where Meyerhold received his friends in Moscow, as lovingly restored by his granddaughter, to Mexico and Colombia, where Seki Sano brought to a new continent his own discoveries from the ‘theatre paradise’ he believed he had found in the Soviet Union, in which ‘the discoveries of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were part of the same baggage’, thus passing, ‘through the rigour of the craft, the meaning of a theatre that lives through revolt and a feeling of not belonging’.

Is there a specific lesbian theatre aesthetic? If so, is butch and femme at the heart of it? Or androgyny? Or the freedom-confinement dynamic? Or, on another level, distancing role from ‘essential being’, and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social constructs from male and female as biological entities? By focusing on a number of lesbian texts, including her own work, Nina Rapi explores both the theory and practice of an emerging aesthetic that reveals the ‘performance of being’, seeking to ‘shift the axis of categorization’, and so to create a new and exciting theatre language. Nina Rapi is a playwright and translator whose theatre work includes Ithaka (Riverside Studios, June 1989; Link Theatre, staged readings, April 1992; published in Seven Plays by Women, 1991), Critical Moments, a trilogy of shorts (Soho Poly Theatre, June 1990), Johnny Is Dead (First One Person Play Festival, Etcetera Theatre, March 1991), Dreamhouse (Oval House and Chat's Palace, April-May 1991), Dance of Guns (touring production, including King's Head and Jackson's Lane Theatres, April-May 1992), and Dangerous Oasis (Finborough, March 1993).

Spiritualism enjoys an equivocal reputation not unlike that of wrestling – for whatever their intrinsic qualities, both benefit greatly from the trappings of showmanship. Supposed spiritualist mediums first manifested themselves during the Victorian era, which seems to have been highly susceptible to such fraudsters as the American Davenport brothers – whose touring ‘seances’ were, however, greeted with rather more scepticism in the North of England than in London. While audiences seemed to enjoy the way in which such demonstrations of spiritual possession were presented in a manner resembling a professional conjuring act, professional conjurers were properly offended by such presumption. So, too, was the young Henry Irving, who, with two companions, took up a challenge in The Era, the newspaper of the variety profession, to emulate the mystical achievements of the Davenports. The following paper, which was originally presented in July 1995 at the Theatre Museum as part of the celebrations of the centenary of Irving's knighthood, traces the rise and development of the spiritualist craze, and illuminates this previously obscure aspect of Irving's career. Helen Nicholson is currently completing her PhD on the life of the Victorian actress and singer Georgina Weldon, before taking up an appointment as a drama lecturer in the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published articles on Georgina Weldon in Occasional Papers on Women and Theatre, on the Victorian supernatural, and on Victorian fairies in History Workshop Journal.

How can computer intelligence best be employed in the theatre? Imagine that a computer is given the ability to control electronically all the media of the stage, and is able to sense and understand in an abstract way what is happening in that space. Furthermore, suppose that the computer is given the ability to reason about what is happening and could construct abstract responses through media. What would it be possible for the computer to do? The theatrical space is the computer's body, the electronic media the limbs, cameras and microphones used as sensors are the eyes and ears, a speech generation program the mouth, and the CPUs and internal programming are the brains, used to interact with the physical world. The space that holds the performance becomes an environment generated from behaviours of the computer, responding to and shaped by performers, designers, and technicians. Robb E. Lovell describes how this kind of intelligent environment can expand the expressive potential of traditional theatre in many ways, and considers how this will affect the viewers' and performers' perceptions, setting out some of the pros and cons of the involvement of computer intelligence in performance settings. Computer involvement is not, he argues, about the death of traditional theatre forms, but rather about their growth into new realms of expressiveness. Robb Lovell is a resident artist/technologist at the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) at Arizona State University. He is co-creator of the Intelligent Stage, a theatrical space that registers sensory input through video and audio, and responds through lights, sound, video, animation, and robotics. He is currently creating tools for artists and technicians based on the technology of the Intelligent Stage – tools that allow artists to create interactive mediated works. He is working on a practical PhD in Interactive Theatre Design through the Institute for New Media Performance Research.

Nikolai Evreinov (1870–1953) was a Russian playwright, director, and theorist of the theatre who played a leading part in the modernist movement of Russian theatre. Evreinov's 1911 monodrama The Theatre of the Soul(V kulisakh dushi) was staged by the Crooked Mirror theatre in St Petersburg in 1912. It was also performed in London (1915) and Rome (1929), and inspired Man Ray to create his aerograph The Theatre of the Soul (1917). In this article Alexandra Smith links Evreinov's play to Russian modernist thought shaped by the atmosphere of crisis associated with the Russo–Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. It demonstrates that Edith Craig's production of Evreinov's play suggests that the philosophy of theatricalization of everyday life might enable modern subjects to overcome the fragmentation of modern society. Craig's use of the montage-like techniques of Evreinov's play prefigures cinematographic experiments of the 1920s and Marinetti's notion of synthetic theatre. Alexandra Smith is a Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is the author of The Song of the Mockingbird: Pushkin in the Works of Marina Tsvetaeva (1994) and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006), as well as numerous articles on Russian literature and culture.

How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).

Admired by Brecht, yet also counting Hitler among his fans, the German cabaret performer Karl Valentin remains an enigmatic figure for most English-speaking theatre people; and his accommodation as a licensed jester during the Nazi years has reinforced the received wisdom that his comedy was ultimately offering reassurances of their own supremacy to bourgeois audiences. Here, Oliver Double and Michael Wilson outline Valentin's life and career, and offer an analysis of his performance style closely linked to two of his best-known routines, which are here also translated for the first time into English. They conclude that Valentin's idiosyncratic style of surreal logic had an effect akin to that of Brecht's Verfremdung, of making the familiar strange, and so, while often extremely funny in its unexpected dislocations, never offering a simple view either of comedy or of life. Oliver Double worked as a comedian for ten years on the alternative comedy circuit, was formerly proprietor and compère of Sheffield's Last Laugh Comedy Club, and is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997). Currently he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Mike Wilson, whose background is in community theatre, is now Professor of Drama and Field Leader for Performing Arts and Film at the University of Glamorgan. He has published widely on varying aspects of storytelling practice and, in particular, on teenage storytelling culture, notably in Performance and Practice: Oral Naratives Among Teenagers in Britain and Ireland (Ashgate, 1997). His latest book, Theatre, Acting, and Storytelling will be published by Palgrave in 2004.

Clara Armand, author of the preceding article on ‘Dialogism and the Theatre Event’ in relation to Deborah Warner's production of Euripides' Medea, talks with Fiona Shaw about her close working relationship with the director in earlier productions, and the process of creating and developing the title role in the play. The interview took place in the Queen's Theatre on 21 February 2001, during the West End run of the production.

Since the mid-twentieth century, urban cultural policies have tended to broaden citizens’ access to cultural and arts facilities in most European cities. Italy saw its theatre infrastructure being enhanced by the teatri stabili which have emerged since the late 1940s, in developed urban contexts, and the decentralization of theatre activities during the 1970s, in the suburbs of cities as well as in small regional towns. This changed the distribution of theatregoing accessibility, but not sufficiently to make opportunities equal across the country's different geographical areas. In the present article Marco Serino discusses the decentralization of theatre in Italy, in particular as it has affected the southern Campania region, basing his argument on his own census of the venues in existence in southern Campania in 2008. Social, economic, and political issues are involved in the discussion since these always influence theatre policy and practice. Marco Serino was awarded his PhD in Sociology, Social Analysis, and Public Policies in 2010 at the University of Salerno, Italy. His research focuses on cultural and communication processes, particularly on theatre organizations and audiences.

While Appia's name is dutifully linked in our theatre histories with the full realization of the revolution in stage lighting wrought by electricity, the nature of his broader scenographic philosophy has remained little understood, and his own writings are not readily accessible in English. Still less have English-speaking theatre people given due attention to the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of the system of eurhythmies – and virtually nothing has previously been written about the unique collaboration between these two innovators, which began in 1906, and eventually flourished in the unlikely setting of a German ‘garden city’, dedicated to the humanization of modern industrial practices – Hellerau, or ‘the bright meadow’. Here, Richard Beacham, who has published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), describes how the two men came to meet and to plan for the possibilities offered by the projected Hellerau festivals: in a subsequent article, he will assess the extent and nature of the work they achieved there.

How has post-war Japanese theatre grappled with Japanese responsibility for its imperialistic/militaristic past in Asia, and for institutionalized discrimination against resident minorities? Using the tools of guilt, nostalgia, and the valorization of victimhood that are embedded in the idea of hōgan biiki (sympathy for the loser/victims), Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei here analyzes Japan's often contradictory, flip-flopping self-image as both victimizer and victim in relation to Korea and resident Koreans. Looking at both mainstream and alternative performances, her article suggests that despite attempts to discuss these issues openly, most theatre artists actually present images that soften or displace responsibility for the past. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, and was recently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität, Berlin. An authority on post-war Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and award-winning playwright. Her books include Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan and the co-authored Theatre Histories: an Introduction. She has published numerous articles and presented papers and keynotes throughout the world. Professor Sorgenfrei is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the Association for Asian Performance Newsletter.

Eugenio Barba delivered this address when he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Plymouth on 27 October 2005. Eugenio Barba founded the Odin Teatret in Oslo in 1964, taking it to Holstebro in Denmark in 1966 where, ever since, he and his collaborators have explored and reinvented the vocal and corporeal possibilities of performance. In the speech which follows, he explores anew several images for the theatre that recur in his writings, notably Beyond the Floating Islands (1986, a new version of The Floating Islands, 1979) and The Paper Canoe (1994). Here they resurface in the all-embracing trope of the sea, accompanied by Barba’s reflections on multiculturalism and diversity in the theatre. Other familiar concerns of Barba’s writings and the Odin’s work such as exile and the search for community are crystallized in this speech in Barba’s lapidary ‘The country in which I dwell is the theatre.’ During Odin Teatret’s UK tour in the autumn of 2005, documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of this issue, Eugenio Barba opened the new Library at Rose Bruford College, named in memory of former NTQ Co-Editor, Clive Barker.

Taking up the arguments set out by Anna Cutler in the preceding article, Susan Melrose here cautions against what she sees as the dangers Cutler fails to take into account of nominalization as an inherently conservative process. She suggests that the reification of the term ‘the body’ carries its own dangers, unless its complexities – as suggested by the title of this article – are recognized and assimilated. Arguing that many of the problems identified by Cutler are as applicable to the male as to the female performer, Susan Melrose concludes that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics. Susan Melrose is Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the MA course in Performance Studies. She is author of A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Macmillan, 1994), and a contributor to numerous journals and symposia in her field. Further contributions to the debate initiated in these articles are planned and invited.