Has the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford become an expensive irrelevance – actually hindering what should be the real work of the parent company, which has to expend so much of its cash and its energy in running it? Certainly, some were tempted to suggest so when the RSC's most exciting Shakespeare productions of the ‘seventies seemed to be emerging from the spartan environment of The Other Place. Now, Graham Holderness, through a detailed comparison of last season's main-house revival of The Taming of the Shrew and the Swan production of Titus Andronicus, argues that the creation of the Swan – a theatre space specifically but not ‘archeologically’ designed for Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – heightens the sense of a ‘contradictory relationship’ between the RSC's two ‘classical’ houses in Stratford. Graham Holderness, author of several studies in the fields of Renaissance drama and the modern novel, is presently Head of Drama at Roehampton Institute.

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.

David Mamet, born in Chicago in 1947, is one of the most talented and eagerly watched young playwrights in America today, whose work has also found a ready response among British audiences. After such plays as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974). American Buffalo (1975) and Edmond (1982), his Glengarry Glen Ross (1982), dedicated to Harold Pinter, had its world premiere in London at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, and subsequently won the Pulitzer prize for the best American play in 1984. In the same year, American Buffalo (seen briefly on Broadway in 1977) won an award for best revival, while the London production of Edmond, which opened at the Royal Court in December 1985, was favourably received by English critics in contrast to its mixed reception in New York. In addition to Mamet's work for the stage, he has written the screenplays for the films The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Noteworthy for their sensitivity to the nuances and rhythms of American speech, including its unmistakable penchant for banalities and obscenities. Mamet's best plays, as the accompanying essay demonstrates, carry with them an implicit attack on American business values, usually through a confrontation between two individuals, one of whom tries to exploit or dominate the other. The interview which follows was conducted in New York City on 2 January 1986 following a performance of Mamet's latest work, a double bill of one–act plays entitled The Shawl and Prairie du Chien, selected by Mamet's friend and close associate at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Gregory Mosher, to reopen the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York.

In the valedictory issue of the first Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981). we included a fascinating glimpse of a highly unlikely convergence – between Lenin and the London Hippodrome, where the Russian revolutionary leader found music hall an intriguing phenomenon, exemplifying ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism’. The author of that article, Laurence Senelick, now introduces the experiences of a contemporary of Lenin's who, though a dramatist himself, at first appears almost as unlikely a visitor to the ‘Old Mo’, the Middlesex Music Hall in late-Victorian London – the German playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and the Lulu trilogy. Long before those plays brought him notoriety, Wedekind visited London, and recorded his views of music hall in his journal. Laurence Senelick, an Advisory Editor of NTQ, teaches in the Drama Department at Tufts University, and has published widely, mainly in the fields of Russian theatre and popular entertainment.

AT DINNER I mention that a few days before I had been to the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane. My neighbour to the left tells me that it is the commonest theatre in all London, and my neighbour to the right says that of its kind it ranks as the poshest. My neighbour across the way, Herr Mess of Frankfurt, asks me to take him along, please, if I ever go somewhere like that again. Did I have anything on for tonight? I say I meant to go to a music hall in Whitechapel. He is wildly enthusiastic, but takes so long to put on his overcoat that we shall be too late. Meanwhile we are joined by a young French Swiss and we go to the Middlesex Music Hall. Neither gentleman seems to have the foggiest notion of what sort of place it is. The dances bore them, the music isn't pretty enough for them. The girls on stage are too young for them, the audience too loud, they don't hear the tunes, they don't see the costumes and they don't feel the century-old atmosphere surrounding them. One of them takes his hometown paper out of his pocket, the other regrets he is unable to strike up an ‘acquaintance’ in his vicinity.

What is The Wild Duck ‘about’? What is the relationship between text and subtext in a work whose usually understood message ‘against idealism’ appears to contradict the conclusion no less usually drawn from A Doll's House? Thomas Bredsdorff here analyzes the approaches of two major modern directors of the play – Ingmar Bergman, in his Stockholm production of 1972, and Luca Ronconi, who directed it five years later in Rome – and suggests the ‘hidden dialogue’ at work in such a comparison. He also explores the issues of patricide and power which may be deduced by applying the insights of Erich Fromm concerning the nature of human aggression, basing his own conclusions on a careful examination of Ibsen's highly pertinent stage directions. Thomas Bredsdorff has been Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1978, and theatre critic of Politiken since 1965. This essay is translated from his most recent book, Magtspil (Power Play), published in Copenhagen by Gyldendal in 1986.

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.

You grew up in Chicago? Yes. And then came to New York, to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a school of theatre where I came back later to work as an actor and director, I kind of stumbled upon a career as a playwright. I became a playwright because I was an actor and I started directing because I wasn't a very good actor and I started writing because I was working with very young actors and there was nothing for them to do. I started writing because nothing existed for twelve 23-year-old actors to do.

Theatre workers in the Third World have largely rejected both the outward trappings and the underlying aesthetic assumptions of the colonial styles they first inherited: but the impulse to evolve or rediscover indigenous forms has often involved the imposition of a would-be ‘popular’ theatre form by an elite of university-educated animateurs. David Kerr has described these as ‘induced’ forms, and here analyzes the process by which one such experiment, in Malawi, was both adopted and assimilated by villagers, for the better understanding of whose social problems it was conceived. From 1974 to 1980 David Kerr was artistic director of the Chikwakwa Theatre project in Zambia (described in the first series of Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 10), since when he has been teaching in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the University of Malawi, and serving as co-ordinator to the Travelling Theatre project there.

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 quasi-theatrical kinds of performance-ritual which existed in pre-Columbian Latin America have been little investigated, and are almost entirely neglected by English-speaking theatre scholars. In NTQ 8, Robert Potter looked at ways in which the missionaries who followed in the wake of the Spanish conquistadores tried to adapt Aztec rituals to their own proselytizing purposes: and here, Adam Versényi, in the first of a series of articles on early Latin American performance, provides an overview of the ways in which the great pre-Columbian civilizations embraced performance into their often-unfamiliar world view – suggesting that in some cases the cosmogony expressed through the dramatic rituals made them particularly ill-equipped to confront the ‘otherness’ of the invading Spaniards. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Among the products of the theatre workshop run by Max Stafford-Clark at the Traverse Theatre – whose twenty-fifth anniversary is celebrated elsewhere in this issue – was Howard Brenton's Hitler Dances, on which the playwright worked with the director and actors late in 1971. Richard Boon sees both the play and the workshop experience as pivotal to Brenton's later development: here, he reconstructs the processes which led towards its eventual performance structure, and places the play with in the context of Brenton's earlier and subsequent work. Richard Boon, who also contributed an introduction to the Methuen Modern Plays edition of Hitler Dances, has recently completed his doctoral dissertation on Brenton's plays, and is working on a full-length study for publication by Methuen in 1990. He is currently Lecturer in Drama in the University of Leeds.

‘Fools and graceless buffoons’ was one Italian playwright's view of Italian acting at the turn of the nineteenth century – and the political and linguistic fragmentation of the country continued to prevent any national approach to the problems of actor training. By the beginning of the present century the situation was beginning to improve, but until the ‘sixties the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome remained the single major training institution in the country. In this article, Roberto Tessari looks at the explosion of opportunities for actor training – and the wide range of approaches to it – which then occurred, largely since the ‘events’ of 1968. He quotes directly from the teachers involved to illustrate the aims of the various schools, which are now beginning a necessary process of consultation – over such matters as assessment procedures and the placement of students – through the annual ‘Prima del Teatro’ meetings hosted by the Pisa Theatre.

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.

The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.