Sustaining the long, initially pioneering concern of TQ and NTQ with popular aspects of nineteenth-century theatre. Jim Davis looks here at the men and the methods involved in improving the reputations of the neighbourhood theatres of the East End of London. Usually noticed for its effects on the licensing of theatre buildings, the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 also brought the newly ‘legitimate’ theatres under the direct control of the Lord Chamberlain. Particularly around the mid-century, the Examiner of Plays, William Bodham Donne, responded to public concern (some genuine, some worked-up by interested parties) by commissioning police reports on theatres, and on occasion requiring appropriate action – from the limiting of performances to one per evening, to the erection of public urinals. Here, Jim Davis, who contributed an article on ‘Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama’ to NTQ14 (1988), and is the author of several books and articles in related areas, offers the first documentation of a little-explored subject.

The new Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), has shaken loose many of the assumptions of historical editing by questioning the existence of single authoritative ‘ur-texts’ and by attempting to present the plays as reflections of contemporary performance rather than as literary texts enshrining authorial intention. Inevitably, Brian Parker argues here, the editors’ success has been variable, and the new approach raises crucial questions of canon, format, the influence and potential of current technology, and the degree to which the editors’ own ‘postmodernist’ assumptions have influenced their decisions. This essay was presented as a discussion-paper for a session on the Shakespeare canon at the 1989 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Austin, Texas. Brian Parker is a professor at Trinity College, University of Toronto, who has prepared critical editions of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Volpone for the ‘Revels Plays’ series and is currently editing Coriolanus for the Oxford English Texts.

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986). Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue – while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council – the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain – introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell had captivated New York, in her distinctively grand manner, well before Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for her in Pygmalion, and immortalized her reputation on stage – as, perhaps, his own protracted and largely epistolatory affair with the temperamental actress immortalized her off-stage. But by the early 1930s, when Mrs. Pat was approaching her own seventh decade, her stage appearances were infrequent, and less fortunate times found her living well beyond her means in New York. There, Alan Brock, at the time an aspiring young actor, made her acquaintance, and in due course became her agent. In the following article he tells the story of Mrs. Pat's declining years – which were marked by a final triumph, half the proceeds of which evaporated, instantly and characteristically, on celebrating the success. Alan Brock went on to become an actor for George Abbott, Howard Lindsay, and the Shuberts. Also a New York actors’ agent, he represented numerous leading players, and later worked with Ben Hecht and Billy Rose on two Broadway shows, while authoring his own radio series and contributing a regular column to the trade weekly Backstage.

In response to the conference on political theatre held last April at the University of Lancaster under the title ‘Points of Contact’, Tim Prentki, Course Director of B.A. Drama and TV Studies at King Alfred's College, Winchester, proposes a new yet very old way of achieving contact between a beleaguered political theatre and its community – the use of the ‘traditionally’ inversionary qualities of carnival to pose highly contemporary questions about the power structures of today's society.

Louise Page was born in London in 1955, but lived in Sheffield from the age of five until a short while ago. She read drama at Birmingham University, and took a postgraduate diploma in playwriting, then returned to Sheffield in 1979 as Fellow in Drama and Television. In 1982–83 she was resident writer at the Royal Court, and in 1985 was awarded the first J. T. Grein Prize by the Critics’ Circle. With a string of widely-produced plays from the early Tissue through Salonika and Golden Girls to the more recent Beauty and the Beast and Diplomatic Wives, Louise Page is now firmly established as one of the leading playwrights of her generation. The present interview was recorded while she was in Greece in September 1988 to prepare the film adaptation of Salonika. The interviewer, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Drama in the University of Thessaloniki. Her publications include Pinter's Female Portraits (Macmillan, 1988), and several articles on modern English drama and feminist criticism. She is currently preparing a study of contemporary British women dramatists. Her ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Louise Page's work follows this interview.

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.

Although now in his seventy-fifth year, the Polish director and artist Tadeusz Kantor is still regarded in the west as a startlingly experimental director, in the bleak, highly personal mould that has marked his work since the creation of the Cricot 2 Theatre in 1955. Such productions as The Water Hen, The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Let the Artists Die have earned him a strong cult following, but he has rarely chosen to explain his views and approach to theatre in the discursive form of an interview. We are therefore particularly pleased to be able to print here a translation of an interview which first appeared in the journal Polityka, No. 39 (November 1988), which took place during the visit of Kantor's most recent work, I Shall Never Return, to New York earlier in the same year. The translation is by Piotr Kutriwczak.

A scandalously successful life as an actress and a tragically early death seemed to cast Aimée Desclée in a stereotypical romantic mould, as did a succession of emotionally-fraught roles, notably in the plays of the younger Dumas. But contemporaries praised the new realism she brought to the passionately wayward women she portrayed. In what did this ‘realism’ consist, and in whose eyes did the virtual equation of female desire with neurosis constitute ‘reality’? John Stokes, who teaches in the Department of English in the University of Warwick, here follows an outline of her career and its context with detailed examinations of the creation, nature, and reception of her most famous roles – finally exploring the effects of the events surrounding the creation of the Third Republic and the impact of the Paris Commune of 1870 on the way in which male playwrights and audiences perceived the women she played in her later years. John Stokes recently contributed the section on Bernhardt to Bernhardt. Terry. Duse: the Actress in her Time, with Michael Booth and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, 1988).

The heavily-subsidized state theatre system of West Germany is often regarded as a model for emulation by the funding agencies of the English-speaking theatre. Yet the situation of such theatres can give rise to its own problems: and in this case-study of the rehearsals of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, Munich, in 1985. Lynn Sobieski (who was assistant dramaturg on the production) analyzes the resulting personal and artistic conflicts, in the context of a system which encourages a degree of complacency in the bureaucracy, and arguably permits some self-indulgence to the directors – while discouraging those of the first ‘post-war generation’ from giving real opportunities to their successors. Lynn Sobieski is presently teaching in the Department of Drama of the University of Texas at Austin, having recently been awarded her doctorate from New York University for her dissertation on ‘The Crisis in West German Dramaturgy’. Her collection, Postmodernism and Contemporary Performance, will be published later this year, and she is currently working on a study of performance art groups in Britain.

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist–Communist coalition government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The coup marked the beginning of severe repression against leftists, trade unionists, journalists, and artists, many of whom were exiled, killed, or merely ‘disappeared’ after being arrested. This letter focuses on the years following the coup: it was written almost one year before the plebiscite on 5 October 1988 when Chileans voted against Pinochet continuing in power as president for another eight years, preparing the way for the elections of December 1989. Despite these hopeful developments – and previous coverage of theatre under the dictatorship, by Catherine Boyle in NTQ 15 (1988) and Enzo Cozzi in NTQ 22 (1989) – we felt it important to publish this moving account by a Chilean actively involved in the struggle, written to Eugenio Barba following the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre they both attended in Lima, Peru, in April 1987. Its author, Hector Noguera, is a professor in the Theatre Department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as director of the university's professional theatre company, a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act, and president of the International Theatre Institute in Chile.

In previous issues of NTQ. we have begun to explore the complex questions raised by the interaction of the study of theatrical performance with other disciplines – notably, in the various interpretations of ‘theatre anthropology’, in the widely divergent approaches to ‘theatre sociology’, and even in terms of its application to quantum theory. Many of these studies have made necessary assumptions in the area of human biology without, however, fully following through their implications. Jean-Marie Pradier. who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Paris 8, here looks at theatre and other modes of performance as ‘biological events’, exploring their importance in the manifestation (and correction) of the way the human body works – in the process touching on areas as diverse as the bio-dramatic function of dreams, the significance of neo-natal rhythms, and olfactory stimulation as one of the influences upon crowd behaviour. Acknowledging the need for further research in the field. Pradier argues for the importance of the ‘body in performance’ being perceived in its biological context.

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

In the year of the Oberammergau Passion Play, with its reminder both of the long tradition of such celebrations and their danger of being subsumed into the ‘heritage industry’, it is instructive to be reminded that the best traditions can also be the most recent, because the freshest and most relevant to the needs to which they respond. Also in Bavaria, and virtually unnoticed by the tourist industry, a nativity celebration is held each Christmas, in a hillside stable to which the participating donkey knows its own way – a ‘living picture’, which began alongside a charitable market and an exhibition of cribs as part of one small community's seasonal celebrations. Its creator, Brother Stephan, talks here about the event to Walter Siegfried.

Even at its most political, contemporary Israeli theatre tends to be self-referential – nowhere more so, suggests Shimon Levy, than in the theatre festivals held at Acre, where year by year over the past decade the plays selected seem to have reflected, more than coincidentally, the preoccupations of the nation, with its haunted past, its militaristic present, and a future full of uncertain or resented accommodations with neighbours for so long perceived as enemies. But Shimon Levy, who teaches in the Theatre Department at Tel Aviv University, also notes two exceptions in a generally gloomy theatrical scene: the exuberant entertainment Yanti Parazi – ‘a metaphor for the yearning for this screwed-up Holy Land’ – and a long-unperformed play on the ‘difficult’ subject of the West Bank occupation, Ephraim Returns to the Army, with its schitzoid title-character ‘deconstructing’ the conflicting elements of Israeli hopes and beliefs, for audiences not presumed to share the play's own progressive but unsentimentalized sympathies.

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.