In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), we included a descriptive analysis by David Williams of three of the major productions of Peter Brook's Centre Internationale de Recherche Théâtrale in Paris. Following the opening of the company's most recent production, the Mahabharata. a number of its earlier members returned to join in a series of meetings designed to share some of their approaches and experiences with a public audience. Georges Banu – whose own detailed account of Brook's work formed the thirteenth volume of Voies de la création théâtrale (Paris: CNRS. 1985) – was among that audience, and here presents a journal of the six days of meetings, which were held from 18–20 and 26–28 March 1986.

Howard Brenton began his theatrical career in the late 'sixties as one of the ‘Portable playwrights’, but quickly felt the need to utilize the resources available on larger stages-without compromising the political impact of his plays. Now established as one of the leading playwrights of his generation, Brenton works regularly with the National Theatre, and in the interview which follows the discussion ranges from his feelings about the ‘scandal’ worked up by the production there of The Romans in Britain to how his feelings about Brecht were affected by preparing their version of The Life of Galileo, and also covers his recent collaboration with David Hare, creating a monstrous press baron, in Pravda. Touching on other recent plays such as The Genius and Bloody Poetry, the discussion thus complements an earlier Theatre Quarterly interview with Howard Brenton, included in TQ17 (1975) and reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). The interviewer, Tony Mitchell, currently teaches in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is the author of Dario Fo: People's Court Jester (Methuen. 1984). His Methuen ‘Writer-File’ on Howard Brenton is due for publication in 1988.

Defiantly, Nicaragua mounted its International Theatre Festival in 1986 while the country remained on a war footing against the contras and their American backers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe were invited, and found the experience very different from other such occasions, east or west. Despite problems of logistics – which left the company without their equipment for much of the visit and virtually having to camp-out in an American-owned hotel – the experience, as recorded here by Daniel Chumley, who has been an actor and director with the group since 1968. was finally and triumphantly affirmative.

Christmas 1911 saw a remarkable collaboration in London between the Austrian director Max Reinhardt and the protean English impresario C. B. Cochran, to create what Margaret Shewring here calls ‘the most remarkable Christmas pantomime ever presented’ – The Miracle, a religious spectacular with a cast of two thousand, staged in the huge arena of the Olympia exhibition centre. Although subsequent revivals of the show, generally in more orthodox performing spaces, have already been documented, there has previously been no full account of this inaugural and in many ways most successful production. Margaret Shewring. who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, has drawn on the previously untapped resources of Olympia, now held at Earl's Court, in this account of the spectacle from inception to reception.

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Ben Jonson – who, but for the happenstance of Shakespeare, would certainly have been Britain's national playwright, but whose achievement has in fact been overshadowed not only by the genius of his sometime colleague, but by the quite different styles and theatrical assumptions of their respective work. The dramatist Peter Barnes, who acknowledges a debt to Jonson in his own writing, is also a leading director of the playwright's work, with productions of Eastward Ho, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, and The Devil is an Ass already to his credit, and, among other productions planned for this anniversary year, one of TheMagnetic Lady for BBC Radio, in apt juxtaposition to the projected RSC revival of The New Inn. Here, Peter Barnes contributes a personal celebration of the playwright's distinctive and defiantly unquenchable work.

It is ironic that interest in the roots of ‘alternative comedy’ is probably greater than ever before just as the most successful of its exponents are moving, in commercial terms, firmly into the mainstream. Perhaps that process is inevitable – and perhaps the drift into sitcoms and voice-overs does not matter so long as there remains a ferment of new activity, jostling for the less lucrative exposure of the smaller venues and the new cabaret circuit. The author of this survey, Tony Lidington, was himself in at the beginning of the ‘Pierrotters’ – which claims to be the first concert party to have existed in Brighton since the war, having now played four summer seasons there – and in 1983 he also founded the Bright Red Theatre Company. Here, he traces the development of the phenomenon of ‘alternative cabaret’ from its social and cultural beginnings, and looks at the present scene from the perspective of some fellow south coast performers – whose problems and ambitions are, he feels, representative of a nationwide network of diverse and, thankfully, often diverting talent.

If the playwright is the most written about of all theatre practitioners, he or she is also, financially, the least underwritten. Despite the emergence of a Theatre Writers' Union during the 'seventies, the path for the novice writer into the profession remains as uncertain as ever, and security is tenuous even for the established dramatist. Christine Eccles has worked in the theatre both as a director and as a member of that elusive species, the playreader, and is currently reviewing for Time Out and Plays International. Here, she looks at the various ways in which a script may – or, more probably, may not – reach the stage, and at the few sources of financial support for the aspiring playwright. NTQ will be looking in depth at each of the major areas here outlined in future issues.

How can the socially critical aspects of comedy be reconciled with a ‘happy ending’ which seems to affirm the existing order of things? This perennial problem has become acute in a period when both playwrights and comic performers are increasingly conscious of the dangers inherent in the stereotyping – racial, sexual, and hierarchical – on which so much comedy depends. In this article, Susan Carlson looks at some recent ‘meta-comedies’ which have used the form, as it were, to expose itself – notably, Trevor Griffiths's Comedians, Peter Barnes's Laughter, Susan Hayes's Not Waving, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine – and analyzes their responses to comedy, which range from the despairing to the affirmative. She concludes that only Churchill has found a positive way of ‘connecting the painful recognitions of twentieth-century dissociations to comic hope’. Susan Carlson is Associate Professor of English at lowa State University. In addition to numerous articles on modern drama and the novel, she has published a full-length study of the plays of Henry James, and is currently working on a book about women in comedy.

The conflict of generations is a theme familiar enough in western drama – but less expected in an African context, with its strong traditions of ‘respectful, submissive behaviour towards the old in general, and towards one's parents in particular’. Yet a theme of aggression between fathers and sons has, argues Stewart Crehan, been discernible in a significant proportion of the plays staged in the last three festivals of the Zambian National Theatre Arts Association. He analyzes some of these plays, and examines the implications of the theme in the various social circumstances of contemporary Zambian society, besides discussing the ‘mythical dimension’ which is also involved. Stewart Crehan is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Zambia, and has been active in Zambian theatre as a playwright, actor, director, and adjudicator. He is author of a critical study and selected edition of the work of William Blake, and has published various articles on literature from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and on African drama and literature.

In this wide-ranging article. Peter Holland explores the relationship between the director and the playwright from contrasting historical and artistic perspectives. A typical film-contract, as recently signed by Trevor Griffiths with Warner Brothers, is thus made to shed retrospective light on the less overtly proprietorial assumptions which governed Stanislavski's approach to the plays of Chekhov – and which, in effect, sanitized them of their political insights into pre-revolutionary Russian society, creating instead bourgeois tragedies about flawed individuals. Acknowledging the difficulties of creating a framework within which the role of the playwright could be introduced more authoritatively into the theatrical structure, the author nonetheless stresses the importance of recognizing the nature of the hierarchy, which gives pre-eminence to the directorial ‘reading’. Peter Holland, University Lecturer in Drama in the University of Cambridge, is currently writing (in collaboration with Vera Gottlieb) a study of Stanislavski for Cambridge University Press, and is preparing the Oxford Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Recent feminist criticism has led to a reassessment of women's roles in the Elizabethan drama, especially in such ‘difficult’ plays as The Taming of the Shrew or Shakespeare's problem comedies. Yet this has often been with an implicit belief in the appropriateness of ‘psychological’ or ‘interpretive’ approaches to character and gender quite alien to the period in which the plays were first performed. In the following article. Kathleen McLuskie. who teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Kent, looks at the different, often conflicting approaches to the sexuality of performance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, at how these were reflected both in theatrical conventions and in contemporary attitudes to the plays and the ‘boy actresses’ – and at some possible implications for modern productions.

‘Verbatim Theatre’ has been the term utilized by Derek Paget during his extensive researches into that form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape-recorded material from the ‘real-life’ originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape. Though clearly indebted to sources such as the radio ballads of the 'fifties, and to the tradition which culminated in Joan Littlewood's Oh what a Lovely War, most of its practitioners acknowledge Peter Cheeseman's work at Stoke-on-Trent as the direct inspiration - in one case, as first received through the ‘Production Casebook’ on his work published in the first issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (1971). Quite simply, the form owes its present health and exciting potential to the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of the portable cassette recorder - ironically, a technological weapon against which are ranged other mass technological media such as broadcasting and the press, which tend to marginalize the concerns and emphases of popular oral history. Here, Derek Paget, who is currently completing his doctoral thesis on this subject, discusses with leading practitioners their ideas and working methods. Derek Paget teaches English and Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education, and has also had practical theatre experience ranging from community work to the West End, and from Joan Littlewood's final season at Stratford East to the King's Head, Islington.

When the current spate of ‘Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland over a decade ago. it was fashionable to lament the lack of plays about the political and military situation there. Now there is no shortage of plays, but a persistent worry – here articulated by Philomena Muinzer – that most of them do little to analyze the events. let alone to suggest a resolution of a crisis which is coming to be accepted as somehow endemic and inevitable. This fatalism, she suggests, is because the plays either fit all too easily into old forms which sanctify antiquated assumptions, or mould no less constricting new ‘conventions’ – thus creating a dramaturgical vicious circle which perpetuates the political. Taking a cross-section of recent plays about Ulster, she thus suggests how they share a body of themes and concerns which ‘become part of an inherited dramatic fabric, which then prejudices new political analysis and new creative thinking alike’. Philomena Muinzer herself grew up in Northern Ireland, and subsequently attended the Universities of Princeton. Essex, and Yale. In 1982 she received an Arts Council bursary on the strength of her play Together Against Him. and she is currently working on a new play about the Troubles.

A director's ‘reading’ of the play – the hierarchical implications of which were discussed by Peter Holland in the preceding article – normally begins with just that: a reading, of the printed or typewritten text. Here. Michael Quinn discusses the various factors through which this initial acquaintance becomes a stage production carrying the stamp of the resulting perceptions – some of which go unrecognized, as much by the director as by those who evaluate his work. These may vary from preconceptions (or a lack of them) about the writer himself to the prevailing modes of the director's own work, or from such imponderables as the ‘lingering’ effect of objects on stage whose original function has been fulfilled to the ‘intertextuality’ always present when a play has a previous production history. The author argues not for the impossible elimination of such influences, but for their proper recognition, so that the director may be better aware of the reasons behind the choices he makes in translating a ‘reading’ into a production. Michael L. Quinn has previously published essays on Brecht and Roman Jakobson, and is currently serving as a play-reader for the San Francisco Magic Theater while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the theatre semiotics of the Prague school.

One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’: the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.

Our inclusion in NTQ5 of a piece by the priest-playwright Karl Gaspar, recording his experiences of creating drama in a Philippine prison-camp, coincided with the overthrow of the Marcos regime – a revolution in whose preparation and support. Eugène van Erven now argues, the theatre played a significant part. In the following article, he describes the organization and work of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association – PETA for short – from its creation in the early 'seventies, to the fully-established network of companies and activities of the present day, and discusses its future role in a society not yet certain of the success of its revolution. Eugène van Erven is currently involved in a long-term project researching liberation theatre in the Third World, funded at present by his postdoctoral research fellowship in the Drama Studies Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His earlier publications have been in the field of contemporary western European political theatre, on which subject he was awarded his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Tennessee.

In the previous article, the author exempted one company's work from her strictures on the present state of Ulster playwriting. That company was Field Day, based in the town whose very choice of name distinguishes Catholic from Protestant, Derry or Londonderry. Here, Michael Etherton outlines the aims of the company, which extend far beyond the theatrical, and also describes and assesses three plays which, although not all originating from Field Day, seem to him to reflect the distinctive ‘poetic and political view’ which he believes the company has nurtured. Most notable, be believes, is its attempt to reveal and replace the arid rhetoric to which beliefs and argument on both ‘sides’ have been reduced. Michael Etherton, presently teaching at King Alfred's College, Winchester, has previously published widely in the field of African theatre, on which he wrote in TQ10 of our original series, and he is preparing a volume on contemporary Irish drama for the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series.

In this, the centenary year of Pirandello's birth, there has been a revival, hopefully more than just circumstantial, of interest in his work in the English-speaking theatre – which has previously tended to acknowledge his influence without often producing his plays. But Pirandello's own theatrical ambitions, which came quite late in his creative life, were initially as a director – indeed, the association with Mussolini which has sometimes cast a pall upon his reputation was largely in the interests of obtaining state patronage for his Teatro d' Arte company, which struggled unsuccessfully for survival between 1925 and 1928. Initially, however, hopes were high, and the inaugural productions both artistically and technically exciting. In the following feature. Susan Bassnett, a Pirandello specialist who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick and is a regular contributor to NTQ, describes the circumstances behind the opening of the company, while Alessandro Tinterri, of the Actors' Museum of Genoa, analyzes the curious encounter in the first major production. The Gods of the Mountain, between Pirandello as director and the now little-remembered Irish cricketer-dramatist. Lord Dunsany.

In the autumn of last year, two events took place which marked in very different ways the recognition that feminist thinking has affected theatre more profoundly than through the necessary logistics of job and role redistribution. In August, the first-ever festival of women in experimental theatre, known as Magdalena 86, took place in Cardiff. Then, in the following month, the International School of Theatre Anthropology devoted its congress in Holstebro, Denmark, to the subject of ‘The Female Role’ – a title we borrow for this short feature, in which Susan Bassnett. who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor both to NTQ and its predecessor, analyzes and evaluates these occasions in successive reports. The core paper presented at Holstebro by ISTA director Eugenio Barba, which discusses the balance between the qualities of ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ necessary to the actor's energy, ‘completes’ a feature which, in the questions it raises for further discussion, remains necessarily inconclusive.

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