The origins of the tableau vivant can be traced back at least to the pantomimus of ancient Rome, but the form achieved its peak of modern popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when poses plastiques sometimes struck an ambiguous balance between art and pornography. In the following article, Volker Schachenmayr calls for a re-evaluation of the form, investigating how far and in what ways a static pose, or attitude, can be a theatrical performance. His article focuses on the attitudes of Emma Lyon, later and more familiarly known as wife to Sir William Hamilton and mistress to Nelson. Drawing on connections with Sir William's archaeological pursuits, and with the performance theory of Goethe, an admirer of Emma's attitudes, he suggests a vocabulary to make the tableau accessible to performance critics, using Goethe's Italienische Reise and Poussin's Inspiration of the Epic Poetto to shape the discussion. Volker Schachenmayr received his PhD in Drama from Stanford University, and this article is part of a larger research project on Winckelmann, the Grand Tour, and stage performance in the age of Goethe.

The reputation of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg has been growing steadily in this country and elsewhere – ironically, since the economic problems of its native Russia have made touring as much a matter of economic necessity as of cultural cross-fertilization. In the following article, Maria Shevtsova offers a detailed explication of four of the Maly's most notable productions under its present director, Lev Dodin – Aleksandr Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky, appropriately one of the final offerings within the ambit of the former Soviet Union; Brothers and Sisters, a view of a Russia in ‘perpetual motion’ in the immediate post-war years which has come to be regarded as the company's ‘signature piece’; a transposition onto the stage of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The Devils; and – following briefer studies of Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia – a revival of The Cherry Orchard which, like so much of Dodin's work, offers a bleak vision of disintegration as Chekhov's portrayal of a crumbling society at the turn of the last century comes full circle to reflect our own fin de siecle. Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, and has published on a wide range of subjects including the work of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Patrice Chereau, and Robert Wilson, having also contributed a three-part study of ‘The Sociology of Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989). Her most recent full-length work is Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993).

Christmas pantomime, that peculiarly English form whose uncertain origins go back to the early eighteenth century, has evolved its own distinctive typology of cross-dressed characters, with a Principal Boy who is a girl, a Dame who is indisputably male, and even those humanoid visitors from the animal kingdom known as ‘skin parts’. David Mayer explored ‘The Sexuality of English Pantomime’ in the seminal ‘People's Theatre’ issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (TQ4, 1974), and twenty years on Peter Holland takes up the debate in the light of recent developments in sexual politics, critical approaches to gender – and, not least, the continuing and not always expected evolution of what remains a very live form indeed. Peter Holland is about to move from his present post as Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre in the Faculty of English at Cambridge to become the new Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. An earlier version of his present article was presented as a paper at the conference on ‘Eros e commedia sulla scena inglese’, at the Terza Università in Rome in December 1995.

The work of Edward Bond has featured regularly both in NTQ and the earlier Theatre Quarterly, from the interview and casebook published in TQ5 (1972) following the production of his version of Lear to Ian Stuart's study in NTQ39 (1994) of the concept of ‘Theatre Events’, as developed during Bond's workshops with Royal Shakespeare Company actors in 1992. A few months before his RSC production of his new play In the Company of Men last autumn, Edward Bond talked with Ulrich Köppen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Mainz, about the relevance of Theatre Events to the debate over modernism and postmodernism, in which Bond has also actively participated – not only through his dramatic works but in prefatory statements and published letters – and the ways in which such ideas illuminate and underpin his plays.

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.

Poh Sim Plowright recently spent six weeks in Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of China, watching the puppeteers, actors, and audiences of her native Fujian theatre tradition. Here she was able to observe at first hand the principle of inversion that, she believes, underlies all Chinese theatre: and in the following article she argues that this principle is clearly illustrated by the string puppet and human theatres of Quanzhou, whose origins can be traced to the official ‘Pear Garden Theatre’ set up in the eighth century by the Tang Emperor, Ming Huang. Theatre in this part of South China is, Plowright suggests, living testimony to the continuing basis of Chinese theatre in the practice of ancestor worship, through which most performances become sacrificial offerings – a connection she believes Brecht to have missed in his celebrated confrontation with Chinese acting techniques in Moscow in 1935. Poh Sim Plowright is Lecturer in Oriental Drama and Director of the Noh Centre in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of a book on the Noh, and also of several plays and features on theatrical subjects for BBC Radio Three.

Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard is clearly ‘about’ the end of one social order – about time changing and time static. Yet different interpretive communities – academics in journal articles and students in their classrooms, newspaper reviewers, theatre writers like Trevor Griffiths and David Mamet, and theatre directors like Adrian Noble and Richard Eyre – ‘read’ Chekhov's representation of history and class change in different ways. The authors of this study have been exploring these different reading formations in a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Chekhov: in Criticism, Performance, and Reading’. Here – grounding their work in industry ‘readings’ via production study and interviews – they focus on production and performance of The Cherry Orchard, contrasting the Richard Eyre/Trevor Griffiths production of 1977 (reproduced in 1981 for BBC TV) with Adrian Noble's production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford, in 1995. In particular, they discuss the writing, directing, acting, and staging of Chekhov's ‘modernity’ in these productions, suggesting that whereas Noble referenced and yet simultaneously occluded class in his rehearsal style and staging, Griffiths and Eyre worked for a production which not only embodied the intra-class mobility of the Thatcher era in 1981, but also the ‘then’ of Chekhov's own particular engagement with modernity and environment. John Tulloch, Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales, is author of Chekhov: a Structuralist Study. Tom Burvill is Associate Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, where Andrew Hood is a PhD student working on reception cultures.

In this article, Ronald Tavel argues that the commercial American theatre, endorsed by the American educational system and theatrical establishment, has never nurtured a vision of the scripted play as art – and has consequently produced no single example of it. The nation's genuine playwrights who saw their tasks as makers of art have, he claims, been neglected throughout American history, and left to wither in the wings. In the 1960s, Ronald Tavel founded and named the still-extant Theatre of The Ridiculous, and has written forty produced plays, a number of which have been translated into a dozen languages and staged in four continents. He has written and directed thirteen films for Andy Warhol: ten of these have recently been restored for international distribution by the New York Museum of Modern Art, and all are to be collected for publication later this year by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles. Ronald Tavel lives in Taipei, but is currently teaching a course on Warhol and the filmmaker-architect Jack Smith at the Art Centre College of Design in California. The American Institute in Taiwan selected the article which follows as the keynote address at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Studies Association of the Republic of China.

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.

Cara Gargano sees the plays of Maria Irene Fornes as reflecting ‘nucleate disorder in a system far from equilibrium’ – a theatrical response to the overturning by the new science of the Aristotelian as of the Newtonian paradigm. Comparing the wildly divergent critical interpretations of Fornes' Mud since its premiere in 1983, she suggests that in this overtly simple dramatization of a far from simple triangular relationship, Fornes ‘uses the theatrical space as her laboratory – a place to explore the interface between our society's construction of the world and our evolving artistic and scientific vision’. Cara Gargano is a writer, teacher, and choreographer who took her doctorate at the City University of New York, was on the faculty at the New York School of Ballet, and is presently Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has written extensively on the Quebecoise playwright Marie Laberge, and her articles on performance, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have been published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, and Dance and Research.

Irving Wardle has spent his working life as a theatre reviewer – for thirty-seven years after 1959 passing what he estimates to have been an average of four nights a week, excluding holidays, sitting in theatres, and turning out notices to meet overnight or weekly deadlines – successively as deputy to Kenneth Tynan on The Observer, from 1963 as long-serving critic for The Times, and subsequently for the Independent on Sunday until he retired from the profession in 1995. The following retrospect was originally conceived as a talk for the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, where it was delivered in July 1996. While a good deal of the history of British theatre through which Irving Wardle moved will be familiar to NTQ readers of the same generation, he brings to that common experience an uncommon perspective – and here confesses frankly to failures of judgement and misgivings, as well as snaring some of the underlying motivations and turning points of his career.

In the following interview, JoAnne Akalaitis discusses her experiences as an actress and director with the Mabou Mines company; her artistic encounters with Beckett, Brecht, and Genet; her thoughts about the relationship between art and politics; and her belief in the connection between the physical and the emotional in performance. Deborah Saivetz is a director and performer who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey. She assisted JoAnne Akalaitis on her production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy Tis Pity She's aWhore at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and performed in Akalaitis's workshop production of The Mormon Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. She had several opportunities to talk at length with Akalaitis during the months that they worked together.

As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.

The thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence – during which a small and poorly-armed guerrilla force eventually triumphed over a highly-equipped enemy, supported by foreign powers – is also the story of a social revolution in which the theatre played its part. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only employed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating its people – concerning education and women's rights, and on the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods – and with victory came measures to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in our previous issue, Paul Warwick here makes the first attempt to reconstruct its undocumented role in the independence struggle, and the efforts of the rebels to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. A graduate of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, Paul Warwick made this the subject of his research when he visited Eritrea in the summer of 1995 as part of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project. Since his return he has collaborated on a translation of The Other War by Alemseged Tesfai, written during the independence struggle, and given a reading at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 1996: this is due for publication later this year in an anthology of African drama from Methuen. Paul Warwick is currently Artistic Director of the Unlimited Theatre Company based in Leeds.

The debate in NTQ about editing Shakespeare has engaged with the practices embodied in recent scholarly projects from the Oxford Complete Works (1986) to the continuing ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. The issues raised have been philosophical, concerning the nature of authorial subjectivity, and practical, concerning the interventions made by editors in manifestly corrupt or incomplete texts. Here, Gabriel Egan surveys the progress of the debate and responds in detail to Andrew Spong's defence in NTQ 45 of the principles embodied in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. Rejecting Spong's claim that editorial interference cannot be justified and that early printed texts must be ‘cordoned off’, Egan argues the necessity of explained interference based on ‘enabling fictions’ of authorial intention. Since all textual transmission is necessarily mediation, he argues that scrupulous explication of interference is called for, and that this is lacking in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ produced to date. Gabriel Egan is completing a PhD on Shakespearean original staging at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon.

In contemporary culture, an ‘Uncle Tom’ has become so derided a figure of complicity in racism that it is perhaps only with difficulty, and a corrective historicist awareness, that we can come to acknowledge both the good intentions and the undeniable effectiveness of Harriet Beecher Stowe's original – a novel in which, interestingly, women play no less prominent a part than black characters. Indeed, it is likely that the proliferating stage adaptations of Mrs. Stowe's novel were largely responsible for creating the stereotype Uncle Tom in a popular imagination on which such melodramatized accounts had a lasting impact: and it was partly in response to such perversions that Mrs. Stowe herself set out to dramatize her novel. The result, The Christian Slave, has remained relatively unknown not least because of the premature death of its solo performer, Mary Webb – herself a pioneer among black performers who achieved recognition from white audiences. In the following article, Susan F. Clark examines the play in its contemporary context, contrasts it both with other stage versions and with the seminal novel, and examines the relationship between its black performer and her audiences. Susan F. Clark is Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Smith College, Massachusetts, and is currently working on a full-length study of interpretations of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the American stage.

The largely solo work of the Coventry-based performer Carran Waterfield is clearly part of a tradition of avant-garde performance and of so-called ‘third theatre’ in its refusal of a narrative line, and its multi-disciplinary, performer-centered orchestration of the elements of visual, aural, and dynamic expression. Yet Waterfield's performance pieces are also highly distinctive in their organic relationship both to her own life and to the life of the community in and for which she performs. Jo Trowsdale here suggests that the points of difference provide an unusual model in which elements of drama therapy, community art, and educational theatre find a fruitful interface with ‘third’ and avant-garde theatre forms. Jo Trowsdale lectures in drama at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, and is presently researching the role of artists in education, especially in the training of teachers.

When I was asked if I would like to reply to Sarah Werner's article in the August issue of NTQ entitled ‘Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Viewpoint’, my first reaction was that it was so unfounded in the reality of practical voice work that it was not worth the time needed to respond. But then, re-reading it, I became incensed at the notion that voice teachers, through the work of freeing the voice, are after some romantic notion of connecting with an idyllic past – a notion so utterly absurd that I spoke with my friends and colleagues, Kristin Linklater and Patsy Rodenburg, and we agreed that Ms. Werner's assumptions must be challenged. As Edgar's words imply in the last speech of King Lear: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Words hurt, cost, are ugly and violent: but it is my belief that when we reach the point of articulating our dilemmas – it is then that we become free to take action. That is what my work is about. So, to follow are our answers to, and our questions for Ms. Werner.

Eritrea is a newly independent country whose performing arts history, based on the music and dance of her nine ethnic groups, is only just beginning to be systematically researched. Western-influenced drama was introduced to the country by the Italians in the early twentieth century, but Eritreans only began to use this form of theatre in the 1940s. The three-part series here inaugurated is the first attempt to piece together the history of Eritrean drama, beginning below with an outline of its history from the 1940s to national independence in 1991. The author explores the highly political role drama played from the outset in Eritrea's struggle towards independence and the effort to mould this alien performance form into a public voice at least for urban Eritreans. Later articles will look at the cultural troupes of the Eritrean liberation forces and at post-independence work on developing community-based theatre. The research took place as part of the continuing Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project, which is involved with practical theatre development as well as theatre research. Although this opening article is written by Jane Plastow, she wishes to stress that it is the upshot of a collaborative research exercise, for which Elias Lucas and Jonathan Stephanus were research trainees. Most of the information used here is the result of interviews they conducted and of translations of articles in Tigrinya or Amharic which they located. Training in interview techniques and collaboration over translation of material into English was conducted by the project research assistant, Paul Warwick. Jane Plastow is the director of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project and a lecturer at Leeds University. She initiated the project at the invitation of the Eritrean government, after working in theatre for some years in a number of African countries, notably Ethiopia. She supervised the research for this project, and used her experience of African theatre and of the politics and history of the region to draw the available material into its present state as a preliminary history of Eritrean drama.

This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the foremost British-Asian ‘company of identity’, Tara Arts, directed throughout that time by Jatinder Verma – a major interview with whom forms the core of this celebratory feature. This traces the history and evolving philosophy of the company, from its origins in outrage at a racist murder, through changing perceptions of how multicultural identity can best find its dramatic expression, to a discussion of Verma's own recent work for Contact Theatre and the National. Contributions from other leading participants in the company's work are complemented by a selection of press reactions to major productions, and a survey of bibliographical and other resources. The compiler of this feature, Graham Ley, presently lectures in the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently in ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993) and ‘The Significance of Diderot’ (NTQ44, 1995). Among his publications on ancient performance, A short introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of chicago Press in 1991.