British actor training has always been linked closely with the names of particular schools or conservatories. American actor training, however, has at least until recently been associated with the names of charismatic individuals – star teachers who conceived it as their function to prepare their pupils to be star actors, whether in film or on stage. Now that generation of teachers has died, and in the following article Richard Hornby explores the legacy of their teaching, in terms both of the training methods now practised and the expectations about a future career they are framed to meet. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and for over twenty years has been regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of five books and over a hundred articles on theatre. Notable books include Script into Performance, Mad about Theatre, and The End of Acting.

Clive Barker often wrote about Joan Littlewood and his time at Theatre Workshop with a mixture of warmth and bewilderment at her unorthodox methods. While preparing her doctoral thesis, Text and Collaboration: an Examination of the Roles of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop in the Genesis and Production of Brendan Behan's ‘The Hostage’, at the National University of Ireland, Galway, June Favre wrote to Clive praising the article ‘Closing Joan's Book: Some Personal Footnotes’ (NTQ, May 2003). As a result of that first letter, Clive and June began a correspondence – exchanging questions, notes, published and unpublished material, with a final email to June dated 4 March 2005, less than two weeks before his death on 17 March. Clive had accepted the position of external examiner for the thesis with the viva voce to take place 10 May 2005 in Galway – a city Clive had never visited. An email sent on 21 February 2005 informed June that Clive was looking forward to ‘seeing the sun go down on Galway Bay’. His sudden death deprived him of that pleasure. Concluding the ‘Acknowledgments’ of the thesis, June wrote: ‘Above all my heartfelt gratitude for the dozens of emails, letters, and articles Clive Barker shared with me. He promptly supplied information on Joan Littlewood and the productions of Brendan Behan plays from first-hand experience.’ There follow some of the informative and humorous exchanges between Clive and June, who was awarded her doctoral degree later in 2005.

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London's commercial West End. The play's success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre included a national tour and a season at Center Stage, Baltimore, directed by August Wilson's director Marion McClinton. In this interview with Deirdre Osborne, Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson's considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson's project to account for the history of black people's experience in every decade of the twentieth century. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams.

It has become axiomatic that theatre not only depends on conflict but also deploys it in its structure and function. Theatre is therefore working in familiar territory when it is utilized in a project dealing with conflict resolution and transformation, based on direct interaction with and intervention by the audience. In this paper Samuel Ayedime Kafewo examines one such experiment in which Boal's Forum Theatre techniques were used to address the issues of ethnic and religious intolerance in the northern region of Nigeria. The paper discusses how the process of choices, decisions, and consequences was used to explore the varying dimensions and manifestations of conflict with the members of the various communities, and how far this contributed to resolving the issues in conflict and led to positive lessons for those involved. The paper concludes by looking at some of the shortcomings of the experiment and suggests ways of strengthening future practice. Samuel Ayedime Kafewo teaches in the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.

The National Theatre of Scotland was constituted in 2003, following a debate in the newly devolved Scottish Parliament. Its first artistic director was appointed in 2004, and its inaugural production was presented in February 2006. Within another year, some twenty productions had been seen in over forty urban and rural locations – a rate of development in marked contrast to the slow crawl over more than half a century towards a National Theatre in London. Personal and political drive apart, a major reason for the speed with which the National Theatre of Scotland has not only established itself but gained respect far beyond national boundaries is the simple fact that it does not possess a theatre building, so that all its work must of necessity tour nationwide – or involve co-productions with building-based companies. Home, the opening event, was in fact a multiplicity of different shows tailored to ten different locations; later work has ranged from the classic Mary Stuart to Anthony Neilson's surrealist Wonderful World of Dissocia, from a reinvention of Macbeth to Gregory Burke's astonishing Black Watch, which interweaves the history of the famous but doomed Scottish regiment with the raw actuality of young soldiers serving in Iraq. In this article, based on a paper presented to the fourth Forum for Arabic Theatre in Sharjah in January 2007, Robert Leach surveys both the brief history of the company and the highlights of its prolific first year's work. Robert Leach lives in Scotland but teaches in England, at Cumbria Institute of the Arts in Carlisle. His latest book is Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre, published by Exeter University Press in 2006.

Is the dumb show, that recurrent standby of Renaissance drama, an archaic convention made even less viable by the prevalence of naturalism – or a purposefully different stage ‘language’ with distinctive functions, which directors misinterpret at their peril? In this article, Katherine M. Carey explores the use of the two dumb shows in Webster's The White Devil (1612), relating this both to the new historicist understanding of the ‘salutary anxiety’ of Jacobean society and to the concept of ‘remediation’ explored in the work of Bolter and Grusin. She ends with a discussion of the dumb shows in three recent productions of the play. Katherine M. Carey has recently completed her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia, USA.

Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey in the Theatre Workshop production of 1959 opened to the sound of a fast twelve-bar blues played on trumpet, saxophone, and guitar by musicians sitting in a box to the right of the stage. Though rarely mentioned by historians, the ‘Apex Jazz Trio’, as they were called, were a lively and unpredictable element in the production. Between the actors' open acknowledgement of the band, and Avis Bunnage's direct comments to the audience, the play shattered the ’realistic‘ conventions that still held sway in the West End, at the same time transgressing the distinction between ‘serious’ theatre and music hall (where the boundary of the proscenium was never respected obsequiously). Alec Patton, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, draws on original interviews with actors from the cast, a member of the first-night audience, and the leader of the band that accompanied the show to offer a re-assessment of the role of music and music hall in the original production of A Taste of Honey.

In his play Paul, first staged at the National Theatre in 2005, Howard Brenton attempted a dramatic portrayal of one of the most influential and controversial figures in human history, the man many regard as the ‘founder’ of Christianity. In this article John Baker explores the complex relationship between Brenton's Paul and his Biblical counterpart, and asks what drew an avowed atheist and socialist to a dramatic consideration of a religious leader often condemned as authoritarian, anti-Semitic and misogynistic. John Baker was awarded his PhD by the University of Manchester in 1999. He currently teaches English Literature at the University of Westminster.

Ian Herbert reports on the fiftieth anniversary congress of the International Association of Theatre Critics, held in Seoul during the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, 7–29 September 2006.

Dick McCaw was a friend and colleague of Clive Barker's for many years, notably during Clive's chairmanship of the International Workshop Festival, which McCaw created and directed to answer the continuing training and development needs of professionals working in the performing arts. In this article, he assesses the roots from which Barker's Theatre Games derives its continuing influence, and offers a critique of its vulnerabilities, interwoven with personal reflections on his association with its author. He discusses our greater understanding of the workings of the brain since the advent of fMRI imaging, and how this affects Clive's metaphor of the roles of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ brain in controlling and integrating the actor's motivation and movement, relating this to other ways in which Clive's proudly autodidactic methods often reached towards the right solutions through unscientific methodology. He looks also at Clive's use of the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, and of his intuitive and successful use of Feldenkrais techniques in regaining momentum following his first stroke. Dick McCaw, whose DVD celebrating Clive's theatre games workshops and their background, Theatre Jazz, was issued by Arts Archives, Exeter, in 2005, is currently teaching at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Many theatre pieces in Japan now focus on a certain type of physicality which results from the sense of unease present in Japanese society. Manabu Noda argues that the senses of estrangement, distrust, apathy, helplessness, and incongruity in this supposedly democratic country come partly from the macho pressures under the right-wing Koizumi administration of 2001–06, and examines some current Japanese performances in the context of Japanese post-war society and of the continuing conflict in Iraq. He explores how these performances stage the body ill at ease – perceived as something irrevocably ‘left behind’ physically rather than textually. Manabu Noda is former general secretary of the Japan Centre of the International Association of Theatre Critics, and presently holds the position of Professor in the School of Arts and Letters at Meiji University in Tokyo. A theatre critic, he has also published books and essays on British and Japanese acting and theatre history. The present paper is based on a presentation in October 2006 at the conference ‘Foundation and Horizon of Hong Kong Performing Arts Criticism’, organized by the International Association of Theatre Critics in Hong Kong, and on a shortened version presented at the IATC 2006 Extraordinary Congress in Seoul.

Report on the circus events during the International Cultural Festival accompanying the Melbourne Commonwealth Games from 15 to 26 March 2006

Peter Hepple, who died on 12 October 2006, had been an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly from the first issue of the relaunched journal back in 1985, and worked with us in the late 1970s during the old Theatre Quarterly's successful campaign to recreate a British Centre of the International Theatre Institute, of which he remained a council member. Here, in a tribute first published in The Independent on 14 October 2006, Ian Herbert remembers the man in the mac who was welcomed everywhere.

Report on the International Intercultural Theatre Festival (Entrecultures), held in Tortosa, Spain, from 17 to 26 November 2006.

This paper evaluates the development of performative theories inspired by practice in the evolution of Lizbeth Goodman's research and SMARTlab's fifteen-year oeuvre. In this piece, Goodman outlines the methodology of ‘performing in the wishing tense’, analyzing the development of her own practice from television to live theatre to broadcast and multimedia to telematics and online learning ‘stages’, to radio, and then to web presence. As the subtitle of the article suggests, Goodman has evolved a methodology for her team that has been influenced by the work of one of her academic mentors, the late Clive Barker, author of Theatre Games, and that has been extended in parallel explorations of play, time, space, and voicing in the work of women, people with disabilities and disadvantaged groups worldwide, here discussed from earliest stages to current collaborations. This work has been extrapolated to show how those with disabilities that prevent free movement and speech can benefit from interactive screenic or telematic performance tools that empower a sense of movement and play: a ‘theatre games’ rubric translated into multimedia performance modes, using technology tools created by the team. She discusses the place of the (damaged or fractured) body of the theorist in relation to the bodies of the people she directs and whose words and movements she choreographs. Written specifically as a ‘response’ to Barker's work, this piece maps the journey of SMARTlab's performances around the globe and through the recent history of multimedia, ending with a postscript describing a collaborative game based on the role-play theories of Barker and on the ‘liveness’ of what Goodman calls ‘the wishing tense’ of lost languages, including body languages. Much of the performance material referred to is available online, and DVD versions can be provided upon request.

Chrissie Poulter read Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University from 1973 to 1976, and was taught by Clive Barker during her first year there. Now a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, her specialism is theatre games, so their paths continued to cross over the years. As a theatre director, deviser, and trainer her work centres on the use of play within and without the theatre world, with a particular focus on inter- and intra-cultural exchange. Her book Playing the Game (Palgrave-Macmillan, 1987) is a widely used manual of theatre games. Her most recent creative projects have been as one of the directors of The Bus Project – a site-specific project on a moving Dublin bus – for Performance Lab in the Dublin Fringe Festival in September 2007, and Metamorphoses with Prey Trio, a site-specific production with three musicians for the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, described in the preceding article by Lizbeth Goodman. Here, Chrissie Poulter takes theatre games as a springboard to discuss and define the need for ‘guardianship’ in game playing, online or in the studio workship.