Since 1634 the villagers of Oberammergau have kept their bargain with God to present a Passion Play every ten years in gratitude for their deliverance from the Plague. It is now staged every decennial year, most recently in 1990, and the single performance that long sufficed has now multiplied to almost a hundred – still not enough to meet the demand for tickets for this internationally-renowned event, which is at once a tourist attraction and, for the Christian, an affirmation of faith. Glenn Loney, theatre journalist and teacher from New York, has had an acquaintance with the play since 1958, and here places the event in its historical and present social context, analyzes the most recent production in terms both of its management and its staging, and describes the controversies which continue to surround it, from the practical problems of an uncompromising dramaturgy to the charges of anti-semitism which are still levelled against a play once defended by Hitler himself against the disfavour of his Nazi cohorts.

The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died in December 1990 at the age of seventy-five. Also a poet and painter, who designed his own work for the stage, Kantor brought to the traumatized and Stalinized post-war Polish theatre a sensibility saturated in the pre-war avant-garde: but he was only able to give theatrical expression to this after 1956, when a marginally more liberal climate allowed him to form his own company. For this company, Cricot-2, Kantor created a sequence of scrupulously orchestrated works in which he was always present, half witness, half auteur – works which were redolent of an apocalypse that had already occurred, yet remained eternally imminent. The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and, most recently, Today Is My Birthday all toured widely, evoking for their audiences a past at once scrupulously ‘real’ in its physical texture yet macabre in its experiential pain. Kantor's fellow countryman and near-contemporary Jan Kott here evokes the distinctive sources and qualities of memory in Kantor's work. An advisory editor of New Theatre Quarterly and of Theatre Quarterly, Jan Kott has been a frequent contributor to both journals, most recently with a study of ‘The Gender of Rosalind’ in NTQ26, which extended the line of thinking of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

By way of coda to our earlier coverage in NTQ of Nicaraguan theatre under the Sandinista government, we include here an interview with Alan Bolt, one of the best-known and most controversial of the playwrights of the revolutionary period. The interview was conducted in September 1989, just a few months before the free elections ended the fragile, insidiously-obstructed Sandinista experiment in socialism with a South American face. While dedicated to the ideals of the Sandinistas, for whom he had fought underground during the Somoza dictatorship, Alan Bolt found himself increasingly opposed to some of those who were putting the revolution into practice, and he chose to work instead with his own theatre group and agricultural collective for a better understanding both of the issues which made revolution necessary, and those which were now prejudicing its success. Bernard Bloom, who introduces this interview with a brief outline of Alan Bolt's career, is a Canadian writer and photographer who lived in Nicaragua during 1987 and 1989. He has lectured extensively about the country, and his photographs have been widely exhibited.

As this issue goes to press, the GDR has just been united with its western neighbour in circumstances which, just a year previously, would have seemed almost as improbable as when Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel returned after the war to create the Berliner Ensemble. Käthe Rülicke-Weiler joined their dramaturgical team in 1951, and witnessed from the inside the attempt to build Brecht's ideal of a socialist theatre. Here, she talks with Matthias Braun about the personal, social, and political background to the Ensemble – which, although under the artistic direction of Brecht himself, was managed by Weigel, who was thus in the position of preventing herself from becoming a conventional ‘star’ performer. As well as dealing with the nature of Weigel's acting – and of her administrative skills – the interview assesses the contributions of Brecht's other co-workers, his own techniques as a director, and the factors (including touring under difficult post-war conditions) which led to the Ensemble's recognition as a major international company. This interview was first published in 1985 in Theater der Zeit, by whose kind permission it is here translated.

The plays of Howard Barker are probably more fervently admired and resolutely disliked than those of any other British dramatist of his generation. Although we have twice published interviews with the playwright about his life and work – first in the original Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), and more recently in NTQ8 (1986) – subsequent articles in NTQ have tended to be critical of his achievements: we are therefore pleased to present here a view of two of his latest plays, The Last Supper and The Bite of the Night, which, while recognizing precisely those qualities for which Barker has often been attacked, suggests that there is a social as well as a highly theatrical purpose behind the ‘postmodern’ approach to theatricality here identified. Th e author, Günther Klotz, teaches and researches in English studies in Berlin, where he has published numerous critical studies and editions of British dramatists and other writers.

In this issue, we present two contrasting views on the issue of gender in Shakespeare – specifically, the gender of the heroine-hero of As you Like It, Rosalind-Ganymede. Both articles relate the character to conventions of acting and of sexuality in Shakespeare's England and our own: but in this first essay Jan Kott connects the play also with another ‘historic moment’ when androgyny became a recurrent theme, the period following the Revolution and the Restoration in nineteenth-century France – notably as reflected in Gautier's novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which an amateur performance of As You Like It, and the sex of its leading player, assume a central significance. Jan Kott has been an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly and of NTQ since the journals began publication, and a regular contributor to both – most recently, on the current preoccupations of Grotowski, in NTQ23. Since the seminal publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, he has been a leading exponent of a critical approach which links the study of drama, the practice of performance, and the forms of culture in which both have their roots.

In exploring the repertoire of farce from its nineteenth-century exponents in France and England through the ‘typically British’ pre- and post-war varieties at the Aldwych and the Whitehall, to the work of such contemporary exponents as Alan Ayckboum and Michael Frayn, Vera Gottlieb also analyzes the ways in which ‘mechanistic’ or ‘clockwork’ kinds of farce are philosophically akin to absurdist drama. She suggests that English approaches to Chekhov have overlaid his work with similar assumptions – as in the contention of Michael Frayn, himself both a Chekhov translator and a highly successful farceur, that Chekhov's characters are ‘reduced by their passions to the level of blind and inflexible machines’. In arguing that this is not the case, she elaborates a crucial distinction between farces which, in effect, assume the impotence of human aspirations, and those in which behaviour derives from character rather than from imposed situations, thus offering at least the potential for change. Vera Gottlieb is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982) and Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Chadwyck-Healey, 1984). She was also translator and director of A Chekhov Quartet, first seen at the New End Theatre, London, in 1990, and subsequently at the Chekhov Festival in Yalta and the GITIS Theatre in Moscow.

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

In NTQ 4 (1985) we included a fully-illustrated interview with the German director Peter Zadek conducted by Roy Kift. Here, Andreas Höfele explores one of the subjects touched on in that interview, as in most responses to Zadek's work: the utilization of the erotic as a recurring motif. From his introduction to London of the then little-known work of Jean Genet to his most recent productions – of Wedekind's Lulu and of Chekhov's Ivanov – Zadek has, in Höfele”s words, opted for ‘the kaleidoscopic uncertainty of play’ and a ‘deliberate lack of closure’, which are here analyzed in terms of Baudrillard's ‘structure of seduction’ employed both as aesthetic principle and as working method. Andreas Höfele, who has taught in the German Department of Edinburgh University and in the English Department at Würzburg, has been Professor of Theaterwissenschaft at the University of Munich since 1986. Apart from four novels, and books on Shakespeare's stagecraft and Malcolm Lowry, he has published articles and lectured on contemporary German productions of Shakespeare, on contemporary British drama, and on aspects of theatrical theory.

The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender in As You Like It largely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.

This is a personal record of a theatre worker's journey to places where theatre is inextricably mixed with politics — or is no less significantly divorced from social concerns. Visiting mainland China and South Africa in the summer of 1990, Richard Schechner records how theatre people confronted the aftermath of major political upheavals – the crushing of hopes in Tiananmen Square, and the perhaps deceptive raising of them following the release of Nelson Mandela. His trip also took in the widely different perspectives and problems of Taiwan, where pluralism struggles (almost unnoticed in the West) to displace an ageing autocracy. Richard Schechner teaches at New York University, and recently returned to the editorial chair at The Drama Review, the journal he conducted through its vintage years in the 'sixties – at the same time creating the Performance Group, and beginning his researches into theatre and anthropology, the field in which he has published widely and innovatively in the interim.

Teatro Settimo is a theatre group which was created in the Italian industrial city of Turin in 1979 by a group of theatre-making friends who wished to discover a kind of left-wing theatre that would respond directly to the problems of an urban environment. Their story is one of institutionalized success achieved – and then deliberately rejected, as the problems of administering that success, with all its attendant bureaucracy, threatened to stifle the original impulses behind the company. Their most recent production, Stabat Mater, was presented at the ‘Divina’ conference held in Turin in June 1990, as described elsewhere in this issue. Lizbeth Goodman and Gabriella Giannachi spoke there to members of the group, which has since brought Stabat Mater to the ‘Theatre under Threat’ conference in Cambridge last October.

New Theatre Quarterly has provided extensive coverage of the work of Odin Teatret, based since 1966 at Holstebro in Denmark, as also of the approach and ideas of its director, Eugenio Barba, who first wrote for us on ‘The Nature of Dramaturgy’ in NTQ1 (1985). Most recently, we documented Odin's twelfth production, Talabot, through David Shoemaker's analysis in NTQ24 (1990). Here, we offer an actor's experience of the creation of a one-person production – uniting personal circumstances, experiences in training, and exploratory research in the process which led towards the creation of Judith, based on the apocryphal story of the woman who seduced an enemy general in order to murder him. Its performer, Roberta Carreri, joined Odin Teatret in 1974, since when she has also performed in The Book of Dance (1974–80), Come! and the Day Will Be Ours (1976–80), Anabasis (1977–84), The Million (1978–84), Brecht's Ashes (1980–84), and The Gospel According to Oxyrhincus (1985–87). Her evocation here of the process which led to the creation of Judith is based on an interview with Exe Christoffersen, who also provides a detailed scenario of the production in performance. This feature forms part of Exe Christoffersen's Skuespillerens Vandring, published in Denmark by Klim in 1989. It has been excerpted and translated for NTQ by Gordi Roberts.

Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works include Feminism and Theatre and Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.

To follow Lenin on the London Hippodrome in TQ40 (1981) and Wedekind on the Middlesex music hall in NTQ16 (1988) – here now is Trotsky on Wedekind. As Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, points out in a brief introduction, this assessment by Trotsky follows in a thin line of dramatic criticism by Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, and Lunacharsky, and dates from Trotsky's involvement with a number of radical journals during his exile in Vienna. The article first appeared in the Neue Zeit in April 1908.

Leopold Jessner's productions of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (1919) and Shakespeare's Richard III (1920) marked a culminating point in the short-lived, politically volatile era of German theatrical Expressionism. Jessner's distinctive work in this staging style did much to define the features of one mode of performance among several which billed themselves – or were branded as – ‘Expressionist’. In the following article, David Kuhns explores the particularly striking impact of Jessner's ‘emblematic’ approach to Schiller and Shakespeare upon the acting of those productions. By transforming his actors from mimetic agents into monumentalized emblems, Jessner analyzed political consciousness in what amounted to allegorical terms. The result was a politically provocative presentation of political behaviour – particularly the will to power – as an essentially spiritual matter. David Kuhns teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and critical theory at Washington University in St. Louis.

John Barrymore's Hamlet, first seen in New York during the season of 1922–23, stands as a high-water mark of Shakespearean interpretation during the inter-war period. But although biographical studies of the actor and his family have appeared steadily over the years, little effort has been made to situate Barrymore's distinctive contribution to the acting of the character within the broader context of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Shakespearean production. Here Michael A. Morrison examines the circumstances surrounding Barrymore's visit to London with his Hamlet in 1925, and the far-reaching influence of his achievement on future generations of actors and directors. Michael A. Morrison is a New York-based writer and teacher, who is presently a doctoral candidate in theatre at the City University of New York, where he is preparing a study of Barrymore's work on Shakespeare.

In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

In spite of periods of withdrawal, Leo de Berardinis is one of the few author-directors from the new Italian theatre of the 1960s and 1970s who has remained faithful to the spirit of experiment, and attempted consistently to renew himself and his processes of theatremaking. In an introduction to the interview which follows, Marco de Marinis outlines the earlier years of de Berardinis's career, and notes the characteristic features of the productions of that period. The interview itself explores his view of the theatre and theatricality from the standpoint of the mid-1980s. At its core is a discussion of de Berardinis's 1985 production of King Lear – the director's second encounter with the play – in relation to his own aims, to the interpretive views of other theatre people and critics, and to what de Berardinis believes we may still perceive of Shakespeare's intentions. A postscript by Marco de Marinis outlines subsequent developments in the director's work.

The ‘two worlds’ of Peter Brook's theatre are its audience and its actors. According to Brook, the actors bring their ‘world of the imagination’ to meet with the audience's ‘world of the everyday’: but instead of the temporary suspension of belief in the ‘everyday world’ which a western audience has traditionally forced upon itself, Brook conceives the true theatrical experience as an interaction between the two modes of reality – those of the ‘imagination’ and the mundane. In the following article, Paul Cohen assesses the importance of this basic philosophy to Brook's productions since 1968, paying particular attention to the tour of Africa with The Conference of the Birds and the recent epic production of The Mahabharata, attempting to show that Brook's theory still directly informs the methodology and the performance orientation of his productions. Paul Cohen originally presented this paper as an MA dissertation for Vanderbilt University, and is currently on the Professional Writing Program of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.