‘The Théâtre de l'Épée de Bois offers Free Training in Actor's Workshop’, reads the announcement each year in Libération. The response is minimal. Of the four thousand actors in Paris at any one time, few will apply. The workshop offers on-site training for ‘theatre apprentices’ and most students and experienced actors decline. Of those who attend, few will have the constitution necessary to withstand the mental and physical demands required of those subsequently engaged for production, let alone be prepared for a ten-month rehearsal period, twelve hours a day, unpaid. The Épée de Bois is more than just a theatre company, it is also a school, and a way of life.

In her 1983 book, Semiotik des Theaters, Erika Fischer-Lichte referred to theatre as part of ‘die Geometrie der Kultur’, a network of relationships materialized in space that symbolizes cultural experience. The concept of the geometry of culture may enable us to show how, in an urban space, different strands of human activities find their expression in the outline of urban space. Lewis Mumford demonstrates in The City in History that political programmes, economic interests, and cultural concepts influence the city's organization as well as the functions which individual buildings take in the urban environment. Cultural historians and semioticians such as Mary Henderson, Monika Steinhauser, Michael Hays, and Marvin Carlson have adopted this perspective for their investigations of the history of theatre in various metropolitan areas. For example, Henderson studies the relationship between the theatres and the financial district in New York City; Michael Hays and Monika Steinhauser analyse particular urban monuments, such as the Lincoln Center in New York and the Paris Opera. Marvin Carlson analyses how theatre buildings have been integrated historically as public monuments in various urban settings. Within the context of such studies I will examine the spatial and aesthetic re-alignments that World War II forced upon the integration of theatre buildings in Berlin, taking as case studies four major theatres: the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the Deutsches Theater, the Schillertheater and the Volksbühne.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Daniel Mesguich does not meet with everyone's approval. This child prodigy, this prodigal son, has made a name for himself since leaving the Conservatoire by his provocative mises en scène. Since creating the Théâtre du Miroir in 1974 at the age of twenty-two he has passionately divided both critics and connoisseurs. Some dismiss him outright without a second thought; others proclaim him a superstar, a genius. And there are those who hover in the middle, unsure how long they can entertain this phenomenon. More recently, of course, his opera direction (Wagner's Ring in 1988) has raised temperatures once more. No one can arouse a rather dominant theatre scene or incite new Hernani riots as Mesguich can.

The commedia dell'arte is a type of improvised acting based around the masked stock characters of the merchant, lawyer and servant, whose earliest names were Magnifico, il Dottore and Zanni (Plate I). From 1571 onwards, it was spread throughout Europe by visiting troupes of professional Italian actors, whose members, activities and travels are, for the most part, well-documented. The way in which it reached Bavaria is less clear. Records, including three festival books, suggest that already as early as February 1568, when crown Prince Wilhelm married Princess Renée of Lorraine in Munich, the commedia dell'arte was an established and popular feature of Bavarian court festivities, to which it contributed in three contexts. Some of its costumes were used in masquerades; the Venetian Magnifico, or merchant, and his servant Zanni (the servant-master pair who became the central comic focus of the commedia dell'arte) appeared as masked clowns on several occasions, and on 8 March 1568 there was a full-length play whose description in Massimo Troiano's festival book is generally acknowledged as the earliest known comprehensive description of a complete commedia dell'arte performance.

It is common to describe the end product of an actor's labour as ‘an interpretation’, but somehow the expression's serious, critical dimension is never fully intended. Only a scholar with his pipe and tweeds would seem to possess the appropriate gravity to render judicious overviews of this kind. When one wants to know what Hamlet is ‘about’, they naturally turn to heavily footnoted exegesis found in periodicals with circulations under a thousand. What could someone prancing before a number greater than this in a single evening, wearing grease paint and tights no less, possibly add to such an exalted investigation?

Passion plays in Europe exhibit a great many similarities as far as general content and presentation are concerned. I do not really think it is relevant for the non-Dutch reader, therefore, to delve too deeply into the specifics of content and presentation with regard to the passion plays in Tegelen in Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands. However, a great deal of the external interference surrounding the passion plays in Tegelen, has also been experienced by the organisers of numerous passion plays in Europe. Therefore, rather than discuss their content, it is far more interesting to investigate these passion plays through their development from 1931 when they began. Through this we can gain insight into the manner in which a social and cultural phenomenon such as a passion play can play a role in the maintenance and even the imposition of a particular world view. For the quality of the text and performance of passion plays are less important than the manner in which a community, usually a small one, driven by a communal ideal, expresses religious feelings which tens of thousands of spectators share. In such a performance there is communal activity with a ritual character. Performers are frequently anonymous and spectators and critics set aside any criticism of individual acting or the text because a passion play entails more than merely a large-scale theatrical performance by enthusiastic amateurs.

For late eighteenth-century London theatres, lighting is the facet of production about which we have least information. In his authoritative Lighting in the Theatre, Gösta Bergman describes Garrick's reforms of the 1760s with reference to contemporary French practice and then speculates on what de Loutherbourg's advances in scene design imply about lighting. However, no detailed lighting accounts like those for the Comédie-Française have hitherto been known for any English theatre of this period. This gap can now be partly filled: a ‘Schedule’ attached to the answer in a 1787 Chancery lawsuit gives two seasons' worth of the daily accounts of Joseph Hayling, a tinman and purveyor of lamps, who provided light at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket from about 1768 to 1782. His schedule can be compared with contemporary French and English records to clarify our picture of lighting practices in London in the late eighteenth century.

Keith Gore's article ‘The Playwright in an institutionalized theatre’ (TRI, vol. 15, no. 2, Summer 1990) paints a dismal picture of the state of affairs in France at the end of the 1980s. Gore claims that the French playwright is an endangered species, the victim of predatory directors whose uncontrolled lust for power has weakened and impoverished the whole institution. Gore is able to support his claims with an impressive array of statistics and his article must be welcomed for making these available to English readers and for raising what is an important subject for debate. He was greatly helped by the publication, in 1987, of a meticulously researched and far-reaching report on the playwright in the French theatre by Michel Vinaver. Gore's fundamental suspicion of the director finds many echoes among practitioners of French theatre to-day. It has become fashionable to demonize the director and to accuse him (or occasionally her) of stifling new talent. But although the record of French theatre in the decade since the Socialists came to power is, to some extent, disappointing, it is not as bleak as Gore suggests, nor is it helpful to suggest that all its ills can be traced to a single source in the director. The director, too, is a product of the same political and cultural forces that have been at work gradually changing the shape of the theatrical map in France.

Samuel Beckett's monodrama, Krapp's Last Tape, presents great challenges to the actor. A short piece, it is complex, many-layered and laconic. As always, Beckett never uses even one word, where silence will do. I rehearsed and performed the play some years ago and have continued to reflect on the play and the role of Krapp.

The ‘notice préliminaire’ to L.-H. Lecomte's unfinished Histoire des théâtres de Paris includes a list of eighteen major fires occurring between 1789 and 1900, each of which resulted in the total destruction of a theatre. The date of each disaster is given, as also the date at which the theatre was rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new location. But beyond these brief particulars, Lecomte gives little information on the circumstances and none at all on the probable causes of each catastrophe and the precautions taken subsequently to avert a recurrence. It is the purpose of this paper to flesh out the bare bones of Lecomte's statistics, and to extend the picture to embrace similar disasters befalling provincial playhouses in France over the same period. There had of course been spectacular fires before the Revolution at Paris theatres, notably that which destroyed the opera house located in the Palais-Royal on 6 April 1763 (incidentally severely damaging the palace itself), although, since it occurred during the Easter break, the theatre was fortunately empty at the time. The Opera was eventually rehoused on the same site, but on 8 June 1781 the building once more went up in flames and was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. Again there were no victims among the spectators, since it was only when they had left after the evening's performance that the fire broke out; but many of the dancers were still changing into their outdoor clothes at the time and two of them failed to follow the example of the others and make their escape across the roof and down to the street. A total of a dozen or fifteen people perished as a result of this fire, including one elderly woman living in the Cour des Fontaines who died of shock at witnessing the fearsome spectacle.

With the increasing familiarity of reception theory, deconstruction, collective creation and performance art, it seems as if performers have assumed they should pursue their craft unencumbered by textual dictates. Actors appear to be privileging their own interests over the interests of characters or literary personae. Even when actors turn from fictive characters to real life personalities in their presentations of one-person shows, oral histories and performance ethnographies, it seems less fashionable to discuss the people that serve as a basis for such performances than to focus upon the actors' personal preferences and individual visions. The question is no longer how performers might put flesh on the textual and human ‘skeletons’ they encounter but how they might pull a bone from here and another one from there in order to create their own figures. In short, ‘the other’ serves performers.

My approach to textual analysis is that of a practising director and actor although I am usually fairly familiar with the main streams of commentary on a particular play or playwright. Thus, when preparing a production I do not often engage in exhaustive examination of the literature. Such reading can actually be harmful, since it may interfere with the direct and intimate contact with the material that can sometimes lead to a fresh insight or approach.