Between its first revival in 1771 and its last in 1871, The Gamester was performed more frequently on the London stage than any other Restoration or eighteenth-century tragedy. Most of these many performances, moreover, were given by Britain's finest actors and actresses. It should not be surprising, then, that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics who witnessed these many fine performances thought, on the whole, highly of the acted play. Nor should it be surprising that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences – who also witnessed the performances of these many excellent actors and actresses – received The Gamester ‘with such genuine applause’.

There are very few texts written from the viewpoint of the Catholics in Ireland in the 1640s; among these, A Tragedy of Cold's Furie, OR, Lirenda's Miserie (Kilkenny, 1646), a five-act verse tragedy or tragicomedy, is striking in being a specifically literary, as well as a political, work.

Almost nothing is known about Henry Burkhead, whose name appears in various forms and who has been mistakenly conflated with another similar-sounding writer. Anthony a Wood rather slightingly calls Burkhead ‘no Academian, only a Merchant of Bristol’, and Langbaine also notices Cola's Furie, repeating this description and saying the play was never performed. A search of the Bristol city archives has failed to discover any mention of him, which may indicate that he resided in Kilkenny and traded with Bristol; various forms of his surname do, however, occur there, and it seems to be an English, rather than an Irish or ‘Old English’ one. The authors of the three sets of fulsome commendatory verses printed with the play – William Smyth, Paul Aylward, and Daniel Breede – seem even more obscure than Burkhead himself; all that is clear biographically is Burkhead's strong support of the Catholic cause, inferred from the play itself. As for its printing, it is not known whether the Jesuit press which then existed in the city was used, or that run by the Supreme Council of the Catholic confederates; it is highly unusual in being a literary text amidst the political, religious and administrative documents, pamphlets and proclamations which make up the remainder of the output from Kilkenny.

The Irish Literary Theatre, from which a new Irish theatre was to develop, came to birth at the very point when Ibsen was about to depart from the European theatrical scene. His last play, When We Dead Awaken, appeared in 1899, the year in which Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field were produced in Dublin. They were the first fruits of the resolve taken by the two playwrights, with Lady Gregory and George Moore, to ‘build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature’ and they offered decidedly different foretastes of what that ‘school’ might bring forth. Yeats declared himself an adherent of a poetic theatre that would use fantasy, vision and dream without regard for the limits set by the realistic convention. Martyn, on the other hand, was clearly following Ibsen in his careful observance of day-to-day probability. The central symbol of his play, the heather field, represents an obscure psychological process which might have received more ‘inward’ treatment. But instead it is fitted into a pattern of social activities in something like the way of the prosaically functional but symbolic orphanage in Ghosts.

Works dealing with the actor proliferated during the early decades of German Romanticism. Actors had come to be viewed as role models whose very costumes, hairstyles, and mannerisms often influenced prevailing fashions or, at least, gave them specific labels from particular plays. Popular interest in everything having to do with people of the theatre was seconded by contemporary poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, professors, and physicians. While some of their writings concentrated on historical and philosophical concerns, others investigated anthropological and psychiatric as well as medical ones. And contemporary actors themselves contributed publications about the ways, means, and consequences of playing roles in public.

Klaus Mann, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, was among the first emigrants to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. From the vantage point of his early exile in Amsterdam, he looked back disapprovingly at German artists and intellectuals who appeared to thrive under Hitler's regime. Especially galling to him was the success of actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), his former brother-in-law:

I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism. So intense was the facination of his shameful glory that I decided to portray Mephisto-Gründgens in a satirical novel. I thought it pertinent, indeed, necessary to expose and analyse the abject type of the treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.

It is not widely known that the Caribbean island of Jamaica enjoys a tradition of live theatre that may well be second to none in the English-speaking world, save only in England itself. Conquered from Spain in 1655, the island boasted an active theatre as early as 1682, not very long after public playgoing had returned to England following the Cromwellian interregnum. Records are silent about theatre for the next several decades, but by the 1730s troupers from England had begun regular visits which culminated in the two long residencies of the famed Hallam Company that came to Virginia from London in 1752. Under the senior Hallam the company journeyed to Jamaica in 1754 and remained there, after Hallam's death, until 1758 when they returned to America, led by David Douglass. Again from 1775 to 1785 the company sojourned in Jamaica, waiting out the War of Independence, this time under Lewis Hallam junior. The record of their performances in the island has been chronicled in Richardson Wright's book Revels in Jamaica (1937), which has recently been reissued.

Space is the essence of theatre, for while we may have theatre without text we can have none without space. This, however, is only to refer to the architectonic space itself, while the problematic concern is not with the space in which we have theatre, but with the space from which the dynamic of the drama itself is derived, particularly as it is located in the analysable dramatic text. This, of course, leads to the contentious question as to whether text or performance has primacy in determining understanding; an issue dismissed by Jiři Veltruský as ‘perfectly futile’ as, in his view, ‘Drama is a work of literature in its own right; it does not need anything but simple reading to enter the consciousness of the public.’ While Veltruský locates the essence of drama in the dialogue, and so argues for ‘Dramatic Literature’, he does acknowledge the dimension of performance in a highly significant qualification to the self-sufficiency of the text: ‘Consequently, the individual arts in their turn influence the development of dramatic literature through the intermediary of theatre. Indeed, when he writes a play, the dramatist is not unaware of the existing theatrical structure and of the various openings it presents to new developments. This is true even though the play is a self-sufficient work of literature which does not necessarily require theatrical performance; the creating subject usually feels, though often unconsciously, the possible applications of his work.’

The values of a community are revealed in its tragedies, and it is increasingly clear that the classical form of tragedy has been unable to accommodate modern values. It is too aristocratic for a democratic age. Sometimes it has been felt that we no longer merit a hero, and sometimes that heroes are now very dangerous and delusive. This latter view was articulated eloquently by the German philosopher-theologian, Karl Jaspers, in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism:

Tragedy becomes the privilege of the exalted few – all others must be content to be wiped out indifferently in disaster. Tragedy then becomes a characteristic not of man, but of a human aristocracy. As the code of privilege, this philosophy becomes arrogant and unloving; it gives us comfort by pandering to our self-esteem.

In any consideration of theatre in the French Caribbean, the name Césaire is bound to be mentioned. Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963) is the most widely- known play in French by a black dramatist, and is now even in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française, and his plays figure widely in checklists of ‘African’ theatre. A revealing contrast can be made between the epic dramas of Aimé Césaire, written for an international audience, especially the newly independent black nations of the 1960s, and the work of his daughter, Ina. He tackles from the standpoint of Négritude major themes of historical drama: the nature of sovereignty, the forging of nationhood; he storms the heights of tragic poetry in French. She is attentive, not to the lonely hero constructing his Haitian Citadel of rock, but to the Creole voices of the grassroots. She brings to the stage the lives of ordinary women, the lore and legends that sustained the slaves and their descendants. Her achievement should of course be assessed away from her father's shadow, but the ‘divergent orientation of the two generations’ also suggests the greater confidence today in the role of Creole language and oral literature, and in a serious theatre within Martinique.

To write of the situation of the dramatic author in present-day France is no easy task, since, inevitably, it involves making a largely negative report. Traditionally, the text in the theatre has been king; in schools and in universities, plays are above all read, and it is often – though perhaps not often enough – a revelation to those who study them to discover that the texts written by, say, Racine or Shakespeare, take on a different kind of existence when they are made flesh in the theatre. One of the qualities of such theatre is, of course, that it can be read and appreciated without any form of mediation, such as that provided, for example, by actors or directors. And it is perhaps odd that we may arguably derive as much from reading the plays of a Giraudoux, for whom the critical collaboration of his director, Louis Jouvet was crucial, as from seeing them performed. Could it be that the partnership of such a self-conscious writer with so committed a practical man of the theatre represents some kind of golden age in the relationship between the author and the director?

(i) A vision and a sense of place

Tom Murphy has responded with some incredulity to an interviewer's suggestion that he has written plays ‘about emigration’. The subject figures in some of the plays; Michael, returned from the exile his tales embroider (Conversations on a Homecoming);, the Carneys, immigrants in Coventry, making a precarious sanctuary of violence (A Whistle in the Dark); John Joe's unsettling meditations on departure from and attachment to his small town (The Fooleen, revised as A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant). These are, on the face of it, situations familiar enough in the Irish dramatic tradition, from Padraic Colum's The Land (1905) and T. C. Murray's Birthright (1910). Murphy is not, however – nor, indeed, were Colum and Murray – evoking distresses measurable by newspaper editorials or the documentation of government reports. The literal emigrations are made to paraphrase emigrations of the self, interior journeys arrivine: at a goal or losing their way.

The Sistren Theatre Collective came together in 1977 as the result of an initiative of the ruling People's National Party in Jamaica. As part of an extensive special employment programme in the 1970s, the Jamaican Government had created opportunities for women to receive basic job training. One group of women who had been involved in a training programme as Basic School aides decided to put on a play for Workers' Week. Through the good offices of the recently established Women's Bureau, the group was able to work on this project with Honor Ford-Smith who was a tutor at the Jamaica National School of Drama at the time. Their collaborative effort resulted in the creation of a sketch, Downpression Get a Blow (1977), based on the women's domestic and political experiences. In the months and years that followed, the group went from strength to strength, creating plays from their shared experiences; working with other groups to use dramatic scenarios as a way of problem-solving and ultimately establishing a permanent company with its own research unit, community workshops and silkscreen printing activities. At the time of writing in 1989, ten of the original thirteen members are still with the group and two new members have been added. Another ten to twelve women and men are employed by the collective as resource and support staff.

The Field Day Theatre Company was founded in 1980 by Stephen Rea, the actor, and Brian Friel, the playwright, at the former's suggestion. The combination of a playwright and an actor in the founding of a theatre in response to a crisis which is both cultural and political recalls the Irish National Theatre Society and the founders of Field Day were conscious that such parallels would be drawn. For both Friel and Rea, the only available models were the Irish Literary Theatre and the Ulster Literary Theatre. The differences between Field Day and other such ventures are however as instructive as the parallels. The Irish National Theatre Society and the Abbey were always Yeats's project; his plays, his theories on drama and speech, and his cultural politics were the informing elements in the development of the theatre. Field Day's founders, however, quickly took on four other fellow-directors – Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, David Hammond and Tom Paulin – for just as the Abbey had had Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow so Field Day has had its pamphlets and other non-theatrical projects, although in the case of Field Day, these are once again open to contributors from outside the company. The purpose of the pamphlets has been to re-examine the various pieties of Irish cultural life in this past century. In its short history Field Day has already attracted widespread attention, but the time seems right for a stock-taking since by the end of 1988 the company will have reached a plateau of sorts in its development. Since 1980 it has produced eight plays, twelve pamphlets, and one volume of poetry, not to mention the work its directors have produced outside the confines of the company; this work places Field Day at the centre of Irish cultural debate. 1988 saw the production of a new play by Friel, Making History – his first for Field Day since The Communication Cord (1982) – the publication of another set of pamphlets, which for the first time were by non-Irish critics – Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said – and preparations for its anthology of Irish writing. The completion of these three projects should consolidate the company's position.

The development of so-called ‘Carnival theatre’ in the Anglophone Caribbean has been steady and important. Rawle Gibbons, a young dramatist/director presently heading the recently established Creative Arts Centre at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies in his native Trinidad, has learned to utilize ritual and festival in his playwriting in increasingly effective ways. I, Lawah is his latest play, and in it he articulates, in theatrical form, a belief in the importance of Caribbean tradition as a revitalizing, invigorating element for the community after the enervating period of colonial rule and the ever-present threat of neocolonial inertia taking its place.

Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden's six part cycle, The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975), is probably the most ambitious attempt in English to dramatize working-class and socialist history. However, productions have been remarkably few even in the ‘alternative’ theatre, so that the work has seldom been seen, even by its critics. Arguably, it is as important as anything in the Arden canon and is certainly the major achievement of the D'Arcy/Arden one. But to say so is to challenge a widely-held view that the D'Arcy/Arden collaborations of the 1970s are significant only in so far as they illustrate a decline in Arden's career. Even when admired, the Connolly plays are usually discussed primarily as an aspect of Arden's development. When not, they are perceived as the clearest indication of his supposed demise as a major playwright, a fall from favour which is often attributed to D'Arcy's influence. Perversely, such discussions may simultaneously fail to acknowledge D'Arcy's role as senior partner in The Non-Stop Connolly Show.