Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist, seen in relation to its source, Molière's The Misanthrope, provides not only a modern commentary on that play but an insight into the nature of comic mimesis. Though startlingly different in most respects, the two plays present us with ‘unrealistic’ extremes which are simply distortions of tendencies we can see both in our society and in our selves. Such distortions are comic in that the audience perceives the disparity between the action and what would ordinarily occur in reality, but the distortions pose no threat to laughter because of the author's careful control of the context in which they occur.

In the summer of 1671, after the court had left London and after his performance as Ladislaus in John Crowne's Juliana – a play thwarted, as the preface declared, by the fact that ‘the Dog-Star was near his Reign’ – Thomas Betterton made his way with Joseph Haines to Paris. What they, and particularly what Betterton, saw there helped to determine the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre which was then under construction, and which would open in November that year. When we compare what was happening on the French stage during and immediately after Betterton's visit with what we know of the Dorset Garden Theatre, however, it becomes clear that Betterton's experience was to have an effect on the form of the Dorset Garden Theatre not immediately, but in the years that followed its opening, and that the single most influential work was not one that Betterton saw on his visit to France in 1671, but one which was first performed two years later.

Eighteenth century Parisian theatres operated under strict theatrical regulations. While licensed to produce a particular type of entertainment, each theatrical manager was admonished to not infringe upon the theatrical specialities of his competitors. In the 1770s, Philip Astley, an Englishman considered by most theatre historians the ‘father of the modern circus’, began offering his unique equestrian performances to Parisian audiences (see Plate I). Although he spent most of his time performing in London, Astley returned to Paris on a fairly regular basis. His London performances usually included clowning, juggling and acrobatics as entr′actes to the equestrian exercises. In Paris, however, juggling, tight-rope acts and the like were among the licensed specialties of Jean-Baptiste Nicolet, a noted acrobat with a long and popular history of performance both at the fairs and on the Boulevard du Temple. Frustrated by the narrowness of the license granted him, Astley devised a unique means of circumventing the regulation.

Jacinto Benavente (1866–1954) is one of Spain's forgotten dramatists. In an interview contained in an article published recently in the newspaper Ya to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Benavente's death, the theatre director José Luís Alonso said: ‘se puede decir que, prácticamente, ha caído en el olvido, mientras que otros autores de su tiempo, un claro ejemplo lo tenemos en Valle-Inclán, han conseguido hoy su plenitud’ [one can say that Benavente has been almost completely forgotten, while other authors of his day (Valle-Inclán is a good example) have today come into their own]. Benavente is today hardly ever performed in Spain, unlike his contemporaries Valle-Inclán and García Lorca. His preoccupation with middle and upper-class characters, and his unwillingness to treat social themes in a radical manner go a long way towards explaining this lack of interest in him. Benavente's plays may seem rather trivial and old-fashioned when compared with Valle-Inclán's bitterly satirical es-perpentos or Lorca's powerful folk tragedies, yet during his lifetime he was Spain's most frequently-performed dramatist. His work is varied, including fantasy plays, dramas on rural themes, and plays satirizing polite society. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. His best work was written relatively early in his life, and the high point of his dramatic output is generally considered to be Los intereses creados (The Bonds of Interest), first performed in 1907, and based on the commedia dell'arte. This, however, is not the only work by Benavente in which commedia characters appear: in the period up to 1916 the author frequently deals with the commedia dell'arte, and his play El hijo de Polichinela (Polichinela's Son) appeared as late as 1927.

A reviewer of a production of Edward Young's tragedy, The Revenge, in 1815, wrote:

Sound morality and good manners demand that this Play should either be greatly altered, or banished from the Stage. No character of Kotzebue is either so unnatural or so dangerous as Zanga. We may pronounce him a despicable coward by the surest test of cowardice – a vindictive spirit that knows not how to pardon…. Zanga is described as brave, heroic, and noble, yet forgiveness is not in his nature. He is more contemptibly mean – more desperately wicked than Iago. He is made more an object of esteem and pity than Othello…. Why did not the author make him the victim of his own contrivances? Why did he not exemplify in the disappointment of Zanga, the sure punishment of an indiscriminate revenge? … He is a fiend that gains our respect by forcing our admiration, and he does this when the real nature of his actions qualify him rather for the gibbit than for the honourable termination of his life.

If the ordinary student of theatre remembers anything at all about the production of Hamlet conceived by Gordon Craig in 1909 and staged by Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, it is that the screens fell down. This aspect of the design, a series of folding screens on casters, arranged in such a way that they might be reversed and alternated, thus changing the scene before the eyes of an audience to create a sense of abstract monumentality, was in fact poorly realized by the plain wood-and-canvas flats that proved to be the most viable medium. And they did indeed fall down, although not in performance, but at a special technical run-through on the afternoon before the opening, when they required rapid repairs and trays of ballast to stabilize them. As a result, the quick-change in full view was replaced by a traditional scene-shift behind closed curtains. Craig had not been at that calamitous rehearsal and knew nothing of the accident; when he read about it, twelve years later, vividly recounted in Stanislavsky's My Life in Art, he reckoned the story a lie and a libel, and, fearful of the mockery to which his ingenuity would be subjected, threatened to sue unless Stanislavsky cut the offending episode. Not until confronted by a sworn affidavit from the stage hands and master carpenters who had been present did he subside into a grumbling quiescence.

The premature death of the Austrian actor Josef Kainz on 20 September 1910, was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the passing of an epoch in the history of the German and Austrian theatre. In obituary notices Kainz was described as the most representative actor of his generation, as the pioneer of a ‘modern’ style of acting which accurately and imaginatively communicated the experience of man during a period of transition and uncertainty, one ‘in which the old … was dead and the new not yet born’. Some notices included even more extravagant accolades; Kainz's death, it was claimed, had deprived the theatre of its most creative spirit and comparisons were made, somewhat indiscriminately, between Kainz and many of the greatest figures of Western civilization – Moses, Socrates, Molière, Voltaire, even Jesus Christ! In the years following his death writers continued to assert without qualification that Kainz had been the most important actor of his generation, the single giant among the moderns. Although some biographers, especially Helene Richter, denned precisely why this was so, others continued their flamboyant praises, one seeing him as the perpetuator of a ‘pythagorean’ tradition which included Giordano Bruno, Albrecht Dürer and Goethe. Kainz, it appeared, was more than just an actor, he was a great creator who profoundly influenced the art of acting in particular and the development of Western culture in general.

The producer is a relatively recent and adventitious figure in the dramatic art. Whereas for centuries the theatre contrived to exist with a tripartite structure (author-actor-audience) in which the true intermediary between the author and the public was the performer, a new intermediary now exists in the shape of the producer, whose functions are partly organizational and partly creative. Barely a century has elapsed since Antoine, the first French producer in the modern sense, embarked almost single-handed on his mission to restore the French stage to its former integrity. During this time the producer's growing prestige and influence have made his role ever more central to the art of the theatre, so much so that there are times when mise en scène appears to have supplanted the dramatic writing it was engendered to serve. This is certainly one of the more controversial developments in the modern theatre, and a challenging one for writers, critics and public alike. My intention here is to consider the playwright's position in relation to this challenge, by showing how two leading modern writers, Ionesco and Arrabal, have responded in sharply differing ways to the changing climate of mise en scène in France. First, however, it will be useful to summarize how, and how far, the delicate balance between the playwright's authority and the producer's functions has evolved in recent years.

Throughout most of the theatre's history, control of obscene stage plays and indeed stage plays generally has been vested in the Lord Chamberlain, the official with overall responsibility for the running of the King's household. One of the Lord Chamberlain's functions would be to ensure that actors and players appeared to entertain the royal household and it was presumably for this reason that he acquired control over the performance of plays. This power of control, which he possessed initially under the authority of the King, was later clarified and put in statutory form in the Theatres Acts 1737–1843.