In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).