Among the three or four leading contemporary American playwrights, John Guare is probably least known in Britain: yet in many ways he is the most clear-sighted about the nature of American society, and the most ‘European’ in the often ironic viewpoint which informs his work. His career now spans the period from the 'sixties years of protest against the Vietnam War to the recent Lydie Breeze tetralogy, which approached the past with something of the sweep of a nineteenth-century novel. John Harrop begins this three-part NTQ feature on Guare with a brief critical overview of the man and his plays. His interview with Guare. conducted last September following the successful New York revival of his House of Blue Leaves, follows, and a detailed bio-bibliographical NTQ Checklist of Guare's work provides a full factual complement. John Harrop. an advisory editor of NTQ. is Professor of Drama at the University of California. Santa Barbara, and was a frequent contributor to the original Theatre Quarterly. His study of American actor training was published in NTQ3, and he is author of Creative Play Direction (with Robert Cohen) and of Acting with Style (with Sabin Epstein). He also acts and directs professionally, and has himself directed two of John Guare's plays