Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology has always been substantiated by a body of written theory. In earlier issues of NTQ he has developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual – most recently, in NTQ20 (1989), discussing the way in which the actor's body is falsely perceived as an ‘instrument’, somehow separate from himself, and exploring the processes which give the actor a true ‘second nature’, distinguishing his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’. In the present article, he looks rather at the company or the lone practitioner pursuing a vision of theatre beyond the safe confines of institutional theatre. Such ‘Third Theatre’ may be short-lived – sometimes to be revered in retrospect, sometimes almost lost to history, sometimes confined to a theory never realized in practice. Eugenio Barba looks at the elements which these disparate kinds of ‘Third Theatre’ have in common, including a shared concern with the search for meaning, necessarily combined with a ‘personal discovery of the craft’ – that ‘patient building up of our own physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional relationship with texts and spectators, without conforming to those balanced and proved relationships current at the centre of theatre’.

Our coverage of Indian theatre in NTQ, as in the original Theatre Quarterly, has been as full as opportunities allowed — notably, including a major four-part assessment by Kenneth Rea in TQ30–34 (1978–79), and a three-part personal casebook by Rustom Bharucha of his production of Kroetz's Request Concert, as adapted to the needs of different Indian cities, in NTQ11–13 (1987–88). The fact that we have never covered the theatre of the state of Manipur, which adjoins Burma and Bangladesh on India's north-eastern border, is all too symptomatic of its more general neglect – at one extreme by central government, and at the other by those who might usefully learn from and contribute to the development of its indigenous theatre. Here, Rustom Bharucha – now based once more in his home city of Calcutta, after a period of work in the United States – explains the background of exploitation and deprivation against which he proceeds to set the indigenous theatre work of the director Kanhailal. Looking in particular at Pebet, a play from the 'seventies based on folk tradition, and at the more recent Memories of Africa, Bharucha attempts to draw some conclusions about the problems and the potential of ‘seeing our cultures from below’ by means of a theatre that springs from and connects with the needs of the people.

Why should one of Shakespeare's plays suddenly receive almost as many productions in a single season in the Swedish theatre as it had done during the whole previous decade? Kent Hagglund, in analyzing and comparing the five productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream seen in his country between July 1989 and June 1990, explains some of the accidental reasons for such a convergence of interest – such as the availability of a new and clear modern translation, which is only now becoming part of Swedish theatrical consciousness. But he also looks at those elements in the play itself which give it a sudden contemporary relevance – notably, the struggle for dominance which manifests itself in forms of sexual violence. All five productions prove to have been closely concerned with this issue, which, suggests Hagglund, also reflects an important aspect of the crisis afflicting ‘the Swedish social ideal’ today.

How to accommodate and utilize the insights and the methodology of marxism – and, simply, its potential as a vehicle for social change – at a time when the popular perception of its political ideology stands discredited? Dorrian Lambley explores the dilemma through the specifics of developments in British theatre since 1968 – the stifling of the early radical impulses under political and economic pressures, which has produced, at best, a sense of marginalization, at worst a conviction of impotence. In proposing ways of working within this situation, Lambley draws on the writings of dramatists such as Edward Bond to suggest that marxism must recognize the most important of the liberal humanist emphases – ‘the presence of the subject’, but perceived within a marxist understanding of social relations. Dorrian Lambley is presently working on her doctoral thesis in the University of Exeter, where she helped to organize the conference ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’, on which she wrote in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ28 (1991).

Appropriately, this feature on the Polish theatre group Gardzienice is something of a cultural mix, in which the impressions of an English visitor may be contrasted with the voice of a Polish admirer – and the beliefs of the group itself, expressed in the words of its director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski. In the winter of 1989–90, Paul Allain, a graduate student at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, visited the company at its ‘headquarters’ – which is also, in effect, the small and remote Polish village from which Gardzienice takes its name. This was at a time when the new. Solidarity-led government had yet to be fully felt. Here, Allain describes the training methods and disciplines of the company which, within the context of its physical environment, have come to constitute a lifestyle as much as an approach to theatre. Janusz Majcherek writes rather of the significance of Gardzienice in relation to the ancient and fundamental need for a homeland – a need which, in Staniewski's writings, is related to the company's own hopes and plans. All this material was in our hands well before the upsurge in nationalist feeling which has succeeded the political changes in eastern Europe: and it may be felt to reflect ironically upon alternative ways of ‘returning home’ – on the one hand through the actuality or threat of civil war and the struggle for an elusive slice of the ‘free market’, on the other in that quest for a lost history and inheritance, for healing connections with one's environment, which is reflected theatrically in the work of Gardzienice.

TO GET TO GARDZIENICE, you have to go by train or car for two or three hours. This is the journey in the ordinary sense of the word. Once you have arrived at the village, you begin a very different kind of journey as you hike the country paths, struggle down ravines, run over meadows – as you walk by the light of the sun during the day or torches at night.

In theatrical parlance, ‘political’ is often taken to be synonymous with ‘left-wing’, and research into political theatre movements of the first half of this century has perpetuated the assumption that the right has generally avoided taking politics as subject matter. This article, the first of two about British political theatre in the 1920s, concentrates on plays about Communism and the Soviet Union during the decade following the Russian Revolution, and offers some contrasting conclusions. Steve Nicholson, Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds, argues that, whether such plays shaped or merely reflected conventional views, they were used by the establishment for the most blatant and explicit propaganda, at a time when it felt itself under threat from the Left. The article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays, housed in the British Library, and derives from a broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre from 1917 to 1945.

Doppio is a theatre company which uses three languages – English, Italian, and a synthetic migrant dialect it calls ‘Emigrante’ – to explore the conditions of the large community of Italian migrants in Australia. It works, too, in three different kinds of theatrical territory, all with an increasingly feminist slant – those of multicultural theatrein-education; of community theatre based in the Italian clubs of South Australia; and of documentary theatre, exploring the roots and the past of a previously marginalized social group. The company's work was seen in 1990 at the Leeds Festival of Youth Theatre, but its appeal is fast increasing beyond the confines of specialisms, ethnic or theatric, and being recognized in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian theatrical activity. Tony Mitchell – a regular contributor to NTQ, notably on the work of Dario Fo – who presently teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Technology in Sydney, here provides an analytical introduction to the company's work, and follows this with an interview with one of its directors and co-founders, Teresa Crea.

DID YOUR DESIRE to start up an Italian theatre in Australia arise from your visiting the town your parents came from in Calabria?

No, but certainly visiting that town in Calabria influenced the type of Italian theatre I wanted to make. My desire to do Italian theatre was a desire to do something I was interested in – I'd been studying drama and also studying Italian formally, both were of interest to me, and I felt that the two could be combined. At the time, strategically, I also met Christopher Bell, who was interested in both things as well.

In the early issues of New Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, already reflects at its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.