It has become a critical commonplace to contrast the relative generosity of the early Arts Council towards establishment institutions with its miserliness towards Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, as the company struggled to survive through the immediate post-war period of touring and then to establish itself with a degree of security at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. In this article, Nadine Holdsworth complements evidence that has before been mainly anecdotal with material from the archives both of the company and the Council, and traces the mutual suspicions that were later also to undermine support for Littlewood's ‘Fun Palace’ in the 'sixties. She documents also the ironic loosening of the funding purse-strings at the very moment when Theatre Workshop's run of West End transfers depleted its energies at its Stratford base – and forced it also to return a percentage of its hard-won profits to Arts Council coffers. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University. She contributed an article to NTQ49 (1997) on ‘Good Nights Out: Activating the Audience with 7:84 (England)’.

Traditional Chinese theatre seems to appeal to audiences across the world more for its exquisite acting than for its literary qualities. Yet Mei Lanfang, Tang Xianzu and Li Yu all assert that good acting must be firmly rooted in its literary base. What compelled these masters to go out of their way to emphasize the importance of the written text, argues William H. Sun, was precisely the failure of many traditional actors to take it seriously, preferring to rely on superficial virtuosities. From this constant struggle in traditional Chinese theatre between a theoretical respect for textual quality and practical emphasis on performance has emerged the peculiar paradox of acting here explored. The author, William H. Sun, is a Shanghai-born playwright, author, and associate professor of drama at Macalester College. A contributing editor of TDR, he has taught at Tufts University, California State University, Northridge, and the Shanghai Theatre

In 1996 John Stokes was appointed to the first endowed Chair in Modern British Literature at King's College, London, where English has been taught since the 1830s. In this version of his inaugural lecture, delivered on 6 November 1997, he traces the transformations undergone by the figure of the prodigal son in the drama of the last hundred years and argues for recognition of the part played by actors in determining the course of theatrical history.

Postgraduate programmes in performance studies are playing an increasingly important role within drama departments in the British university sector, and require that both staff and students confront with greater rigour than at undergraduate level the relationship between theory and practice – more precisely, how that theoretical relationship should and can be related to practical aspects of the programme. Taking her own cue from bedside-reading ranging from Foucault to the latest titles from Routledge to the influential article on ‘Geographies of Learning’ contributed to Theatre Journal in 1993 by Jill Dolan, Susan Melrose here debates the dilemma, and in particular the problems posed to actors by challenging their approach to their work at precisely the moments when they may most need to fall back on old strategies and securities. Susan Melrose recently took up the post of Head of Graduate Studies and Research Development at Rose Bruford College, London. She presented an earlier draft of this article at the SCUDD Conference at the University of Glasgow in March 1998, which was concerned with issues relating to the teaching of theatre and drama studies in the university.

It is received theatrical wisdom – indeed, a self-evident truth – that performances of a particular production differ not only night by night, depending on the chemistry between actors and audience, but in the case of touring productions, in response to the changing relationship between the driector's approach and the venue for which it must be freshly adapted. Yet studies of the theoretical or practical effects of such differences are rare – and can rarely draw on such a range of performing venues as those in which the Out of Joint company presented Max Stafford-Clark's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters in 1995. Originally staged at the ornate, tradition-steeped Bristol Old Vic, the production was taken on tour to modernist, hangar-like auditoria in India, and presented in the unusual yet apt ‘found’ environment of an English country house, before reaching its final home at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with its renovated Victorian interior surrounded by a modernist shell. Exploring the terminology used by lain Mackintosh in his Architecture, Actor, and Audience, Sylvia Vickers compares and contrasts the conception, realization, and reception of the production in these varying venues. Sylvia Vickers worked as an actress in a wide range of theatre before co-founding and creating the Brighton Actors' Workshop and Studio Twelve in the 'seventies. She then took a first in English at Sussex, and now teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute while continuing her work as a director, most recently for the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.

When, back in 1971, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBC's own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.