In 1988 the Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek was invited by the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Theatre in Stockholm to deliver a speech for the ‘Strindberg-O'Neill’ symposium on the issues suggested by this title. In defining his terms and their relationship, he combined Aristotelian precision and existential candour with a gentle irony entirely his own. The speech was first printed in the Polish theatre journal Dialog, to whose editors we are grateful for permission to print this translated version.

In two earlier articles, Steve Nicholson has explored ways in which the the right-wing theatre of the 1920s both shaped and reflected the prevailing opinions of the establishment – in NTQ29 (February 1992) looking at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed on the stage, and in NTQ30 (May 1992) at the ways in which domestic industrial conflicts were presented. He concludes the series with three case studies of the role of the Lord Chamberlain, on whose collection of unpublished manuscripts now housed in the British Library his researches have been based, in preventing more sympathetic – or even more objective – views of Soviet and related subjects from reaching the stage. His analysis is based on a study of the correspondence over the banning of Geo A. DeGray's The Russian Monk, Hubert Griffith's Red Sunday, and a play in translation by a Soviet dramatist, Sergei Tretiakov's Roar China. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.

In an article in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. In NTQ 30 (May 1992), he took a closer look at the productions of the 1990–91 season, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. Here, he continues to trace the long decline of the ‘fabulous invalid’ through the season of 1991–92 – a season overshadowed by the death of Joe Papp, the mourning for a great showman mixed with concern for the future of his Public Theatre enterprises. The paucity of productions on Broadway – where, while one show could lose its backers four million dollars overnight, Peter Pan took American audiences happily back to the traditions of English pantomime – continued to contrast with signs of life elsewhere, and new productions marked milestone-anniversaries for La Mama and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Glenn Loney, is a widely published theatre writer and teacher based in New York.

Our occasional series of original theatre documents continues with this translation, the first in English, of an article written in 1915 by the Russian director Nikolai Evreinov attacking his contemporary and erstwhile colleague Vsevolod Meyerhold for artistic plagiarism – an attack which, of course, reveals as much about the susceptibilities and private jealousies of its perpetrator as it does about its object. Tony Pearson, who currently teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, accompanies his translation with a full introduction and commentary, setting the polemics within the context of the Russian and early Soviet theatre, and the subsequent, separate careers of the two personalities involved.

The longer I follow the activity of V. E. Meyerhold, the more I am astounded at the derivative nature of his talent. ‘Je prend mon bien, où je le trouve’, said the genial Molière, obviously without realizing what temptation such words plant in the souls of all those who are quick to spot anything lying around just waiting to be picked up while its owner isn't looking. And Moliere has finally discovered a truly ‘original’ imitator in the person of V. E. Meyerhold!

This article is a comparative examination of the relationship of audience and actors on the one hand, and of a client and his psychotherapist on the other. Peter Elsass argues that in order to describe both relationships as of a healing nature, one also has to identify a ‘healing space’ beyond the consulting room, instead of focusing on the healing relationship itself. Employing an analogy with shamanism, he describes this ‘healing space’ as a ‘pinta’, or vision from an extra-contextual frame. The history of psychoanalysis shows this need for a ‘pinta’ as a driving, rebellious force, and he suggests that without a ‘pinta’ of its own, the theatre also dies. Peter Elsass is a Professor of Health Psychology in the Medical Faculty of Aarhus University, Denmark, and chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aarhus. In addition to writing a large number of articles within the medical and psychological fields, he has also worked in the field of cultural anthropology, and in Strategies for Survival: the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities (New York University Press, 1992), he describes his many periods of residence with Indian tribes in Colombia. Peter Elsass has been an associate of Odin Theatre, and has taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, directed by Eugenio Barba.

The recent work of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard has addressed the present realities of a country undergoing traumatic change. But on whose behalf does it speak today? The common claim of critics has been that his work ‘bears witness’: but what does this claim amount to in the context of current debates about culture in South Africa? Central to these debates is the contextualizing work which has arisen out of the neo-Marxist emphasis on previously marginalized black dramatic forms: tending to supplant the liberal, universalizing approach which helped promote Fugard, this is fast becoming a new orthodoxy, diminishing his contribution and historic influence alike. In this article, Dennis Walder looks more closely at the European origins among the liberal-left of the idea of ‘bearing witness’, and considers its continuing potential as taken up by Fugard himself at a turning-point in the development of his plays – the moment from which sprang both Boesman and Lena and the collaborative Sizwe Bansi and The Island. These plays can still be understood to offer a voice to the voiceless – above all to Lena, the ‘Hotnot’ woman, an outcast among outcasts, who affirms her identity through her body and her language. Dennis Walder, who was born and brought up in South Africa and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is now Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University: a Dickens scholar, whose Dickens and Religion appeared in 1981, he also wrote the first book-length study of Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), and is currently editing Fugard's plays for Oxford University Press.

Our ‘Update from Eastern Europe’, following this article, includes reports from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia – on all of which countries we have published earlier features concerning the problems faced by theatre people in the wake of the disintegration of the Communist bloc. However, the theatre of Bulgaria has been little previously noticed, whether by NTQ or its contemporaries, and requires a more detailed overview. This is now provided by Gabriella Giannachi and Lizbeth Goodman, who visited the country in October 1991, interviewing a wide range of people working in its theatres and seeing a selection of productions in which they were involved. Gabriella Giannachi is a graduate student based at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, whose series of feminist theatres interviews has been published in earlier issues of NTQ.

ARTISTICALLY, Stary Theatre, Krakow, has maintained an impressive record since the 1950s. It has been a source of innovative directors including such giants as Swinarski, Jarocki, and Wajda, as well as a talented younger generation – Bradecki, Gzegor-zewski, and Lupa. It has also been a focus for good actors and designers: quite simply, it is a company for which almost everybody wants to work.

AFTER STRUGGLING to survive over four decades of rigid government control, theatre in Czechoslovakia is struggling to survive freedom. Like every other sector of society, theatre is having to deal with the enormous problems of transition from life under a totalitarian system to the free-for-all rush of a liberal, market-based democracy.

WHEN perestroika legitimized the social criticism for which the Russian theatre had been the only forum during the ‘years of stagnation’, playwrights such as Gelman, Galin and Petrushevskaya came to prominence. The breaking of the wave of so-called ‘black’ plays, however, also coincided with the beginning of the disintegration of the society which they scourged.