In suggesting an answer to the question which forms the title of this article, Jan Kott seeks relevant connections between the rites of a past civilization and the history of the twentieth century – each age sharing across the millennia the capacity to hate those it chooses to make its victims. Since the publication of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in 1964, Jan Kott has published in a wide range of fields, always displaying a characteristic combination of critical perception, insight into performance potential, and open sensibility towards the cultures of past and present. Jan Kott has also from the first been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly as of New Theatre Quarterly. He will be eighty in 1994, and in NTQ40, due for publication in November of that year – as it happens, also the eightieth issue of this journal and its predecessor – we plan a special issue by way of celebration. Although a number of contributions have already been commissioned, further ideas for articles of a kind appropriate to the occasion are welcome.

An earlier version of this paper was written by Harriet Walter in December 1991 for the second Divina Conference in Torino, in response to an invitation to speak from the actress's point of view about playing Shakespeare's women. In the event, she ranged much more widely across the typology of women's roles in the theatre, and the actress's response to their challenges – and limitations. The paper has since been delivered, in roughly the present form at the University of Cambridge Graduate Drama Seminar in February 1992, and in March 1992 was read in extract and discussed on a BBC Radio programme in the Art Works Series for the Open University. Opposite, Lizbeth Goodman sets the paper in the context of Harriet Walter's theatrical career.

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

Playwrights, directors, and theatre teachers interested in understanding the theatrical possibilities and functions of monologue soon discover that critical analysis in this area is limited alike in extent and depth. In the following analysis of contemporary dramatic monologue, Paul C. Castagno therefore begins by exploring its more expected or traditional uses, and proceeds to examine its present expanded function with particular reference to the plays of two contemporary American playwrights, Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman – both multiple Obie Award-winning writers, whose dramaturgic techniques have been highly influential yet who remain largely overlooked in the critical arena. He concludes that monologue in the new dramaturgy is actually moving in various and often complex ways back towards a kind of dialogism. Paul C. Castagno, who is himself a practising playwright, is director and dramaturg of the New Playwrights' Program at the University of Alabama, where he has developed a number of new playscripts for award-winning productions. He has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Text and Presentation, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Topics, among others, and will shortly be taking on the editorship of the journal Theatre Symposium. His study The Early Commedia dell'Arte, 1550–1621: the Mannerist Context is due for publication by Peter Lang in 1993, and he is is currently preparing a playwriting text that explores elements of the new dramaturgy.

Is there a specific lesbian theatre aesthetic? If so, is butch and femme at the heart of it? Or androgyny? Or the freedom-confinement dynamic? Or, on another level, distancing role from ‘essential being’, and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social constructs from male and female as biological entities? By focusing on a number of lesbian texts, including her own work, Nina Rapi explores both the theory and practice of an emerging aesthetic that reveals the ‘performance of being’, seeking to ‘shift the axis of categorization’, and so to create a new and exciting theatre language. Nina Rapi is a playwright and translator whose theatre work includes Ithaka (Riverside Studios, June 1989; Link Theatre, staged readings, April 1992; published in Seven Plays by Women, 1991), Critical Moments, a trilogy of shorts (Soho Poly Theatre, June 1990), Johnny Is Dead (First One Person Play Festival, Etcetera Theatre, March 1991), Dreamhouse (Oval House and Chat's Palace, April-May 1991), Dance of Guns (touring production, including King's Head and Jackson's Lane Theatres, April-May 1992), and Dangerous Oasis (Finborough, March 1993).

The idea of merging western and Indian performing traditions through the performance of King Lear by a Kathakali company promised to be a viable experiment in intercultural practice – yet it proved entirely alien to Indian audiences initiated in Kathakali, and baffling when brought before the cosmopolitan throngs of the Edinburgh Festival. Here, Suresh Awasthi, former chairman of the National School of Drama in Delhi, analyzes the misconceptions which, in his view, fatally flawed the production – setting it within the context of its parent performance tradition, which permits development and change within a framework of basic thematic stability, but is unable to appropriate new texts. When, as in this case, the attempt is made, what results is a mistranslation of performance codes between two cultures. In the course of his argument, Suresh Awasthi provides a useful summary and analysis of traditional Kathakali conventions, and in conclusion describes some productions from the ‘classical avant-garde’ which have successfully explored an intercultural approach without detriment to either of the traditions involved.

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.