A dozen years after the political and theatrical watershed of 1956 came those further shifts in social thinking of 1968. which were also reflected in major changes on the theatrical scene. Another twelve years on, any theatre people who were expecting such a collision of events in 1980 appeared to be waiting in vain. Yet, in retrospect, the impact of that first full year of a new kind of Conservative government can be seen as no less decisive, though its effects on the theatrical scene are only now beginning to make a kind of negative sense. Here, Vera Gottlieb argues that the tone of ‘Thatcher's theatre’ was already being set by such earlier plays as Peter Shaffer's Equus, in which she detects both the despair of rational solutions and the willing subjection to supposedly implacable forces that have since become characteristic of our national theatre as of our national mood. Vera Gottlieb. who is Principal Lecturer in Drama at Goldsmiths’ College. University of London, is the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982), is presently collaborating with Peter Holland on a study of Stanislavsky as director, and has been co-author and director of Red Earth (Hampstead, 1985) and Waterloo Road (Young Vic Studio. 1987).

For many theatregoers whose sensibilities were shaped by the new theatre writing of the late ‘fifties, the adaptation in 1963 of Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays into the three-play cycle The Wars of the Roses came as a startling revelation of the ‘political’ Shakespeare. Directed for the still-fledgling RSC by Peter Hall and John Barton, with the latter also responsible for the adaptation and revision, the sequence was perhaps most memorable for the performance by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret-Shakespeare's ‘first heroine’ –whose presence first illuminated and then haunted the production. Robert Potter, who now teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, encountered the production while on a Fulbright scholarship to England, and here recollects in tranquility the disturbing impression of Ashcroft's performance, and its impact upon our understanding of the plays. Robert Potter, who as a practising playwright made his own adaptation of the Roses sequence in 1977, has also published widely in the field of medieval drama, and wrote on theAbraham and Isaac play as presented in Aztec Mexico in NTQ 8.

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

In recent years, melodrama has increasingly been recognized not only as an important element in popular theatre studies, but for the intrinsic importance of the form itself. Less considered has been the relationship of the material of melodrama to the ‘real life’ it reflected in a highly conventionalized yet ultimately (for its audiences), recognizable fashion. Here, Jim Davis looks at one major category, nautical melodrama, setting the images of the navy and of sailors that it created alongside factual and critical accounts of life at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conveys both the pressures that existed for redress of abuses, and the consequent balance between coercion and subversion in the melodramas themselves – drawing in particular on the memoirs of Douglas Jerrold to explore aspects of the ambiguity to be found in contemporary attitudes. Jim Davis, who is the author of several books and articles in the area of nineteenth century theatre history, is presently teaching in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales.

In his major work on Theatre Games (Methuen, 1977), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end – the development of acting skills, and the enrichment of the rehearsal process. But, partly as a result of the book's appearance, he has also conducted many one-off ‘game workshops’, often for groups whose concerns are not primarily or professionally theatrical: and in the following article he discusses the value that game-playing still seems to have for such groups, by close analogy with the function of the ‘kissing-games’ of his own childhood and adolescence – as a means of breaking down inhibitions within a context that is both socially acceptable and controlled. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewoods's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

Has the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford become an expensive irrelevance – actually hindering what should be the real work of the parent company, which has to expend so much of its cash and its energy in running it? Certainly, some were tempted to suggest so when the RSC's most exciting Shakespeare productions of the ‘seventies seemed to be emerging from the spartan environment of The Other Place. Now, Graham Holderness, through a detailed comparison of last season's main-house revival of The Taming of the Shrew and the Swan production of Titus Andronicus, argues that the creation of the Swan – a theatre space specifically but not ‘archeologically’ designed for Elizabethan and Jacobean plays – heightens the sense of a ‘contradictory relationship’ between the RSC's two ‘classical’ houses in Stratford. Graham Holderness, author of several studies in the fields of Renaissance drama and the modern novel, is presently Head of Drama at Roehampton Institute.

What is The Wild Duck ‘about’? What is the relationship between text and subtext in a work whose usually understood message ‘against idealism’ appears to contradict the conclusion no less usually drawn from A Doll's House? Thomas Bredsdorff here analyzes the approaches of two major modern directors of the play – Ingmar Bergman, in his Stockholm production of 1972, and Luca Ronconi, who directed it five years later in Rome – and suggests the ‘hidden dialogue’ at work in such a comparison. He also explores the issues of patricide and power which may be deduced by applying the insights of Erich Fromm concerning the nature of human aggression, basing his own conclusions on a careful examination of Ibsen's highly pertinent stage directions. Thomas Bredsdorff has been Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Copenhagen since 1978, and theatre critic of Politiken since 1965. This essay is translated from his most recent book, Magtspil (Power Play), published in Copenhagen by Gyldendal in 1986.

Theatre workers in the Third World have largely rejected both the outward trappings and the underlying aesthetic assumptions of the colonial styles they first inherited: but the impulse to evolve or rediscover indigenous forms has often involved the imposition of a would-be ‘popular’ theatre form by an elite of university-educated animateurs. David Kerr has described these as ‘induced’ forms, and here analyzes the process by which one such experiment, in Malawi, was both adopted and assimilated by villagers, for the better understanding of whose social problems it was conceived. From 1974 to 1980 David Kerr was artistic director of the Chikwakwa Theatre project in Zambia (described in the first series of Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 10), since when he has been teaching in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts in the University of Malawi, and serving as co-ordinator to the Travelling Theatre project there.

‘Fools and graceless buffoons’ was one Italian playwright's view of Italian acting at the turn of the nineteenth century – and the political and linguistic fragmentation of the country continued to prevent any national approach to the problems of actor training. By the beginning of the present century the situation was beginning to improve, but until the ‘sixties the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome remained the single major training institution in the country. In this article, Roberto Tessari looks at the explosion of opportunities for actor training – and the wide range of approaches to it – which then occurred, largely since the ‘events’ of 1968. He quotes directly from the teachers involved to illustrate the aims of the various schools, which are now beginning a necessary process of consultation – over such matters as assessment procedures and the placement of students – through the annual ‘Prima del Teatro’ meetings hosted by the Pisa Theatre.