In previous issues, NTQ has paid close attention to the theoretical work of Odin Teatret founder and director Eugenio Barba, publishing several of his articles relating to the actor's scenic presence and the manipulation of his or her performing energies. Indeed, as a result of his work with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Barba is perhaps better known today as a theatre scholar than as a director: but he insists that virtually all of his research originates in his work with the actors of Odin Teatret. Here, David Shoemaker, who is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the relationship between Barba's work as theoretician and practitioner, describes his encounter with the Odin's most recent performance piece, entitled Talabot.

Peter Arnott is a young playwright whose relatively brief working career has spanned a wide spectrum not only of Scottish theatrical outlets, but of the styles and approaches open to a politically committed writer in a community which has consistently and vehemently rejected Thatcherism, yet which has to live within its political if not its cultural boundaries. Here, Peter Arnott talks with Greg Giesekam, of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Glasgow, about the development of his own thinking, and its relationship to his working methods and their theatrical applications.

Does vague approval for the social objectives of much third-world theatre blind sympathetic western observers to its defects? And, where those objectives are specifically socialist, are the complex dialectics which generate revolution too readily supplanted in favour of simplistic affirmation? R. G. Davis takes examples from his own experience in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria to propose a closer, more active, and inter active attention to the relationship between theatre and national needs, based in a lateral approach to what theatre can and cannot do well. R. G. Davis was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and is currently teaching at San Francisco New College, while working on two films and a book. He has been a regular contributor to Theatre Quarterly and NTQ – most recently, on ‘The Politics and Packaging of Performance Art’ in NTQ13 (1988).

Gaston Salvatore was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1941, of an upper middle class Chilean mother and an Italian father. After completing a degree in law, he went to Berlin in 1965, where he studied sociology, and together with Rudi Dutschke became one of the leaders of the student protest movement. He was arrested and obliged to leave Germany in 1969, returning briefly to Chile. In the early ‘seventies he went to Rome, where he worked with Michelangelo Antonioni. One of the results of that collaboration was his novel. Der Kaiser von China, published in 1979. He began his work in German with a cycle of poems, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung Natascha Ungeheurs, set to music by Hans Werner Henze, in 1970. His German theatre pieces include Büchners Tod (1972), Fossilien (1975), Freibrief (1977), Tauroggen (1978), Stalin (1985), and Lektionen der Finsternis (1989). A novel, Der Mann mit der Trommel, was published in 1974, and Salvatore's most recent work in that form, Waldemar Müller – ein deutsches Schicksal, appeared in 1982. Gaston Salvatore is co-editor with Hans Magnus Enzensberger of the Trans-Atlantik review, and also writes for Stern, Der Spiegel, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He now lives in Venice. The following interview with Salvatore by Alessandro Tinterri, one of the directors of the Actors’ Museum of Genova, took place in Venice in 1989, following two Italian productions of Salvatore's Stalin in a single season – one by the Compagnia del Collettivo di Parma, with Gigi Dall' Aglio and Michele De Marchi, and another by the Teatro di Sardegna, with Raf Vallone. The original German production opened in Berlin, at the Schiller-Theater on 31 October 1987, and was followed by several other productions, including one directed by Salvatore himself at Karlsruhe. In 1988 George Tabori staged the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with a woman, Angelica Damrose, in the title role. Alessandro Tinterri sets out in this interview to examine the background to Gaston Salvatore's work and to trace the multi-cultural pathways that have led to his present standing in the European, and especially German, theatre.

Ever since Aristotle compared the advantages of the epic and dramatic modes, their varying qualities have been a topic of critical debate – though in western theatre the solo storyteller has long since ceased to serve as performer as well as author of his works. Not so in many African nations – including Sierra Leone, where the itinerant storytelling-Performer Lele Gbomba, who sadly died in September 1989, after this article was written, was in some ways typical of his fellow-Craftsmen, in others markedly his own man. Here, Julius Spencer, lecturer in drama at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, describes and discusses Lele Gbomba's distinctive style. Julius Spencer gained his doctorate from the University of Ibadan, and has been active for many years as a playwright and director in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. He is presently researching the traditional theatre forms of Sierra Leone.

The new Oxford Shakespeare, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (1986), has shaken loose many of the assumptions of historical editing by questioning the existence of single authoritative ‘ur-texts’ and by attempting to present the plays as reflections of contemporary performance rather than as literary texts enshrining authorial intention. Inevitably, Brian Parker argues here, the editors’ success has been variable, and the new approach raises crucial questions of canon, format, the influence and potential of current technology, and the degree to which the editors’ own ‘postmodernist’ assumptions have influenced their decisions. This essay was presented as a discussion-paper for a session on the Shakespeare canon at the 1989 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Austin, Texas. Brian Parker is a professor at Trinity College, University of Toronto, who has prepared critical editions of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Volpone for the ‘Revels Plays’ series and is currently editing Coriolanus for the Oxford English Texts.

In response to the conference on political theatre held last April at the University of Lancaster under the title ‘Points of Contact’, Tim Prentki, Course Director of B.A. Drama and TV Studies at King Alfred's College, Winchester, proposes a new yet very old way of achieving contact between a beleaguered political theatre and its community – the use of the ‘traditionally’ inversionary qualities of carnival to pose highly contemporary questions about the power structures of today's society.

A scandalously successful life as an actress and a tragically early death seemed to cast Aimée Desclée in a stereotypical romantic mould, as did a succession of emotionally-fraught roles, notably in the plays of the younger Dumas. But contemporaries praised the new realism she brought to the passionately wayward women she portrayed. In what did this ‘realism’ consist, and in whose eyes did the virtual equation of female desire with neurosis constitute ‘reality’? John Stokes, who teaches in the Department of English in the University of Warwick, here follows an outline of her career and its context with detailed examinations of the creation, nature, and reception of her most famous roles – finally exploring the effects of the events surrounding the creation of the Third Republic and the impact of the Paris Commune of 1870 on the way in which male playwrights and audiences perceived the women she played in her later years. John Stokes recently contributed the section on Bernhardt to Bernhardt. Terry. Duse: the Actress in her Time, with Michael Booth and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge, 1988).

In the year of the Oberammergau Passion Play, with its reminder both of the long tradition of such celebrations and their danger of being subsumed into the ‘heritage industry’, it is instructive to be reminded that the best traditions can also be the most recent, because the freshest and most relevant to the needs to which they respond. Also in Bavaria, and virtually unnoticed by the tourist industry, a nativity celebration is held each Christmas, in a hillside stable to which the participating donkey knows its own way – a ‘living picture’, which began alongside a charitable market and an exhibition of cribs as part of one small community's seasonal celebrations. Its creator, Brother Stephan, talks here about the event to Walter Siegfried.

Even at its most political, contemporary Israeli theatre tends to be self-referential – nowhere more so, suggests Shimon Levy, than in the theatre festivals held at Acre, where year by year over the past decade the plays selected seem to have reflected, more than coincidentally, the preoccupations of the nation, with its haunted past, its militaristic present, and a future full of uncertain or resented accommodations with neighbours for so long perceived as enemies. But Shimon Levy, who teaches in the Theatre Department at Tel Aviv University, also notes two exceptions in a generally gloomy theatrical scene: the exuberant entertainment Yanti Parazi – ‘a metaphor for the yearning for this screwed-up Holy Land’ – and a long-unperformed play on the ‘difficult’ subject of the West Bank occupation, Ephraim Returns to the Army, with its schitzoid title-character ‘deconstructing’ the conflicting elements of Israeli hopes and beliefs, for audiences not presumed to share the play's own progressive but unsentimentalized sympathies.