In NTQ 30 (1992) Dorothy Knowles provided a description and explication of the recent work of the visionary French director Armand Gatti. For what he calls his ‘plural writing’ projects, Gatti has increasingly come to recruit not actors but ‘actors’: those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them – together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether developing a performance within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre are entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. Here, he speaks for himself, describing both the inspiration and the evolution of his work in a style which characteristically combines pragmatism with lyricism. The article derives from a series of interviews conducted in 1991 by Hélène Châtelain – an actress who has worked with Gatti since 1966 – and first published in Le Monde Diplomatique for February 1992. The translator for NTQ, Wesley Hutchinson, wrote his doctoral thesis on Gatti at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lectures in the English Department of the University of Paris, Nanterre.

Despite the importance of Italian Futurism to the modernist movement in Europe during the early inter-war period, it has suffered a bad press – initially because of its association with the emergent fascist movement, and more recently because of the feminist concern with apparently misogynistic elements in the writing of the acknowledged leader of the movement, F. T. Marinetti. However, Günter Berghaus argues that this is to ignore not only the roots of Marinetti's own anti-feminism – in contempt for the very aspects of subservient womanhood now condemned by feminists themselves – but also the support that Futurism enjoyed from a number of women artists in Italy at the time. Certainly, the early career of the actress Fulvia Giuliani affirms both her strong endorsement for and participation in the movement, and her contempt for women who passively accepted the roles assigned to them by the patriarchy. Günter Berghaus, who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, here outlines Giuliani's role in the Futurist movement and documents it from previously unpublished sources.

This is the text – appropriately, a ‘performance text’ – of the inaugural lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College, University of London, on 9 March 1993, by Jacky Bratton, following her appointment as Professor of Theatre and Cultural History. Although she holds her chair at a former women's college, Jacky Bratton reflects that the introduction of co-education in such institutions has in practice left them as male-dominated as the rest. Ironically, this continued marginalizing of women in academic life reflects the common view of theatre studies as itself a marginal discipline – almost as suspect as Jacky Bratton's own specialist concern with its more popular aspects. Looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized within theatre history, she challenges in particular the received wisdom that the alleged ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century was reversed by a striving for respectability usually traced to the rattle of cups-and-saucers on box sets, and apotheosized in Irving's knighthood: instead, she reflects upon the radical impulses of earlier nineteenth-century theatre, and at the ways in which the gender of three women who worked within it influenced their theatrical careers, their social standing, and their own attitudes towards both.

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning ‘high art’ poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

Although included among the comedies in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure long found itself disapproved on grounds of moral impropriety, and was restored to critical favour only to enjoy the dubious dignity of becoming a ‘problem’ play – which left open the question of whether the ‘problem’ was Shakespeare's, as man or craftsman, his society's, or perhaps even our own. In the theatre, too, the pendulum has swung from the easy contempt of the recent ‘permissive’ past for the value placed by Isabella upon her virginity to the renewed respect of feminist critics for her right to control her own body. Still, her silence in response to the Duke's marriage proposal permits actors and directors to make their own climactic meaning. Jan Kott's essay on the play, ‘Head for Maidenhead, Maidenhead for Head’, first appeared in the old Theatre Quarterly, and was subsequently reprinted in his The Gender of Rosalind. Here, Kott reconsiders the play, in discussion with Charles Marowitz, who has himself directed Measure for Measure, and also written about it in his Recycling Shakespeare (1991).

This article – a chapter from The Paper Canoe: a Treatise on Theatre Anthropology, forthcoming from Routledge – was dedicated to NTQ's co-editor, Clive Barker, on his recent sixtieth birthday. In some senses, therefore, a reflection on the rite of passage into old age, it is more importantly a recognition of the quality and nature of experience understood – as applied to life and, in this case, to the profession of theatre. Eugenio Barba is the founder both of Odin Teatret and of ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, and here he links the impulses behind the two in highly personal experiences with universal implications – childhood epiphanies of feeling with the perception of theatrical genius, even the fending-off of boredom triggering an understanding of an actor's body movement shared across cultures and continents. Theatre, he concludes, ‘allows me to belong to no place, not to be anchored only to one perspective, to remain in transition’.

In earlier issues, New Theatre Quarterly has followed through several lines of enquiry into the processes of acting and the construction of critical methods appropriate to the analysis of contemporary performance. Articles on the work of Tilda Swinton (NTQ23) and Harriet Walters (NTQ34) for example, focused on the consciousness and techniques of those actresses. But the work of Odin Teatret, complemented (as in this issue) by the theoretical writings of its director, Eugenio Barba, has been a recurrent concern – most recently in the exploration in NTQ26 by Roberta Carreri of the technical means through which her role in Judith was articulated. Here, Janne Risum pulls together several related lines of enquiry by considering the performance of Julia Varley in the Castle of Holstebro, her vocal demonstration workshop The Echo of Silence, and her written piece, A Candle Lit amongst the Pages of Books, as related aspects of perception through which the female spectator engages with the actress and her fictive personae. Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also active in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published books and essays on acting, theatre history, and women in the theatre. A version of the present paper has also appeared, in Danish, in Nordic Theatre Studies, VI, No. 3 (1993).

Video technology has been widely available for the last twenty years, and offers possibilities for the documentation of theatrical performance that no previous generation has possessed. What are we doing with these possibilities? Why is it that we are only now taking some timid first steps towards the establishment of national or regional video archives? This article reports some findings from ten years of experimentation with recording formats and analysis, and urges the need for action by theatre practitioners, funding authorities, and university researchers to ensure that the theatrical output of another generation is not lost. The author, Gay McAuley, teaches in French and Performance Studies and is Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research in recent years has focused on the semiotics of performance and, in particular, the ways actors use text in the construction of performance. She is currently writing a book called Space in Performance.