Eugenio Barba delivered this address when he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Plymouth on 27 October 2005. Eugenio Barba founded the Odin Teatret in Oslo in 1964, taking it to Holstebro in Denmark in 1966 where, ever since, he and his collaborators have explored and reinvented the vocal and corporeal possibilities of performance. In the speech which follows, he explores anew several images for the theatre that recur in his writings, notably Beyond the Floating Islands (1986, a new version of The Floating Islands, 1979) and The Paper Canoe (1994). Here they resurface in the all-embracing trope of the sea, accompanied by Barba’s reflections on multiculturalism and diversity in the theatre. Other familiar concerns of Barba’s writings and the Odin’s work such as exile and the search for community are crystallized in this speech in Barba’s lapidary ‘The country in which I dwell is the theatre.’ During Odin Teatret’s UK tour in the autumn of 2005, documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of this issue, Eugenio Barba opened the new Library at Rose Bruford College, named in memory of former NTQ Co-Editor, Clive Barker.

Roy Williams is one of the outstanding new voices in contemporary British theatre. Born in Fulham, south-west London, in 1968, he has already, by his mid-thirties, won a shelf-full of awards, with plays staged at the National Theatre and Royal Court. His debut, The No Boys Cricket Club, won the Writers' Guild New Writer of the Year award in 1996. Two years later, his follow-up, Starstruck, won three major awards: the John Whiting Award for Best New Play, an EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards) for Best Play, and the first Alfred Fagon Award, for theatre in English by writers with Caribbean connections. In 2000, Lift Off was joint winner of the George Devine Award, and in 2001 Clubland received the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright. In 2002, Williams received a best school drama BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for Offside (BBC), and in 2004 he won the first Arts Council Decibel Award, given to black or Asian artists in recognition of their contribution to the arts. His most recent play, Little Sweet Thing, was a 2005 co-production between Ipswich’s New Wolsey Theatre, Nottingham Playhouse, and Birmingham Rep. What follows is an edited transcript of Aleks Sierz’s ‘In Conversation with Roy Williams’, part of the ‘Other Voices’ symposium at Rose Bruford College, Sidcup, Kent, in May 2004, organized by Nesta Jones. Williams is a graduate and now a Fellow of the college.

The importance of Granville Barker’s association with J. E. Vedrenne in the seminal Court seasons of 1904-1907 is one of the ‘givens’ of twentieth-century theatre history, as are Barker’s later, groundbreaking productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy. Yet these and much of his intervening work were also in many ways collaborative achievements, now in association with his wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy – their later divorce helping to rewrite the history of their partnership. Lillah McCarthy was also a prominent suffragist, and Granville Barker allied himself with many other men and women who were working actively in support of the extended franchise. Susan Carlson argues that many of Granville Barker’s productions should be seen, in part, as artistic extensions of suffrage activism, and in this article she explores the ways in which his support for the suffragists manifested itself on as well as off the stage. Susan Carlson, Associate Provost and Professor of English at Iowa State University, has most recently published essays on suffrage theatre, focusing on its political use of comedy and its connections to productions of Shakespeare.

Robert Armin, one of the ‘principal actors’ of Shakespeare’s plays named in the First Folio, probably joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599 to take the place of Will Kempe as the company’s clown; and it was for him that Shakespeare wrote the parts of Touchstone, Feste, and the Fool in King Lear. Received wisdom, in part extrapolated from the nature of Armin’s roles, sees him as a more serious, even morose character than his predecessor, and he took his clowning seriously enough to write a book on ‘natural’ fools, Foole Upon Foole (1600), in addition to some minor verse, and a play, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, whence the only known illustration of him in performance derives. Although virtually disregarded by critics as little more than a jest book, Foole Upon Foole was also, argues Peter Cockett, a serious attempt to survey the variety of qualities and conditions of natural folly. It not only reveals much about Armin’s likely approach to his roles, but questions the conventional distinctions between the natural and the artificial fool. With close reference to Armin’s description of one of his subjects, Lean Leanard, Peter Cockett compares what this tells us about Armin’s possible approach to the role of Touchstone with the problems faced by the actor, David Tennant, in the RSC As You Like It of 1996. The author is a professional actor who emigrated to Canada in 1994. He now teaches acting and directing at McMaster University, Ontario, and is working with the University of Toronto’s medieval and renaissance players on a two-year project on the work and repertoire of the Queen’s Men.

This article examines Alan Ayckbourn’s two linked plays, House & Garden, in the context of an entire career exploring the limits and boundaries of theatrical conventions. As the driving force and artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, a complex which houses two theatres – a proscenium stage and a theatre-in-the-round – the playwright/director has a flexible, state-of-the-art laboratory in which to experiment with theatrical elements which have always fascinated him. In House & Garden, Ayckbourn stretches stage boundaries in unprecedented ways by writing two plays to be performed simultaneously in two adjacent auditoria – a comedy of manners for the proscenium and a carnivalesque farce for the round. Stephanie Tucker analyzes how this unprecedented dramatic diptych exploits the possibilities of theatrical space, on and offstage, whilst appropriating elements from traditions as various as Greek satyr plays and nineteenth-century drama, and from venues as disparate as the carnival square and the drawing room. This experiment, she argues, forces audiences to re-examine preconceived notions concerning theatre’s relationship to the ‘real’ world, a theme which runs through Ayckbourn’s opus. Stephanie Tucker, who teaches at California State University, Sacramento, has published articles on various aspects of contemporary British and American theatre and is presently engaged upon a book-length study of Ayckbourn’s drama and stagecraft.

Festivals have become a prominent feature of theatre in South Africa today. More than forty such annual events not only provide employment, but constitute a socio-cultural polysystem that serves to ‘eventify’ the output of theatre practitioners and turn everyday life patterns into a significant cultural occasion. Important for the present argument is the role of the festivals as events that foreground relevant social issues. This is well illustrated by the many linked Afrikaans-language festivals which arose after 1994, and which have become a major factor not only in creating, displaying, and eventifying Afrikaans writing and performance, but also in communicating a particular vision of the Afrikaans-speaking and ‘Afrikaner’ cultural context. Using the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn as a case study, in this article Temple Hauptfleisch discusses the nature, content, and impact of this particular festival as a theatrical event, and goes on to explore the polysystemic nature of the festival phenomenon in general. Temple Hauptfleisch is a former head of the Centre for South African Theatre Research (CESAT) and Chair of the University of Stellenbosch Drama Department. He is currently the director of the Centre for Theatre and Performance Studies at Stellenbosch and editor of the South African Theatre Journal. His recent publications include Theatre and Society in South Africa: Reflections in a Fractured Mirror (1997), a chapter in Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2003), and one on South African theatre in Kreatives Afrika: Schriftstellerlnnen über Literatur, Theater und Gesellschaft (2005).

As this issue of New Theatre Quarterly was going to press, we learned of a threat to the continued existence of the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. The following personal response by NTQ Contributing Editor Ian Herbert may well have been overtaken by events by the time this issue is published, but we felt the situation should not go unrecorded or unprotested. Any interested readers who have not yet added their voices in support of the Museum should visit http://theatremuseum.org/news_and_views/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=3582 where up-to-date news is, at the time of writing, being posted.

From 21 October to 6 November 2005, Odin Teatret, comprising director Eugenio Barba, actors Augusto Omolù, Julia Varley, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Roberta Carreri, Torgeir Wethal, Tage Larsen, Jan Ferslev, Kai Bredholt, Frans Winther, and administrator Patricia Braga Alves, toured the UK with their ensemble performance Inside the Skeleton of the Whale. The company also presented performance demonstrations, workshops, masterclasses, conferences, seminars, and lectures.