Jan Kott wrote for the first issue of NTQ, and has been one of our advisory editors since the beginnings of the original Theatre Quarterly, to which he was also a regular contributor. As a much-published critic – his most recent book being The Bottom Translation, from Northwestern University Press in 1987 – he needs no introduction, and, ever since the first publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, his sense of how criticism can be made relevant to theatre practice has also meant that he is much in demand as that mysterious creature, the dramaturg. Now read on.…

Peter Barnes was born in 1931, and has been writing for the theatre since 1963: but he remains resolutely uncommercial, and enjoys even among enthusiasts an essentially cult following – though this includes Terry Hands, who directed his most recent work to reach the stage. Red Noses, for the RSC at the Barbican in 1985. The Ruling Class, his ‘baroque comedy’ on the British aristocracy and the ways it exercises power, helped to bring him the John Whiting Award in 1968 and the Evening Standard award as most promising playwright of 1969, though many found his ‘neo-Jacobean’ portrait of a sublimely insignificant Spanish monarch. The Bewitched, an even richer work when it reached the Aldwych under Hands's direction in 1974. Laughter, half-set in Auschwitz, followed at the Royal Court in 1978. In between, Barnes proselytizes enthusiastically for Ben Jonson, on whom he wrote for NTQ11 (1987), but makes most of his living from writing screenplays, and as a radio dramatist – notably in his occasional but long-running sequence of monologues. Barnes's People. As a near-contemporary, NTQ co-editor Clive Barker began this interview by discussing Barnes's own background, and talks also with the dramatist about his distinctive themes, beliefs, and working methods. Peter Barnes's Collected Plays to date have recently been published by Methuen.

Continuing our coverage of South African theatre, which most recently featured a critical view of the policy of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, by David Graver and Loren Kruger (in NTQ19), we now include a consideration by South African writer Stephen Gray of one of the Market's most recent productions, by assuredly its best-known playwright, Athol Fugard. My Children! My Africa! is, claims Fugard, ‘between me and my country’. Here, Stephen Gray acknowledges and analyzes the ways in which the play focuses with a new intensity upon the agony of Fugard's native land, as realized by a cast of three: two unknowns, plus the veteran John Kani – here cast, controversially, as a coward and traitor to his people. Stephen Gray has also edited the documentary volume on Athol Fugard in McGraw-Hill's ‘Southern African Literature’ series.

While considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the work of women dramatists during the wave of proto-feminist activity in the early years of the present century, the way in which women characters – whether created by male or female writers – were presented has been less adequately investigated. Here, Jan McDonald, Head of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, explores the work of well-known and largely-forgotten playwrights alike, discussing the ways in which the ‘new drama’ – the subject of Jan McDonald's recent book for the ‘Macmillan Modern Dramatists’ series – reflected the concerns of the ‘new woman’.

Most of the heavily-quoted interviews available on feminist theatre are in serious need of updating. A current account is needed of ‘feminism and theatre’ as experienced by feminist theatre practitioners, and as perceived by feminist theatre students, critics, players and their audiences. To meet this need, NTQ plans a series of interviews with women involved in the British feminist theatre movement today, whose career paths trace developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview is with Gillian Hanna, who worked with the 7:84 Theatre Company and with Belt and Braces from 1971 to 1975, before co-founding the Monstrous Regiment feminist theatre group in 1975. Hanna worked exclusively within the Regiment from 1975 until 1981–82. and is one of the three original members who still actively participate in Regimental management, production, and performance, though she now works extensively outside the group as well, having acted in repertory at the Liverpool Everyman and in Newcastle, Sheffield and Derby. Recently, Hanna spent the best part of a year playing in The House of Bernardo Alba. which opened at the Lyric. Hammersmith, and ran in the West End, and in the Spring of 1989 she played in Caryl Churchill's Ice Cream at the Royal Court. Her acting credits include work in TV and film, and her interests extend to translation of playtexts from French and Italian: she translated Dario Fo's Elizabeth, and is currently on a commission to translate (and re-translate) the complete oeuvre of the one-woman plays of Franca Rame and Dario Fo. Three of the Rame/Fo plays – under the joint title A Common Woman – were recently produced at the Sheffield Crucible and at the Half Moon in London, for which performance Hanna won the 1989 Time Out ‘01 for London’ Award. Projects currently under way within the Regiment include an adaptation of a Marivaux play (The Colony), and possible plans to tour both A Common Woman and Beatrice. She is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, originally a New Yorker, and currently a junior member and scholar of St. John's College and a graduate researcher in the English Faculty of Cambridge University, where she is working on a doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and a book on the politics of theatre funding.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell had captivated New York, in her distinctively grand manner, well before Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Eliza for her in Pygmalion, and immortalized her reputation on stage – as, perhaps, his own protracted and largely epistolatory affair with the temperamental actress immortalized her off-stage. But by the early 1930s, when Mrs. Pat was approaching her own seventh decade, her stage appearances were infrequent, and less fortunate times found her living well beyond her means in New York. There, Alan Brock, at the time an aspiring young actor, made her acquaintance, and in due course became her agent. In the following article he tells the story of Mrs. Pat's declining years – which were marked by a final triumph, half the proceeds of which evaporated, instantly and characteristically, on celebrating the success. Alan Brock went on to become an actor for George Abbott, Howard Lindsay, and the Shuberts. Also a New York actors’ agent, he represented numerous leading players, and later worked with Ben Hecht and Billy Rose on two Broadway shows, while authoring his own radio series and contributing a regular column to the trade weekly Backstage.

Although now in his seventy-fifth year, the Polish director and artist Tadeusz Kantor is still regarded in the west as a startlingly experimental director, in the bleak, highly personal mould that has marked his work since the creation of the Cricot 2 Theatre in 1955. Such productions as The Water Hen, The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Let the Artists Die have earned him a strong cult following, but he has rarely chosen to explain his views and approach to theatre in the discursive form of an interview. We are therefore particularly pleased to be able to print here a translation of an interview which first appeared in the journal Polityka, No. 39 (November 1988), which took place during the visit of Kantor's most recent work, I Shall Never Return, to New York earlier in the same year. The translation is by Piotr Kutriwczak.

The heavily-subsidized state theatre system of West Germany is often regarded as a model for emulation by the funding agencies of the English-speaking theatre. Yet the situation of such theatres can give rise to its own problems: and in this case-study of the rehearsals of Fassbinder's Katzelmacher at the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel, Munich, in 1985. Lynn Sobieski (who was assistant dramaturg on the production) analyzes the resulting personal and artistic conflicts, in the context of a system which encourages a degree of complacency in the bureaucracy, and arguably permits some self-indulgence to the directors – while discouraging those of the first ‘post-war generation’ from giving real opportunities to their successors. Lynn Sobieski is presently teaching in the Department of Drama of the University of Texas at Austin, having recently been awarded her doctorate from New York University for her dissertation on ‘The Crisis in West German Dramaturgy’. Her collection, Postmodernism and Contemporary Performance, will be published later this year, and she is currently working on a study of performance art groups in Britain.

In previous issues of NTQ. we have begun to explore the complex questions raised by the interaction of the study of theatrical performance with other disciplines – notably, in the various interpretations of ‘theatre anthropology’, in the widely divergent approaches to ‘theatre sociology’, and even in terms of its application to quantum theory. Many of these studies have made necessary assumptions in the area of human biology without, however, fully following through their implications. Jean-Marie Pradier. who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Paris 8, here looks at theatre and other modes of performance as ‘biological events’, exploring their importance in the manifestation (and correction) of the way the human body works – in the process touching on areas as diverse as the bio-dramatic function of dreams, the significance of neo-natal rhythms, and olfactory stimulation as one of the influences upon crowd behaviour. Acknowledging the need for further research in the field. Pradier argues for the importance of the ‘body in performance’ being perceived in its biological context.