For many, the death of Joan Littlewood on 20 September 2002 at the age of 87 marked the end of a theatrical era – though in practice she had lived an increasingly reclusive life following her move to France and the death of her partner Gerry Raffles in 1975, interrupted only in 1994 by the publication of an autobiography, Joan's Book. Clive Barker, Co-Editor of NTQ, became a member of Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company in 1955, shortly after the change from a touring policy to a building-based company at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, had led to the departure of Ewan MacColl and others of the original group, and subsequently to the displacement of other members as critical success led to West End transfers. What follows is not a dutiful obituary but a highly personal memoir of the years that followed, and provides an ironic contrast between Joan's own published recollections and the experience of one of her ‘slags’ – liable to be called on to do anything and everything. Joan's own recollection of Clive Barker was that ‘You could only do three things. Catatonics, menace, and I forget what the third was.’ Here, with fearful glances over his shoulder for an apparition at the window, Clive Barker reminds her, and adds a few other corrigenda to Joan's Book.

In this essay Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, founder of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, and a Contributing Editor of NTQ, traces his own ‘orphanage’ from a professional family – and his discovery not only of an ‘elder brother’ in Grotowski, but of his two ‘grandfathers’, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. He extends the metaphor to suggest how these two branches of a theatrical family tree, apparently of quite different impulses and temperaments, shared a working language, however differently this translated into their theatre practice. He sums this up as a common concern with ‘showing how thoughts move’, and relates this in particular to the ways in which the theatre lost, preserved, and has slowly rediscovered the work of Meyerhold, and to how the ‘disconnected tradition’ of his work re-emerges in unexpected places. This takes Barba on a journey from the home where Meyerhold received his friends in Moscow, as lovingly restored by his granddaughter, to Mexico and Colombia, where Seki Sano brought to a new continent his own discoveries from the ‘theatre paradise’ he believed he had found in the Soviet Union, in which ‘the discoveries of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were part of the same baggage’, thus passing, ‘through the rigour of the craft, the meaning of a theatre that lives through revolt and a feeling of not belonging’.

As a rule, news from Nepal gets little or no prominence in the western media – but the regicide of 2001, in which Prince Dipendra allegedly mowed down his parents and then shot himself, was a notable exception. Two years earlier, Syed Jamil Ahmed witnessed Prince Dipendra's and his father King Birendra's participation in the festival of Indra Jātrā, held annually in the nation's capital city, Kathmandu. After an analysis of the myths underlying the festival, and of their modification over centuries to serve changing dynastic priorities, the author provides an account of the festival as a ‘first-person felt experience’, and then investigates how its contemporary actuality reflects and attempts to perpetuate an intricate network of social and political meanings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. He trained in theatre at the School of Drama in New Delhi, and in 2001–2 was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh. He has proceeded to examine the variety of Islamic theatre forms, their inherent features, and their relationship to the corrupting influence of western forms.

Israeli institutional theatre has only just begun to toy with the idea of ‘feminist theatre’ and, despite a demonstrable increase in violence against women in Israel, with increased visibility in the mass media, the subject has yet to be confronted in mainstream theatres. However, women's creation has been longer at the frontier of theatre activities, and the issue of battered women has been a central theme of several community-based performances over the past two decades. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem offers an overview of these plays – the first performed by professional actresses who had just graduated from university, and who were mostly Ashkenaziyot (of European origin); the two following produced by community amateur actresses who were Mizrahi (of Arabic origin) – women from a low social stratum who, although being acquainted with domestic violence, had wished to avoid being regarded as battered women; and the last performed by a group of amateur actresses who came from more heterogeneous backgrounds, but who were all being treated in one of the centres for prevention and treatment of domestic violence. The author argues that in the first performance the battered woman was articulated by another, distant woman; in the next two she was presented by a more closely, identifying relative; while only in the fourth production did she publicly represent herself by herself, articulating her own voice through the symbolic system of theatre. The author proceeds to analyze in detail the first and the last of these performances, which clearly present the process of passage from acting woman-as-object to acting woman-as-subject. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a lecturer, researcher and practitioner in the Community Educational Unit of the Theatre Department at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, who trained and worked as an actress and community theatre animator/director for many years. Her writings in areas of play theory, and performance and cultural studies, and their relation to community theatre, educational drama, drama therapy, and feminist theatre, have been published in numerous periodicals in the USA, Europe, and Israel, and her article ‘Ethnicity, Class, and Gender’ is forthcoming in Theatre Research International.

In today's diverse and evolving world of performance there is a place for the reinvestigation of the archaic realm of shamanism, and the extent to which it relates to modern theatre practice. To what extent do the calling, initiation, trance, and performance states of the shaman resemble the experience of today's actors? Is there really a dichotomy between a theatre of greed and a theatre of need? Inspired by her own personal sense of the evolution of the actor from the role of the shaman, Rachel Karafistan here considers the work of contemporary, so-called ‘third theatres’ such as Odin Teatret, Teatr Biuro Podrozy, and Derevo in the light of shamanic precedent. Having initially studied Psychology at university, Rachel Karafistan worked as a freelance director, teacher, and actor in England for seven years while researching her doctoral study: Shamanic Dimensions within Theatre Practice Today: a Theoretical and Experiential Investigation, which she completed in 2001. She is currently working as an actress and teacher in Poland with Teatr Biuro Podrozy and her own company, COSmino.

As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a City's Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.

This article is based on discussions with artistic directors and administrators of British Theatre in Education companies about past and current practice and changing funding resources. Persephone Sextou reviews developments in TiE practice since its beginnings in the 1960s, focusing upon the situation in the 1990s following the enforcement of National Curriculum requirements, the redirection of government funding to partnerships in education, and the availability of funds from the National Lottery. She describes how the remaining TiE companies are struggling not to compromise their artistic autonomy, and considers the relevance of the British TiE experience in relation to the potential for the development of the medium in other countries. Persephone Sextou is an instructor in Drama and Theatre in Education at the University of Thessaly in Greece, and is researching the transference of British TiE to a Greek context for her doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her book on School Dramatization has been published in Greece.

BETWEEN 14 and 28 June 2002 the Lyttelton Theatre hosted a series of five rehearsed readings: Jean-Paul Wenzels's Rising Blue (2000), translated by Lin Coghlan and directed by Deborah Bruce; Laurent Gaudé's Battle of Will (1999), translated by David Greig and directed by John Tiffany; Marie N'Diaye's Hilda (1999), translated by Sarah Woods and directed by Dalia Ibelhauptaite; Philippe Minyana's Habitats (2001), translated by Steve Waters and directed by Fiona Laird; and Serge Valletti's Le Pub! (1998), translated by Richard Bean and directed by Mick Gordon. Part of the National Theatre's innovative ‘Transformations’ season, the readings constituted the public interface of what the organizers viewed as a ‘new type of translation exchange’.

RICHARD HORNBY does well to advocate freedom of interpretation for the actor in his NTQ article of November 2002, but he diminishes Jacques Derrida as a false friend of the actor in puzzling ways.

JANE WINEARLS, ‘the dancing don’ as one local newspaper described her, has died at the age of ninety-three. She was a pioneer in many ways through her work in the professional worlds of theatre and dance, and in her work in higher education.