It is a matter for pride that the old TQ was one of the first English-language journals to include material by and about the Italian dramatist Dario Fo. Our ‘Theatre Checklist’ on Fo in 1978 provided the first full reference guide to his plays (notably to his work since 1970 with the theatre collective La Comune), and Tony Mitchell contributed a documented study of Fo's one-man show Mistero Buffo to TQ 35 in 1979. In between, Belt and Braces had established Fo's British reputation with their long-running productions of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay, Won't Pay – while in TQ40 Fo's leading American director, R. G. Davis, looked at some of the problems of presenting Fo in the USA. Now, Trumpets and Raspberries looks set to repeat the success of its predecessors at London's Phoenix Theatre. What sustains Dario Fo's unique ability to create political comedy which is at once hard-hitting yet widely accessible? As he suggests in the first of these articles (which originally appeared in Italian as an introduction to a volume of his plays), the answer lies in part in Fo's very rejection of the label ‘political’. Here, he analyzes some of the features by which he would rather distinguish his work as popular theatre, notably its traditional dependence on situation rather than character. In the second article, published in Italian in 1978, Fo examines the way in which this kind of theatre also fuses the elements of past culture with a critical examination of the present. Tony Mitchell, who translated both pieces, has just published a study of Fo. People's Court Jester, in the Methuen Theatrefiles series.

This year will see the completion of Max Stafford-Clark's fifth year as Artistic Director of the English Stage Company – and the thirtieth year of that company's tenure of the Royal Court Theatre, where its arrival under George Devine back in 1956 was to prove so seminal for the British theatre. Recently under threat of losing a major portion of its Arts Council grant, the company has had to struggle to maintain its reputation as the natural home for new writing in conditions where its ability to mount regular new productions has been severely curtailed: but in spite of this it has premiered some of the most important new work and writers of the past few years. Tony Dunn, who is senior lecturer in literature and drama at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and was recently appointed editor of Gambit, talked to Max Stafford-Clark about the problems and policy of the company, in the perspective of its past history. Before joining the Court, Max Stafford-Clark directed the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in its vintage years from 1968, and was a founding member of the Joint Stock Company in 1974.

While Appia's name is dutifully linked in our theatre histories with the full realization of the revolution in stage lighting wrought by electricity, the nature of his broader scenographic philosophy has remained little understood, and his own writings are not readily accessible in English. Still less have English-speaking theatre people given due attention to the work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of the system of eurhythmies – and virtually nothing has previously been written about the unique collaboration between these two innovators, which began in 1906, and eventually flourished in the unlikely setting of a German ‘garden city’, dedicated to the humanization of modern industrial practices – Hellerau, or ‘the bright meadow’. Here, Richard Beacham, who has published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), describes how the two men came to meet and to plan for the possibilities offered by the projected Hellerau festivals: in a subsequent article, he will assess the extent and nature of the work they achieved there.

Workers in ‘conscientization’ through theatre in the so-called underdeveloped countries tend to assume that this form of theatre work has a potential unique to such circumstances. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the ‘sixties, argues that the poorer sections of the richest nation in the world have no less been deprived of their cultural roots, and here describes his experiences when he was asked to direct a play dramatizing a workplace incident in the cannery town of Watsonville, northern California, when a Mexican worker was appealing for reinstatement against unfair dismissal. A regular contributor to the former Theatre Quarterly, most recently in TQ 40 (1981) on his productions of Dario Forin the USA, R. G. Davis's own version of We Won't Pay, We Won't Pay, was published last year by Samuel French, and he has recently directed a Native American play in San Jose, followed by a Brecht play in Australia.

The original series of TQ included very little about the work of the pioneering Polish director Jerzy Grotowski – not for any lack of offerings on the subject, but because potential contributors seemed unable to distinguish discipleship from the need for analytical description. It is, therefore, with special pleasure that we now include, by way of introduction to the more detailed study of specific aspects of Grotowski's work, this clear overview of the director's development, from his first experiments in Opole, Poland, over 25 years ago, to his present researches into ‘objective drama’ in California. Grotowski himself has divided this work into four distinct though developmental phases, and here Richard Fowler, himself currently responsible for the Canada Project of the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium, outlines the distinctive nature and achievements of each successive stage of the work.

The years since independence have seen a remarkable range of work in experimental forms of theatre in the nations of Africa – ‘experimental’, that is, in their shared rejection of the imposed colonial heritage of westernized forms, and the common attempt to revitalize indigenous cultural traditions while making them relevant to present and future development priorities. Ross Kidd, who has worked and written widely in this field, here provides a case study of just one ‘Theatre for Development’ workshop, held in a small Zimbabwe village in August 1983. A member of the secretariat of the International Popular Theatre Alliance. Ross Kidd is also an advisory editor of NTQ, and will be contributing a full survey of the range of popular theatre activity in the Third World to a forthcoming issue.

In the first part of this article, published in NTQ1. Susan Bassnett introduced the two papers from ltalian contributors to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Here, she concludes her brief introduction to the work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts by providing a context for the two further papers included in this issue, both products of the French approach to the problem of describing theatre in performance. Susan Bassnett's own study of the plays of Pirandello appeared in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series in 1983.

One of the problems of applying semiotic techniques to theatre work has been a vocabulary which too often mystifies rather than clarifies the theatre experience for the non-specialist student. Patrice Pavis, in his work with students at the University of Paris III, has evolved a questionnaire about theatre performance which, while not in itself utilizing semiotic terminology, attempts to direct the respondents' attention to all the aspects of theatrical signification upon which it touches. In the following article, Patrice Pavis, whose major study of theatrical terminology, entitled Dictionnaire du Théâtre, was published by Editions Sociales in 1980, outlines the purpose of the questionnaire, and provides explanatory notes to the individual questions, outlining an approach on which many involved in theatre teaching may wish to comment and build.

Pursuing the theme of the preceding article, on possible approaches to the teaching of theatre analysis. Susan Melrose here suggests that contemporary linguistics offers a methodology which may help us to look at dramatic texts in such a way as to discover a semantics which transcends the merely verbal. The author proceeds to test her suggested method in a comparative examination of two actual productions – a French and an English version of Pinter's No Man's Land – and looks in detail at the opening scene of Julius Caesar. She concludes that in both cases what the actor often senses intuitively may also be analyzed ‘in process’ in terms of the language and rhetoric of the text. Susan Melrose is presently a Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Tunis. She presented an earlier version of this paper to the Conference on Theatre Analysis held in May 1984 at the University of Warwick, after completing her doctorate at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.