Both in his practical work with Odin Teatret, and his close involvement with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Eugenio Barba has developed an approach to theatre which is highly personal in expression, yet far-sightedly comparative in its concern with the nature of the actor's work and the ways in which it crosses cultural and other divides. An Advisory Editor of NTQ, Eugenio Barba contributed earlier pieces on the nature of the actor's energies to NTQ 4 and NTQ 11, and now further develops his thinking, in a consideration of what he calls ‘the body-in-life’, and the balance between its ‘three vital organs’ which is essential if the actor is to realize his full potential.

It is now twenty-one years since Joe Orton's death, though his relatively slender theatrical output has retained its freshness and power. After the modest West End success achieved by his first play to reach the stage. Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the New York production proved a failure, and the interview given by Orton to Glenn Loney in New York in October 1965, a few days before the Broadway opening, therefore went unpublished at the time. We print it now, as an intriguing sidelight on the attitudes and opinions of the playwright. It is placed in context by the widely-published theatre critic and teacher Glenn Loney, who also describes the brief, mainly epistolatory friendship with Orton that sprang from this first meeting.

‘Catharsis’ remains one of the several concepts employed by Aristotle in the Poetics whose precise meaning and implications have tantalized critics over the centuries. But all too often ‘catharsis’ has largely been discussed as a process which occurs to the audience of a tragedy: in this article, Ian Watson looks instead at the different forms it may take (and the differences in underlying intentions) so far as performers are concerned. He relates his ideas to forms of dramatic experience as discrete as psychodrama, and to schools of acting from Stanislavski to Grotowski.

Interest in Charles Laughton has recently been revived by the publication of Simon Callow's biography (Methuen, 1987), in which the author quoted from the personal recollections of a teacher. Ken Carter, whose view of Laughton's Stratford performance as Lear in 1959 ran counter to the critical dismissals which have otherwise come down to us. Carter expanded his views for a short article published in Drama (4–1987), and now provides a fuller account of a performance recollected in remarkable detail after almost thirty years. An Oxford graduate, Ken Carter has worked mainly as a teacher in London, with interludes near Bath and in Madrid.

The parodos is the first appearance of the Chorus in a classical Greek drama, an occurrence common to tragedy, comedy – and that curious hybrid form, of which very few examples are extant, the satyr play. One of the two complete surviving, texts is the Ichneutai or Searching Satyrs of Sophocles: and in the following exercise in literary detection. Paola Polesso bases her investigation of the play not only on linguistic evidence but on clues which emerge from seeing the play in performance, to suggest the chronological context with in which the play may now be more precisely placed. Dr. Polesso, who presently teaches drama in the University of Bologna, has acted as assistant director to Luca Ronconi, and has been a contributor to numerous Italian theatre journals.

In the valedictory issue of the first Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981). we included a fascinating glimpse of a highly unlikely convergence – between Lenin and the London Hippodrome, where the Russian revolutionary leader found music hall an intriguing phenomenon, exemplifying ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism’. The author of that article, Laurence Senelick, now introduces the experiences of a contemporary of Lenin's who, though a dramatist himself, at first appears almost as unlikely a visitor to the ‘Old Mo’, the Middlesex Music Hall in late-Victorian London – the German playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and the Lulu trilogy. Long before those plays brought him notoriety, Wedekind visited London, and recorded his views of music hall in his journal. Laurence Senelick, an Advisory Editor of NTQ, teaches in the Drama Department at Tufts University, and has published widely, mainly in the fields of Russian theatre and popular entertainment.

AT DINNER I mention that a few days before I had been to the Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane. My neighbour to the left tells me that it is the commonest theatre in all London, and my neighbour to the right says that of its kind it ranks as the poshest. My neighbour across the way, Herr Mess of Frankfurt, asks me to take him along, please, if I ever go somewhere like that again. Did I have anything on for tonight? I say I meant to go to a music hall in Whitechapel. He is wildly enthusiastic, but takes so long to put on his overcoat that we shall be too late. Meanwhile we are joined by a young French Swiss and we go to the Middlesex Music Hall. Neither gentleman seems to have the foggiest notion of what sort of place it is. The dances bore them, the music isn't pretty enough for them. The girls on stage are too young for them, the audience too loud, they don't hear the tunes, they don't see the costumes and they don't feel the century-old atmosphere surrounding them. One of them takes his hometown paper out of his pocket, the other regrets he is unable to strike up an ‘acquaintance’ in his vicinity.

The quasi-theatrical kinds of performance-ritual which existed in pre-Columbian Latin America have been little investigated, and are almost entirely neglected by English-speaking theatre scholars. In NTQ 8, Robert Potter looked at ways in which the missionaries who followed in the wake of the Spanish conquistadores tried to adapt Aztec rituals to their own proselytizing purposes: and here, Adam Versényi, in the first of a series of articles on early Latin American performance, provides an overview of the ways in which the great pre-Columbian civilizations embraced performance into their often-unfamiliar world view – suggesting that in some cases the cosmogony expressed through the dramatic rituals made them particularly ill-equipped to confront the ‘otherness’ of the invading Spaniards. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

Among the products of the theatre workshop run by Max Stafford-Clark at the Traverse Theatre – whose twenty-fifth anniversary is celebrated elsewhere in this issue – was Howard Brenton's Hitler Dances, on which the playwright worked with the director and actors late in 1971. Richard Boon sees both the play and the workshop experience as pivotal to Brenton's later development: here, he reconstructs the processes which led towards its eventual performance structure, and places the play with in the context of Brenton's earlier and subsequent work. Richard Boon, who also contributed an introduction to the Methuen Modern Plays edition of Hitler Dances, has recently completed his doctoral dissertation on Brenton's plays, and is working on a full-length study for publication by Methuen in 1990. He is currently Lecturer in Drama in the University of Leeds.

The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.

Among the infinite variety of critical approaches to Shakespeare, relatively little attention has been paid, even by scholars professedly concerned with Shakespeare's language, to the quality and nature of the sound of his words – despite the commonplace assumption that the young Shakespeare, in particular, was in love with language. One consequence is that such a major element of Richard II as its high proportion of rhyming couplets is either briefly (and negatively) dismissed, or ignored. Here, Kenneth C. Bennett, who teaches in the Department of English at Lake Forest College, lllinois, considers in detail the distinctive qualities and ‘sonances’ of language in the play, looking in particular at the couplets, whose use and significance he analyzes and defends.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, which had its beginnings in a paperback bookshop, and its first proper premises in a cramped one-time brothel. The Traverse has consistently walked the tightrope between its own ambitions and the cultural constraints of the City of Edinburgh – outside the annual explosion of activity during the festival. In the following article, Vera Lusting combines a view of this cultural context with an historical survey of the theatre's work, a glimpse of some of its more significant productions, and an assessment of the often divergent styles of its succession of artistic directors. She illustrates her survey from interviews conducted with many of the leading figures who have contributed to the Traverse's history.