The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died in December 1990 at the age of seventy-five. Also a poet and painter, who designed his own work for the stage, Kantor brought to the traumatized and Stalinized post-war Polish theatre a sensibility saturated in the pre-war avant-garde: but he was only able to give theatrical expression to this after 1956, when a marginally more liberal climate allowed him to form his own company. For this company, Cricot-2, Kantor created a sequence of scrupulously orchestrated works in which he was always present, half witness, half auteur – works which were redolent of an apocalypse that had already occurred, yet remained eternally imminent. The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and, most recently, Today Is My Birthday all toured widely, evoking for their audiences a past at once scrupulously ‘real’ in its physical texture yet macabre in its experiential pain. Kantor's fellow countryman and near-contemporary Jan Kott here evokes the distinctive sources and qualities of memory in Kantor's work. An advisory editor of New Theatre Quarterly and of Theatre Quarterly, Jan Kott has been a frequent contributor to both journals, most recently with a study of ‘The Gender of Rosalind’ in NTQ26, which extended the line of thinking of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.

This is a personal record of a theatre worker's journey to places where theatre is inextricably mixed with politics — or is no less significantly divorced from social concerns. Visiting mainland China and South Africa in the summer of 1990, Richard Schechner records how theatre people confronted the aftermath of major political upheavals – the crushing of hopes in Tiananmen Square, and the perhaps deceptive raising of them following the release of Nelson Mandela. His trip also took in the widely different perspectives and problems of Taiwan, where pluralism struggles (almost unnoticed in the West) to displace an ageing autocracy. Richard Schechner teaches at New York University, and recently returned to the editorial chair at The Drama Review, the journal he conducted through its vintage years in the 'sixties – at the same time creating the Performance Group, and beginning his researches into theatre and anthropology, the field in which he has published widely and innovatively in the interim.

To follow Lenin on the London Hippodrome in TQ40 (1981) and Wedekind on the Middlesex music hall in NTQ16 (1988) – here now is Trotsky on Wedekind. As Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, points out in a brief introduction, this assessment by Trotsky follows in a thin line of dramatic criticism by Marx, Engels, Mehring, Plekhanov, and Lunacharsky, and dates from Trotsky's involvement with a number of radical journals during his exile in Vienna. The article first appeared in the Neue Zeit in April 1908.

In a sequel to his essay ‘Sexuality and Structure in Expressionist Theatre’ in NTQ26, Peter Nicholls here explores a very different set of developments in the French avant-garde drama of the period. Arguing that Dada and Surrealist theatre have a strongly marked ‘anti-oedipal’ tendency, he suggests that their polemics against the family and paternal law contrast with the increasing prominence given to Freud's masterplot in Expressionism. Peter Nicholls teaches English and American Literature at the University of Sussex: his publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing, and articles on postmodernism, contemporary poetry, and French cubism. His Modernisms: a Literary Guide will be published by Macmillan in 1992.

Is there a postmodernist theatre – and if so, what was the modernist theatre? What qualifies as avant-garde – and for how long? And why does the ‘established’ alternative theatre lean so heavily on appropriation, whether of ancient myths or contemporary ideologies – such as postmodernism? Graham Ley uses analogies from dance and design to explore our perceptions of and attitudes towards those contemporary theatre practitioners who may once have broken boundaries, but now often head the queue for lavish corporate finance. Graham Ley has taught in universities in England, Australia, and New Zealand, and his Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre will shortly appear from the University of Chicago Press.

So close was the relationship between women and the Irish literary and theatrical renaissance that the severely diminished feminist role in contemporary Irish cultural and theatrical life contrasts all the more revealingly with the early achievements. In this article, which is an expanded version of a paper given at the 1990 conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research at Glasgow University, Steve Wilmer etches in the historical perspective, notably the significance of women's writing to the nationalist as well as the suffragist movement, and outlines the present situation, in which the solid advances being made by women directors and administrators are only slowly being reflected in an increase in women's theatre writing and support for feminist theatre groups, let alone the assumption of real theatrical power. Steve Wilmer teaches in the Samuel Beckett Centre at Trinity College Dublin, and is the author of several plays, including Scenes from Soweto.

Yvonne Brewster is best known in Britain as artistic director of Talawa Theatre, but she has also been active in the theatres of Jamaica, Africa, and America, having worked as a drama teacher, television production assistant and presenter, and film director in Jamaica before beginning her international theatre directing career. Talawa was founded in 1985 by four women, with Yvonne Brewster as director, and with the aim of using ‘the ancient African ritual and black political experience of our forebears to inform, enrich, and enlighten British theatre’. Although Talawa has as yet been unable to give the work of black women writers the attention it deserves, the company is itself primarily female: the artistic director and the majority of employees are women, all the designers to date have been women, and so predominantly are the technical and stage management staff. A medium- to large-scale touring company, Talawa worked without a building base until 1991, when the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre became its home. Yvonne Brewster has directed all Talawa's work to date, focusing primarily on productions of the classics with black performers and on introducing the work of black playwrights to British audiences. Her productions have included The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James (1985–86), An Echo in the Bone by Dennis Scott (1986–87), O Babylon! by Derek Walcott (1987–88), Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1988–89), The Gods Are Not to Blame by Ola Rotimi (1989–90), The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace (1990–91), and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1991–92). Yvonne Brewster is also the editor of Methuen's two volumes of Black Plays (1987 and 1989). Here she is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, who has just completed her doctoral dissertation on women's theatre in Britain at Cambridge, and is currently working with the Open University.

We are happy to return to the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, the subject of pioneering studies by Clive Barker in the original Theatre Quarterly, where he used the ‘Brit’ as focus for an overview of the problems of researching nineteenth-century popular theatre in TQ4 (1971), proceeding to a detailed analysis of our knowledge of the nature and composition of the theatre's audiences in TQ34 (1979). Jim Davis now turns to the repertoire of the theatre, and, for one representative decade from 1863 to 1874, explores the sources of the melodramas presented there – a great many of them specially written or adapted by popular ‘house dramatists’. He also examines the values which may be discerned to underlie the most popular plays, and in the process, by going to manuscript sources rather than to the inevitably more ‘respectable’ plays that reached print, uncovers a more radical repertoire than previous authorities had assumed. Jim Davis, who currently teaches in the Theatre Department of the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre, including a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988) and a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990).