Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia – the Theatre of the Eighth Day – has survived for 22 years, with essentially the same personnel since the early seventies, and with a constant commitment to social engagement. The group – which has never included trained actors, because, according to director Lech Raczak, any graduate of a Polish theatre school, ‘cannot act with his whole self’ – was a major voice of protest for the Polish student generation of 1968. Despite constant harassment and frequent arrests, it continues both to inspire and record the work of young oppositional theatres, although in 1985 it was forced to split when six members toured western Europe whilst four others, denied their passports, played in Polish churches. What follows is a collage of two interviews conducted that autumn – in London with Tadeusz Janiszewski, Adam Borowski, and Leszek Sczaniecki, and in Poznan with Lech Raczak and Marcin Keszycki. They discuss the importance of Grotowski for their generation: their working method, based on group improvisation; the function of poetry in physical theatre; their major productions; and the day-to-day survival strategies of a collective dedicated to exploring the expressive and political potential of the actor. The interviews were assembled by Tony Howard, a playwright who also teaches English in the University of Warwick, and who expresses his thanks to the many people who made this feature possible – especially Nick Gardiner, the ‘European’ group's manager, and the translators. Ewa Elandt and Ewa Kraskowska.

Among the least expected (and least examined) aspects of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico was its ‘export’ of a neo-medieval form of religious drama. The devastation wrought by the conquistadores upon an ancient civilization should not, however, blind us to the extreme cruelty involved in Aztec forms of worship; and in the following article, Robert Potter both outlines the ‘dramatic’ qualities of such sacrificial spectacles, and shows how the Spaniards, in their attempts to convert the Aztecs to Christianity, employed their own forms of ‘sacrificial drama’ for the purpose – utilizing, for example. The Sacrifice of Abraham for their didactic ends, while also assimilating some elements from the supplanted cultural forms. Robert Potter, who teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art in the University of California, Santa Barbara, is author of The English Morality Play (1975), and of many articles on medieval and renaissance drama. He prepared the present paper for the colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour I'Etude du Théâtre Médiéval at Perpignan in July 1986.

In the final issue of the original series of Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), R. G. Davis described his experiences directing the plays of Dario Fo in Canada and the USA, focusing mainly on his work with We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! Here, he looks not only at his own but at the half-dozen other productions of Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist which have so far been presented in North America – and finds himself, in retrospect, critical of his own work, as well as that of others. He concludes that it is impossible to attempt Fo's plays properly without at least an understanding of the political point of view he sums up as ‘anarcho-communist’ – a point of view which must communicate through the leading players. A regular contributor to the present and its predecessor journal, R. G. Davis, who founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the sixties, is presently teaching at San Francisco State University, reviewing for the magazine of the California Confederation of the Arts (by whose kind permission the following article is reprinted), and is now engaged in staging his own adaptation of llya Ehrenburg's The Life of an Automobile, as an ‘imagistic theatre’ production.

‘Deadly British productions of Chekhov remain all too common.’ Or so suggests David Allen, who finds in the Chekhov productions of Mike Alfreds a refreshing recognition of the distinctively ‘Russian’ qualities of the plays, and an ability to render these in terms of the choices available to British actors. Mike Alfreds founded the Shared Experience company in 1975, and in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Clive Barker interviewed him and members of the company on the processes of collective creation through which most of their productions then evolved: the present feature thus in part reflects Alfreds's own developing interest in working on ‘fixed’ scripts, both with Shared Experience, for whom he directed Three Sisters earlier this year, and in his work as guest director of The Cherry Orchard, first for Oxford Playhouse in 1982, and subsequently for the National Theatre at the Cottesloe, in 1985. In the following interview, Mike Alfreds's own perceptions of his work are intercut with author David Allen's observations during rehearsals, and the subsequent reactions of the critics.

Of the generation of playwrights who began to write around 1968. Howard Barker came more belatedly than some to full critical recognition, but has emerged in recent years as a major voice in all the available dramatic media: thus, among his most recent work, Scenes from an Execution was for radio and The Blow for television, while The Castle was premiered by the RSC at The Pit in November 1985 – and last spring he contributed an updated final act of his own when adapting Middleton's Women Beware Women for production at the Royal Court. Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler interviewed Howard Barker on his earlier work in Theatre Quarterly No.40 (1981), and now Finlay Donesky discusses with the dramatist the more recent development of his writing, as of the thinking about society and his own craft which underpins it. The interview was conducted in July 1985 while Donesky was in England on a fellowship from the University of Michigan, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the plays of Barker, Brenton, and Hare.

As Alice Reyner's paper on Stanislavski and Bradley in NTQ 4 illustrated, Stanislavski remained very much a man of his own time, however enduring his approach to acting has proved. Here, Natalie Crohn Schmitt examines one of the concepts most crucial to ‘the system’ – a concept which is in its essentials, however, derived from nineteenth-century ideas, now being challenged, about the relationship between creativity and the unconscious. Pointing out that Stanislavski himself believed that his ‘system’ was simply the application of natural laws to acting technique, the author shows Stanislavski's indebtedness to the psychological theories of Théodule Armand Ribot, which interpreted all human behaviour in terms of ‘an aim towards fixed ends’. One of the reasons for the decline in influence of Stanislavski's system thus reflects, she argues, the growing belief that creativity is ‘process’, its ends ‘continually redefined by the actions, and vice-versa’ – and the author suggests examples of such a non-Stanislavskian approach among contemporary theatre companies. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is associate professor of theatre in the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her earlier essays have appeared in a wide range of journals, and she has just completed a full-length study, Actors on the Stage of Life. The present paper was written under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Why does the vocabulary of the theatre become pejorative as soon as it is applied to everyday experience? Why does the use of theatre as a metaphor for the world carry implications of the deceptive and the artificial? And why, more recently, have sociologists and psychologists used theatricality as a basis for explaining the nature of behaviour in ‘real life’ – at the same time as theatrical gurus have begun to seek a kind of transcendent theatricality in ‘real’ experience? Through an analysis of the ideas of writers such as Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Burns, and of theatre workers from Diderot through Stanislavski to Grotowski, David E. R. George concludes that the apparent contradictions and paradoxes become reconcilable if one replaces the traditional alternative models of theatricality – subjective identification between actor and role versus presentational objectivity – with a triadic approach, which recognizes the partial, overlapping, and multi-faceted nature of all ‘theatrical’ behaviour, on the stage or in the street. After the award of his Cambridge doctorate in 1964, David E. R. George taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Göttingen, Malaysia, and Peking, before taking up his present post as Chairman of Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published books on Ibsen and on German tragic theory, and his study of Indian ritual dance-drama will appear later this year in the ‘Theatre in Focus’ series.

‘What makes one sentence into a line of poetry and another sentence dull and lifeless?’ This was one of the questions Arnold Wesker set out to answer from the point-of-view of the practising playwright rather than the critical theorist, when he delivered the following pape; to the biennial conference of the International Association of Theatre Critics in Rome in 1985. He examines the constituent elements of stage dialogue in supposdly ‘raistic’ drama and th rigorous if not always conscious process of artistic selection and shaping diotated, in his own practice, by the natur of the originating experence. He illustrates his argument with extracts from his own works. including his most recently staged play in London, Annie Wobbler – the first in a now-completed cycle of four plays for on woman of which Four Portraits, Yardsal, and Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon? are the other parts. A frequent contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, Arnold Wesker's earliest works, the plays of the ‘Wesker Trilogy’ and The kitchen, were milestones in the creatior of the ‘now British drama’ of the late fifties, and he has continuec to write for the theatre in a wide range of styles – which have been known to disturb the ‘expectations of realism’ of some of the critics he was here addressing…

David Hornbrook's articles in NTQ 4 and 5 offered a challengig perspective to the history of drama-in-education. a critique of present practices and practitioners. and some positive proposals for the future place of the subject in the clrriculum. These provoked Widespread interest and we published in NTO 7 a first selection of comments. We now continue the debate with comments from Gavin Bolton, Who has published Widely on educational drama and is Head of Drama and in the School of Education of the University of Durham. and Warwick Dobson. Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bradord and llkley College.

Despite the successful production of Ödön von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods. In the translation by Christopher Hampton at the National Theatre in 1977. the work of this inter-war contemporary of Brecht's remains little known in the English-speaking theatre. James L. Rosenberg. Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, is himself a professional playwright who has translated some of Horvath's work previously unavailable in English. In an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to this checklist, he both outlines the reasons for our ignorance of Horvath, and suggests aspects of his undervalued importance. The subsequent checklist provides a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication

DAVID HORNBROOK'S intelligent and lucid account of the problems which have beset the drama in education community during the last thirty years has a compelling look to it. In Part One of ‘Drama, Education and the Politics of Change’ (NTQ 4), the historical analysis is astute and the questions posed at the end are important and pressing ones. I should lik, however, to confine my own obsrevations to the issues raised in Part Two of the paper (NTQ 5), where of offers specific proposals for future developments, because it is here that the argument falters.

Despite the successful production of Ödön von Horvath's Tales from the Vienna Woods, in the translation by Christopher Hampton at the National Theatre in 1977. the work of this inter-war contemporary of Brecht's remains little known in the English-speaking theatre. James L. Rosenberg. Professor of Drama at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pittsburgh, is himself a professional playwright who has translated some of Horvath's work previously unavailable in English. In an illuminating biographical and critical introduction to this checklist, he both outlines the reasons for our ignorance of Horvath, and suggests aspects of his undervalued importance. The subsequent checklist provides a succinct outline of the original productions of Horvath's plays and of the publication of his novels, plus a selective guide to available critical writing in English and German.