In 1974 Dario Fo and ‘The Commune’ theatre collective were forced to engaged in a political battle to secure control of the ‘Palazzina Liberty’, a nondescript building once a market canteen, set in the middle of a park in a south-eastern suburb of Milan. Here, Tom Behan describes how mass support, derived from a revolutionary ideology, secured The Commune's control over the building for several years. The relationship between this political movement and the political content of the shows performed at the Palazzina is then discussed with reference to Can't Pay? Won't Pay!, Fanfani Kidnapped, and Mum's Marijuana is the Best. Tom Behan, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His article began life as part of the research for his Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre (Pluto Press, 2000), and forms a companion piece to ‘The Megaphone of the Movement: Dario Fo and the Working Class, 1968–79’, published in The Journal of European Studies, XXX (September 2000).

This is not only the story of an actor whose character began as Clytemnestra and became Daedalus, but of how the slow and arduous discovery of that character helped to form and transform the Odin Teatret production of Mythos – a collage of characters and places, their relationships rooted not in cause and effect but in action and reaction – and of how that production itself emerged by following both actual and metaphysical threads through the Cretan labyrinth. The search takes the form of a funeral wake which is interrupted by the arrival of Oedipus, Cassandra, Daedalus, Odysseus, Medea, Orpheus, and Sisyphus, who introduce the last revolutionary of the twentieth century to the immortality of myth. The author, Julia Varley, who herself took the role of Daedalus, has been with Odin Teatret since 1976. The production of Mythos, based on poems by Henrik Norbrandt and directed by Eugenio Barba, is at present on tour, and expected to be presented at the Salisbury Festival in June 2001.

The year 2000 prompted a review of the past millennium that took various forms – and lent a special significance to revivals of the medieval mystery plays for the celebrations in Coventry and York. Margaret Rogerson here argues that, no less than their local medieval counterparts, revivals can function as both community theatre and religious celebration – their appeal in a secular modern world raising fewer questions than versions of the Christian story adapted for the commercial or institutional theatre. She demonstrates how special efforts were made in the millennium revivals to reach out to the community; both local and global, and how through associated educational programmes and the inclusion of a wide range of participants, they introduced innovations into local traditions and built on the past to contribute to a continuing theatrical heritage. Margaret Rogerson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Sydney who is currently researching the mystery play revival traditions in York from 1951 to 2000.

The work of the French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, although phenomenally successful in continental Europe, has been staged less frequently in Anglo-American theatres; and a major feature on his work in NTQ49 in February 1997, and the publication by Methuen later in the same year of a collection of three of his plays in English translation, brought him only belated recognition in print. In this paper, first presented at a recent gathering in France to mark the tenth anniversary of Koltès's death, Maria Delgado and David Fancy trace the trajectory of a number of his plays through the space of translation, including Roberto Zucco, Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cottonfields), Quai Ouest (Quay West), and Combat de nègre et de chiens (Black Battles with Dogs). Koltès asserted in 1986 that ‘I have always somewhat disliked the theatre because theatre is the opposite of life; but I always come back to it and love it because it is the one place where you can say: this is not life’; and the poetic specificity of his work has posed significant challenges for an Anglo-American theatre culture imbued with actors' identification with character. Relying on testimonials from a variety of directors, translators, and actors, as well as evidence from productions in the UK, Ireland, and the US, the authors, who are both Koltès translators, trace the challenges that have faced English-speaking artists wishing to stage this demanding writer. Maria Delgado is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, and David Fancy is a freelance director based in Canada who is currently completing a PhD on Koltès's work.

The young Joseph Goebbels, caught up in the heady mix of ideas and ideals permeating German artistic circles during and after the First World War, expressed both his convictions and his confusions through writing plays. None of these deserve much attention as serious drama: but all shed light on the ideological development of the future Nazi Minister of Culture. While also developing an argument on the wider relationship between Expressionism and modernism, David Barnett here traces that relationship in Goebbels' plays, as also the evolution of an ideology that remained equivocal in its aesthetics – the necessary condemnation of ‘degenerate’ art tinged with a lingering admiration, epitomized in the infamous exhibition of 1937. David Barnett has been Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Huddersfield since 1998, and was previously Lecturer in German Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford. His Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner Müller was published by Peter Lang in 1998, and other publications include articles on Heiner Müller, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, Werner Schwab, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Peter Handke.

Prompted by the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny's biography Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, two recent productions, Esther Vilar's Speer and David Edgar's Albert Speer, have set out to explore the reputation of Hitler's architect and later Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, the only leading Nazi to acknowledge his guilt at the Nuremberg Trials. The plays, like the biography, are concerned with the extent of Speer's knowledge of the ‘Final Solution’ during his career in the Nazi hierarchy, and consequently with the integrity of the stance he adopted at Nuremberg and thereafter – that is, of his claim of guilt by association and omission rather than by active participation. In her biography, Sereny claims that as a result of her association with Speer he eventually acknowledged his guilt to her, and was repentant. But Nick White believes that the evidence – much of it unearthed by Sereny herself – suggests otherwise, and that Sereny had failed to acknowledge that between 1978 and his death in 1981 Speer consistently deceived her about crucial aspects of this evidence. How successful are Vilar and Edgar in their quite different dramatic sifting, not only of the public persona of Speer, but also of the interpretation granted their subject by the biographer upon whom their plays, to a lesser and greater degree, depend? Nick White has taught at City University, London, and his PhD dissertation, ‘In the Absence of Memory? Jewish Fate and Dramatic Representation: the Production and Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the London Stage, 1945–1989’ (1998) has been followed by a companion volume of criticism, articles, and letters, The Critical Reception of Holocaust Drama on the British Stage, 1939–2000.

The theatre of Eastern Europe has not always benefited as fully as might have been expected from the supposed freedoms which followed the collapse of Communism. State support for institutional theatre has been drastically reduced, while the ‘alternative’ theatre, though no longer constrained by a formal censorship, has had seriously to consider what it is now alternative to. Magdalena Gołaczyńska takes 1989 as starting point for a survey both of the framework within which alternative theatre now works, and of the three main strands that have emerged in the closing decade of the twentieth century – of companies continuing to produce socially critical work, of groups exploring experience at a more personal and existential level, and of ‘collective creators’ whose concerns are rather with pushing the boundaries of performance itself. Magdalena Gołaczyńska teaches at the University of Wroclaw and the State Academy of Drama in Cracow, and is author of a doctoral study of contemporary alternative theatre.