As this issue goes to press, the GDR has just been united with its western neighbour in circumstances which, just a year previously, would have seemed almost as improbable as when Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel returned after the war to create the Berliner Ensemble. Käthe Rülicke-Weiler joined their dramaturgical team in 1951, and witnessed from the inside the attempt to build Brecht's ideal of a socialist theatre. Here, she talks with Matthias Braun about the personal, social, and political background to the Ensemble – which, although under the artistic direction of Brecht himself, was managed by Weigel, who was thus in the position of preventing herself from becoming a conventional ‘star’ performer. As well as dealing with the nature of Weigel's acting – and of her administrative skills – the interview assesses the contributions of Brecht's other co-workers, his own techniques as a director, and the factors (including touring under difficult post-war conditions) which led to the Ensemble's recognition as a major international company. This interview was first published in 1985 in Theater der Zeit, by whose kind permission it is here translated.

The plays of Howard Barker are probably more fervently admired and resolutely disliked than those of any other British dramatist of his generation. Although we have twice published interviews with the playwright about his life and work – first in the original Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), and more recently in NTQ8 (1986) – subsequent articles in NTQ have tended to be critical of his achievements: we are therefore pleased to present here a view of two of his latest plays, The Last Supper and The Bite of the Night, which, while recognizing precisely those qualities for which Barker has often been attacked, suggests that there is a social as well as a highly theatrical purpose behind the ‘postmodern’ approach to theatricality here identified. Th e author, Günther Klotz, teaches and researches in English studies in Berlin, where he has published numerous critical studies and editions of British dramatists and other writers.

Teatro Settimo is a theatre group which was created in the Italian industrial city of Turin in 1979 by a group of theatre-making friends who wished to discover a kind of left-wing theatre that would respond directly to the problems of an urban environment. Their story is one of institutionalized success achieved – and then deliberately rejected, as the problems of administering that success, with all its attendant bureaucracy, threatened to stifle the original impulses behind the company. Their most recent production, Stabat Mater, was presented at the ‘Divina’ conference held in Turin in June 1990, as described elsewhere in this issue. Lizbeth Goodman and Gabriella Giannachi spoke there to members of the group, which has since brought Stabat Mater to the ‘Theatre under Threat’ conference in Cambridge last October.

Leopold Jessner's productions of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell (1919) and Shakespeare's Richard III (1920) marked a culminating point in the short-lived, politically volatile era of German theatrical Expressionism. Jessner's distinctive work in this staging style did much to define the features of one mode of performance among several which billed themselves – or were branded as – ‘Expressionist’. In the following article, David Kuhns explores the particularly striking impact of Jessner's ‘emblematic’ approach to Schiller and Shakespeare upon the acting of those productions. By transforming his actors from mimetic agents into monumentalized emblems, Jessner analyzed political consciousness in what amounted to allegorical terms. The result was a politically provocative presentation of political behaviour – particularly the will to power – as an essentially spiritual matter. David Kuhns teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and critical theory at Washington University in St. Louis.

In spite of periods of withdrawal, Leo de Berardinis is one of the few author-directors from the new Italian theatre of the 1960s and 1970s who has remained faithful to the spirit of experiment, and attempted consistently to renew himself and his processes of theatremaking. In an introduction to the interview which follows, Marco de Marinis outlines the earlier years of de Berardinis's career, and notes the characteristic features of the productions of that period. The interview itself explores his view of the theatre and theatricality from the standpoint of the mid-1980s. At its core is a discussion of de Berardinis's 1985 production of King Lear – the director's second encounter with the play – in relation to his own aims, to the interpretive views of other theatre people and critics, and to what de Berardinis believes we may still perceive of Shakespeare's intentions. A postscript by Marco de Marinis outlines subsequent developments in the director's work.

Michel Vinaver is a French playwright, born in 1927, who was exiled to the USA during the German occupation, and began to write in the 1950s – alongside a business career until 1982, when he became Professor of Drama Studies in the University of Paris. His complete plays have recently been published in two volumes by Actes Sud, and are widely-produced in France – but in the following article he claims that his few British productions, at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the Traverse in Edinburgh, have often been closer to his textual intentions. This is one of the problems he examines in the following wide-ranging article on the successes and limitations of the French post-war policy of theatrical Decentralization. Against the benefits of financial security and non-metropolitan bias, he weighs the failures to reflect regional cultures, and the cult of the director, with its continuous pressures to be ‘different’ in the interests of promotion and critical prestige. This paper was first presented at a conference at Birmingham University in April 1990. Readers with access to copies of the original Theatre Quarterly may also find it useful to refer to the special issue on People's Theatre in France, TQ23 (1976).

The regular community drama activity of the village of Monticchiello in Italy has been pursued for nearly a quarter of a century, but is still little known abroad. A full study of the phenomenon is as much a study of the community, past and present, as it is a piece of theatrical analysis, in the area where there is a complete interlock between social history and the theatrical activity which a society produces. Since the work and history of the Teatro Povero have too many ramifications for everything to be summarized or even alluded to in one article, Richard Andrews here sets out to introduce the subject to students of theatre ‘by example’ – aiming to dig a single trench into the strata, in order to convey the outlines of the subject, hopefully without damage to the evidence needed for a more complete survey. Richard Andrews is Professor of Italian at Leeds University, having previously taught at Swansea and Kent. For the past fifteen years his research interests have been mainly concentrated on theatrical material, and he is currently preparing a study of sixteenth-century Italian comedy for Cambridge University Press. His regular contact with Monticchiello dates from 1983, and has been supported by a systematic analysis of all the texts produced there since 1967.