Well into his eighth decade, Eric Bentley now regards himself as primarily a playwright, having redefined the agenda of serious criticism during the early post-war years, pioneered the understanding, translation, and production of Brecht in the West, and for long combined academic work at Columbia with producing the best kind of regular theatre reviews. Apart from several collections of that ‘occasional’ writing, and anthologies of plays in translation which have helped to extend the range of the English-language repertoire, he has produced several full-length studies of seminal importance – from his early re-evaluation of Shaw and, in The Playwright as Thinker, of other major modern dramatists, to the more theoretical but invariably stimulating ‘rethink’ of dramatic genres in The Life of the Drama. More recently, he has devoted his time to active playwriting, and it was during a production of his Lord Alfred's Lover in Miami that the director and self-proclaimed ‘counterfeit critic’ Charles Marowitz persuaded him to discuss the present state of both the active theatre in the West – and of the condition of the critical trade he had once pursued.

American vaudeville welcomed a host of important stage actors into its midst during the generation between the mid-1890s and the end of the First World War, and in 1912, following appearances in British music halls, Sarah Bernhardt became vaudeville's centrepiece in its own war with the legitimate theatre for audience and status. By way of exchange, she received the highest salary ever paid to a ‘headlined’ vaudeville act, while performing a repertoire from which she was able to exclude the sort of light entertainment which had previously typified the medium. Both vaudeville and Bernhardt profited, in very different ways, from this wedding of high culture to low – and in the process a cultural standing seems to have attached itself to exhibitions of pain which legitimised the lot of the morally deviant women she both portrayed and exemplified. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the ways in which the great actress thus maintained a demand for her services well after the eclipse of her legendary beauty and matchless movement.

Arthur Ballet was a dramaturg in America before the English-language theatre really knew that such a theatrical functionary had long been leading a curious backstairs life in the theatres of central Europe. He directed and taught theatre at the University of Minneapolis for many years until, in 1961, he became Director there of the grandly-entitled Office for Advanced Drama Research – in which capacity he not only gave unstintingly of time and advice to hundreds of aspirant playwrights, but guided their work towards likely outlets, and selected and edited no fewer than thirteen volumes of new work in the Playwrights for Tomorrow series. He was also a regular dramaturg for the O'Neill Playwrights' Conference, and later served in that role at the Guthrie Theatre. During the Carter years Arthur Ballet was director of the theatre programme for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975 he became an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly, as he has been of NTQ from our first issue. What follows is an after-dinner speech made to an association whose very existence would have seemed an improbability just a few decades ago – the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, to whom he here addresses some words of practical advice and cautionary wisdom.

We continue our occasional series on the actuality and the ideology of lesbian performance with a study of Apple Island, a performance space in Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the productions of this ‘women's cultural and art space’ could, suggests Stacy Wolf, be categorized as performance art: she looks at these in the context of other modes and definitions of cultural production, and at the ‘complex interplay of identity and knowledge’ which constructs Apple Island's potential spectators. Looking at both positive negative critiques of its work, she concludes that the activity through which its refusal of political and performative divisions is best exemplified is the weekly class-cumperformance of country western line dancing, and suggests through folkloric analogy how this helps to define or redefine the meaning of cultural feminism. Stacy Wolf is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Drama and a lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has also published articles in Theatre Studies, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Overwhelmingly, the British reputation of George Gershwin is as a ‘serious’ composer: but this is liable to obscure not only the contributions he and his brother Ira made to the popular music theatre in Britain, but also, conversely, the British influences upon this seemingly all-American pair. George was profoundly influenced by that pre-eminent American Anglophile of his time, Jerome Kern, while British influences upon the semi-scholarly Ira extended far beyond W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse. After ‘Swanee’ swept Britain in 1920, and George had honed his art and craft by writing the score for the West End revue, The Rainbow (1923), came the musical comedy, Primrose (1924) – its score his first to be published, and including some of his earliest orchestrations. A prototype of the frivolous comedies of the era, Primrose marked the first time the brothers were billed together as the Gershwins, since Ira had earlier written as ‘Arthur Francis’: it was also the immediate precursor of their first great Broadway hit, Lady, Be Good! Finally, in 1928, Ira collaborated, without George, on the London show That's a Good Girl – though Damsel in Distress, the brothers' last film musical, was a valedictory to the British-American musical comedy of the era. James Moore's earlier transatlantic study, of Cole Porter in Britain, appeared in NTQ30 (1992), and his Radio Two programme on the revue producer André Charlot was broadcast in October 1993.

This paper examines two plays by Trevor Griffiths, ten years apart in the writing, which responded in different ways to burning contemporary issues. The first, Oi for England, though originally seen on television in 1982, was conceived as a theatre text, and was eventually toured to audiences closer to the age (and perhaps to some of the beliefs) of its racist rock-band central characters. The Gulf between Us, written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, was staged in Leeds in 1992 as a local theatrical ‘event’ at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, under Griffiths's own direction. Jonathan Bignell looks at the ways in which the different nature of these occasions and audiences, and the different ways in which the plays can be viewed as ‘political theatre’ – in particular, the new demands made by The Gulf upon critics who arrived with a type-cast view of its author – in both cases militated against a successful political statement being conveyed. Jonathan Bignell completed a PhD on narrative in film and television fictions in 1989, and since then has lectured in English and Media Studies in the English Department of the University of Reading. His research interests are in literary theory, and film and television analysis.

In large part due to the relative lack of productions in Europe, the plays of Wole Soyinka have mostly been approached from a literary point of view rather than analyzed as theatrical events. Because the plays rely heavily on non-verbal conventions, this neglect of visual and acoustic patterns promotes an incomplete understanding of Soyinka's idea of theatre. Here, for the first time, a play by Soyinka is analyzed from the point of view of performance – specifically, the production of Death and the King's Horseman staged at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 1990. Martin Rohmer examines the transformation of playscript into mise-en-scène, focusing in particular on the use of music and dance, but looking also at the production as an intercultural event – asking not only how far a European company has to rely on African performing skills, but how far a European cast and audience is capable of a proper understanding of the play. This article is a revised version of a lecture delivered at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, held in Bayreuth in June 1992. Martin Rohmer studied Drama, German Literature, Anthropology, and Philosophy in Munich, and Theatre, Film and TV Studies at the University of Glasgow, before completing his MA in Munich in 1992. Presently he is a Research Assistant at the University of Bayreuth, where he is working on a PhD on the performing arts in Zimbabwe.

The received wisdom regarding the composition of the audience for Shakespeare's theatre has shifted in accordance with the social assumptions of the times – from Alfred Harbage's assertion of a popular, homogeneous audience, evolved for the egalitarian 'forties, to Ann Jennalie Cook's argument for a ‘privileged’ audience, put forward in the elitist 'eighties. While Andrew Gurr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London corrects the worst excesses of both views, it remains dependent upon a great deal of inference from inadequate documentation, often directed to other purposes, and sometimes upon necessary guesswork, however rooted in common-sense. Caroline Gardiner teaches and researches in the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, whence have emerged the most detailed attempts to ‘profile’ the theatregoing populace of contemporary London: and here she suggests that some of the approaches and even the findings of modern audience researchers may shed new light on the controversy. Sometimes the results are surprising – and include the possibility that, relative to the pool of population available, theatre is now actually a more popular activity than in Shakespeare's London. However, she concludes that, overall, the percentage attending the theatre has remained remarkably constant, and constantly low.