Our impressions of Broadway tend to be a compound of past glories as reflected in new musicals, ritual laments of lack of intellectual substance, and the no-less-confusing mix of tawdriness and glamour in the place itself. The showbiz press, meanwhile, concentrates on the hard cash of the theatrical situation. However, as Glenn Loney here suggests, even economic generalizations can falsify the details of a complicated picture: and he considers other relevant factors, from pressures for environmental preservation to the paranoid fear of ‘the Times review’, and the often-overlooked attitudes of the playwrights and performers themselves. Glenn Loney is a widely-published writer and teacher, who contributed a survey of American academic drama to NTQ20, and here he provides a clear overview of the current Broadway scene for a British readership, while offering some lateral thinking which will also prove stimulating for an already-informed American audience.

In NTQ15 (1988) Catherine Boyle surveyed the paradoxically rich variety of theatrical practices that have come to life in Chile under conditions of extreme hardship since the military takeover of 1973. She concluded that ‘there is more to be said about Chilean theatre and other interpretations to be made’. The following piece puts forward one such interpretation, by examining some of those practices in terms of the larger social and political questions at stake, and by drawing theatrical and historical parallels between the work of the two most important dramatists of the period – Juan Radrigán and Marco Antonio de la Parra – and the work and thought of Piscator. This article was written well before the developments that have brought Chile to the brink of a re-establishment of some kind of democracy, with the elections of December 1989 won by the opposition to Pinochet: but it still reaches an optimistic conclusion, which we can only hope is borne out by events. Enzo Cozzi is a Chilean who came to exile in Britain in the aftermath of the military coup. He now teaches in the Department of Drama at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. University of London, and runs a puppet theatre company. Travesura, devoted to Latin American popular culture.

This is the second in a series of interviews with women who are involved, in various capacities, in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, in NTQ21, was with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, and provided an update of a previously published interview as well as a discussion of contemporary work: its aim was to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by making available the views and opinions of one of Britain's leading young women playwrights, Charlotte Keatley, along with a detailed account of the origins of her 1989 Royal Court success, My Mother Said I Never Should. Charlotte Keatley was born in London in 1960, but has lived in Leeds and Manchester since she was nineteen. Her many plays include Underneath the Arndale (1982). Dressing for Dinner (1983–84), Citizens (BBC 4, 1987–88), and My Mother Said I Never Should (Contact Theatre, Manchester, 1987, and Royal Court Theatre, London, February 1989; Gaieté Theatre, Paris, September 1989, and European tour). She has been directing playwriting workshops for students while in Cambridge on a Junior Judish E. Wilson Fellowship, 1988–89, and is currently at work on her next plays. The interviewer, and compiler of this series, Lizbeth Goodman, is a New Yorker who is now a Scholar of St John's College, Cambridge, where she is preparing her doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and completing a book on the politics of theatre funding.

Unlike Avignon, still active after more than forty years, the once notorious Nancy Festival has slipped unobtrusively into history. David Looseley sets out here to trace this itinerary. After reviewing the festival's origins and its importance for the experimental theatre of the 1960s, he examines what became of it in the bleaker decades which followed, and assesses the meaning of its decline. David Looseley, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford, is currently engaged in research funded by the Leverhulme Trust into the politics of culture in contemporary France. His published work includes a book on the theatre of the twentieth-century French dramatist Armand Salacrou.

One of the persistent problems in acting, and one that seems to grow steadily in importance, comes from the public identity of the actor. This study suggests that a semiotic approach to the acting sign can help to distinguish the function of celebrity in acting, the threats to authority that celebrity imposes, and the results of celebrity acting both on stage and in the efforts of the actor to achieve an identity. This essay is related to earlier discussions of the stage figure by its author, Michael Quinn, in Modem Drama and Gestus. applying the Prague School model of analysis that also supported his article on reading and directing in NTQ11 (1987). Michael Quinn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, is currently working on a critical study of Vaclav Havel, as well as a longer study of the stage figure in different theatrical contexts.

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986). Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue – while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council – the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain – introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.

Louise Page was born in London in 1955, but lived in Sheffield from the age of five until a short while ago. She read drama at Birmingham University, and took a postgraduate diploma in playwriting, then returned to Sheffield in 1979 as Fellow in Drama and Television. In 1982–83 she was resident writer at the Royal Court, and in 1985 was awarded the first J. T. Grein Prize by the Critics’ Circle. With a string of widely-produced plays from the early Tissue through Salonika and Golden Girls to the more recent Beauty and the Beast and Diplomatic Wives, Louise Page is now firmly established as one of the leading playwrights of her generation. The present interview was recorded while she was in Greece in September 1988 to prepare the film adaptation of Salonika. The interviewer, Elizabeth Sakellaridou, is Senior Lecturer in Modern English Drama in the University of Thessaloniki. Her publications include Pinter's Female Portraits (Macmillan, 1988), and several articles on modern English drama and feminist criticism. She is currently preparing a study of contemporary British women dramatists. Her ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Louise Page's work follows this interview.