Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

Dario Fo has developed his own brand of epic theatre by adapting principles and techniques from various forms of popular performance and the oral tradition. He stays detached from the role he plays by frequently shifting in and out of character and by calling attention to the performance as such. This, argues Antonio Scuderi, allows him to emphasize the interpretive frame – the ‘messages’ he establishes in his prologue. His most recent play, The Two-Headed Anomaly, is thus at one level a farcical romp; but a closer look reveals an intricate metatheatrical structure that allows Dario Fo and his fellow-performer Franca Rame to deliver their political satire. Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and with Joseph Farrell edited Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal (2003) and Modern Language Review (2004).

Brian Woolland is the author of a major study of Peter Barnes's work, Dark Attractions: the Theatre of Peter Barnes, published by Methuen in the autumn of 2004 – too late to take more than brief note of the playwright's death in July. The following critical retrospective serves, then, both as a valedictory postscript to the author's full-length study and as a critical afterword to the personal tributes paid to Peter Barnes by Alan Rickman, Charles Marowitz, and Elaine Turner in NTQ80. Brian Woolland is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Reading. His research interests are in Renaissance theatre in performance, modern European theatre, and theatre in education. He also works as a playwright and as a theatre director.

The recent plays of Martin McDonagh have fascinated and repelled critics for nearly a decade. His idiosyncratic blend of rural Irish mythology and ‘in-yer-face’ aggression has both caused consternation and won high praise, but the motivations and inspirations of McDonagh's work have not been widely discussed. Here, Catherine Rees addresses some of the common critical assaults on one of his most contentious plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), and seeks to rescue the playwright from misunderstanding and heavy-handed critical treatment. She also aims to clarify some of the issues surrounding this politically charged and controversial work, and discusses it within the wider context of British and Irish drama. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Contemporary Irish Literature: Diverse Voices’ conference at the University of Central Lancaster in April 2003. Rees has presented on various aspects of McDonagh's work at a joint American Conference for Irish Studies and British Association of Irish Studies conference, and is currently working on a PhD about his plays at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in today's Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

Teatro Ósmego Dnia, the Theatre of the Eighth Day, has for forty years flourished in Poland, never as part of the established theatre, but as one of what Eugenio Barba calls the ‘floating islands’ – those companies which live as much as make theatre, and form part of an informal international circuit of like-minded though distinct and individual groups. Ian Watson here shapes his own memories of the group in the form of a letter to one of NTQ's co-editors, with whom he has shared experiences of Polish theatre, and in particular the work of Eighth Day, relating their history to the changing political and economic environment in Poland, and the company's relationship with the outside world. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University, Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

In the following article, Christine Hamilton and Adrienne Scullion review the system of theatre provision and production that exists in the rural areas of Scotland, most especially in the Highlands and Islands, assessing the policy framework that exists in the nation as a whole and in the Highlands and Islands in particular. They highlight the role and responsibilities of volunteers within the distribution of professional theatre in Scotland, challenge the response of locally based theatre-makers and nationally responsible agencies to represent rural Scotland, and raise issues fundamental to the provision of culture nationally. In doing so, they question what we expect theatre policy to deliver in rural areas, and what we expect rural agents to contribute to theatre provision and policy. Finally, they suggest that, in the system of rural arts in Scotland, there are wider lessons for the development of arts in and the arts of other sparsely populated and fragile communities. Christine Hamilton is the director and Adrienne Scullion the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow, where Adrienne teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies.

The international circulation of commercial theatre in the early twentieth century was driven not only from the centres of Great Britain and the USA, but by the specific enterprise and habitus of managers in ‘complementary’ production sites such as Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The activity of this period suggests a de-centred competitive trade in theatrical commodities – whether performers, scripts, or productions – wherein the perceived entertainment preferences and geographies of non-metropolitan centres were formative of international enterprise. The major producers were linked in complex bonds of partnerships, family, or common experience which crossed the globe. The fractures and commonalities displayed in the partnerships of James Cassius Williamson and George Musgrove, which came to dominate and shape the fortunes of the Australian industry for much of the century, indicate the contradictory commercial and artistic pressures bearing upon entrepreneurs seeking to provide high-quality entertainment and form advantageous combinations in competition with other local and international managements. Clarke, Meynell and Gunn mounted just such spirited competition from 1906 to 1911, and their story demonstrates both the opportunities and the centralizing logic bearing upon local managements shopping and dealing in a global market. The author, Veronica Kelly, works at the University of Queensland. She is presently undertaking a study of commercial stars and managements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, with a focus on the star performer as model of history, gender, and nation.

Report on the conference arranged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Birmingham University, held at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on 16 October 2004.