Charles Marowitz worked extensively as a director in Britain from the late 'fifties through the 'seventies, and was one of the editors of the influential Encore magazine in the formative years of the ‘new wave’. His free-lance work included the co-direction with Peter Brook of the seminal ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, and the premiere production of Joe Orton's Loot. Later, in partnership with Jim Haynes, a season at the London Traverse Theatre led to the creation of his own, more enduring Open Space Theatre in a basement in Tottenham Court Road – one of the identifying events of 1968 and its theatrical aftermath. Since returning to his native United States, Marowitz has worked out of Malibu, and continued his parallel role as writer – in which he has become best known for his sequence of ‘collage’ Shakespeares ranging from Hamlet to The Shrew, and also as a self-professed ‘counterfeit critic’ and theoretician of acting and directing. The following article also forms the final chapter of his latest book, The Other Way: an Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing, to be published by Applause Books later this year. It represents, also, a concise charting of his own voyage of discovery – of the role of the director, and of the recognition of the autonomy and ‘higher calling’ of the actor that this has involved.

The potential and the problems of multicultural theatre have frequently been described and debated in this as in other theatre journals, but discussions of its value and viability have generally been in ethical terms – over how far it is possible for the West to ‘import’ or otherwise employ the theatrical traditions of other cultures without resort to an imperialist appropriation of what is found ‘consumable’, to the detriment of the culture thus despoiled. While not ignoring the moral arguments, John Russell Brown here deals also with the practical issues – notably, how far different kinds of theatre depend on being ‘site-specific’ not only in terms of the performers involved, but also in terms of audiences and their responses. He argues that, paradoxically, truly intercultural theatre is more often to be found where western influences from Hollywood films or pop music have become part of the lived experience of eastern cultures, or in western communities where (for example) British and West Indian or ‘Anglo’ and Latino-American traditions have become intertwined. He suggests that rather than trying to embrace the substance of ‘other’ traditions, western theatre might better benefit by exploring the conventions that modulate the relationship between actors and audience, or the approach of the actor to different kinds of ‘text’. He concludes: ‘By using overseas research to develop its own inheritance, a theatre might discover what it alone needs to create and encourage a more active and imaginative response from its local audience.’ A widely published writer on drama and theatre, John Russell Brown was first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and was subsequently an Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. Currently he is visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.

The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare

As a mutually-illuminating contrast to the academic exploration in the previous article of the potential of CD-ROM as a means both of teaching a ‘classical’ playtext and of analyzing the multiple choices involved in its performance, the two following pieces explore the potential of the new technologies in the creation and documentation of live art. Focusing upon her performance Push the Boat Out, given as part of the Jezebel Season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1995, Leslie Hill first outlines the thinking behind her use of the Internet and the Web – as yet more economic than CD-ROM – both for creating ‘live art’ and for rendering its conventionally ‘unprintable’ form as a ‘text’ with its own integrity. The scripted element of her performance follows. Leslie Hill is a writer and performer, currently a resident artist fellow at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, and a senior lecturer in the Theatre Department at Arizona State University. Along with Helen Paris, she is co-artistic director of the ‘curious.com’ multimedia performance company.

GOOD EVENING. Tonight I've been asked to talk to you about HTML – hypertext markup language – and its performative characteristics; its multimedia capacity; its non-linear structure; its interactive possibilities; its real-time relationship with its readers slash navigators slash audience; and its potential interest to writers cum artists cum performers.

Harley Granville Barker, the major innovator in the English theatre at the beginning of the present century, was long underestimated as a playwright, and misjudged as a mediocre imitator of Bernard Shaw. In more recent years major revivals of his plays, as well as new critical studies and editions, have witnessed a renewed interest in Barker as a dramatist, which, Rudolf Weiss here argues, testifies to the Chekhovian rather than the Shavian qualities of his plays. In the following article Weiss explores these qualities in the context of the early reception of Chekhov's plays in Britain, and on the basis of a reassessment of the existing records he offers a new view of Barker's originality as a playwright, concluding that the quasi-Chekhovian stamp of his work does not derive from influence but reflects the distinctive Zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century. Rudolf Weiss, who teaches in the English Department of the University of Vienna, has previously published on Arthur Wing Pinero, John Galsworthy, Harley Granville Barker, and Elizabeth Baker.

From the run-up to its return to Chinese rule in July 1997 to the stock-market crash in October, Hong Kong has seldom been out of the news during the past year. But the attention paid to its political and economic provenance has not been matched by much interest in its cultural output – despite the existence in Hong Kong of a cinema industry with a prodigious output now approaching ten thousand films. Although a professional theatre has been a relatively more recent development, the connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close – from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the ‘female’ films of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical. Frank Bren, who is presently living and working in Hong Kong, here captures something of the history and the distinctive flavour of the overlapping movie and theatre industries, and assesses why the relationship remains mutually profitable in artistic as well as economic terms.

Twenty-five years ago, the original Theatre Quarterly pioneered the documentation of the rehearsal process in a series of ‘Production Casebooks’ which, in a wide variety of formats – dictated by the people and the facilities available for any particular production – delved pragmatically into then-uncharted territory. That such analyses are now more commonplace is thanks not only to the active participation of academics in the field of theatre studies, but also to what Gay McAuley here describes as the postmodern ‘shift in interest from the reified art object to the dynamic processes involved in its production and reception’. But the need to refine happenstance into methodology has served only to highlight the problems of observation, selection, and presentation involved – and of how to determine the degree of objectivity that is possible or desirable. The availability of video alongside audiotape and notebook provides an important additional tool – but presents its own problems of ‘editing’ and interpretation. Here, Gay McAuley, Director of the Centre for Performance Studies in the University of Sydney, compares the dilemma of the rehearsal recordist with that of the cultural anthropologist, and proposes the value of an ethnographic model in recognizing and starting to embrace if not always to overcome the difficulties which confront the involved observer. An earlier version of her paper was read at the IFTR/FIRT conference ‘Actor, Actress on Stage’, held in Montreal in June 1995.