Back in 1977, Alan Plater contributed an article to TQ25 celebrating twenty-five years as a writer for stage and television. But his first play for television was not screened until 1962 – hence the different anniversary which here provides the occasion for his reflections on changes in the medium and its treatment of drama (and dramatists) over the succeeding four decades. As a stage writer, he established special relationships with Stoke-on-Trent, Humberside, and the North-East – where his Close the Coalhouse Door played to tremendous local acclaim, but to metropolitan disinterest when it reached the West End. But while his stage work has remained resolutely committed to the parts the critics seldom reach, as a writer for television he has both kept his own entirely distinctive voice, as in the Beiderbecke sequence, and remained an ever-reliable contributor to series from Z Cars in the 'sixties to Midsomer Murders in the new millennium, with excursions into glossy period dramatizations such as the seven-part Fortunes of War. Here, he reflects on the losses of spontaneity and creative freedom which have accompanied technical innovation and increasing bureaucracy, and offers some hopes for changes in direction to restore what was once the glory of British TV drama. This article is based on an inaugural lecture Alan Plater gave at the University of Bath in March 2002.

The numerous interrelated ‘popular’ theatres of Indonesia provide important evidence for the study of artistic interaction and change. The West Sumatran Randai theatre emerged in a culturally hybrid space and has been a sensitive index to local, national, and international flows and conditions. Matthew Isaac Cohen traces the origins of Randai in the late-colonial period and discusses its associations with rantau – a time of temporary migration, traditionally associated with the rite of passage to adulthood, but increasingly a semi-permanent exile for many Sumatrans. He then traces how and why Randai has now become more than a local art form, having been exported out of the province of West Sumatra to be utilized as source material for modern theatre by Indonesian theatre makers in Jakarta and Australia. Matthew Isaac Cohen is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow, a scholar of Indonesian theatre and performance, and a practising shadow puppeteer.

The exponential growth of ‘theoretical’ approaches to theatre in the last twenty years has given rise to a vast body of literature and a swag of highly influential ‘command metaphors’. In this article, Julian Meyrick describes and analyzes the rise of such theories, contrasting academic understanding of theatre with the more experiential problem-solving of the profession. He argues that sophisticated ‘theoretical’ approaches to the theatre too often preclude or traduce the thinking of artists themselves, presenting practical concerns as epiphenomenal or untutored. This, in turn, points to important short-circuits in some academic takes on theatre which need modifying if ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are once again to feed into each other in a meaningful way. Julian Meyrick Is currently an Associate Director and Literary Adviser at Melbourne Theatre Company, and an Honorary Associate with the Drama Program, La Trobe University. His production for the Melbourne Workers' Theatre, Who's Afraid of the Working Class? attracted numerous awards, and toured widely in Australia. He has published in the areas of arts policy, the theory/practice nexus, and post-1945 Australian theatre. His book on Sydney's Nimrod Theatre, See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave was published by Currency Press in 2002.

Performance artist Tim Miller has been making autobiographical work for more than twenty years. Dee Heddon explores Miller's recent show, Glory Box (2001), arguing that, both in his practice and his use of his own life stories, he is attempting not only to connect with but to energize his audiences, transforming them into activist spectators. One tactic Miller employs in Glory Box is futurity – performing an autobiography that he has not yet lived. This future is one that Miller compels us collectively to rewrite, inviting us to change his potential life and life-story in the process. Dee Heddon argues that Miller's commitment to and faith in the transformative potential of live performance enacts a resistance to those pejorative terms too easily thrown at autobiographical performance: Miller may work from his ‘self’, but his work is far from solipsistic, egotistic, or narcissistic. Dee Heddon makes and teaches autobiographical performance, and her writing has appeared in Performance Research, Studies in Theatre Production, Research in Drama Education, Reconstructions, and M/C. Her Devising Performances: Histories and Practices, co-authored with Jane Milling, is forthcoming from Palgrave.

Elizabeth Russo here explores the analogies between Brecht's spectator-centred approach to theatre and a student-centred approach to education, comparing the symbiosis achieved in his work between the ‘Magistral’ approach common to top-down education and the open-ended ‘Socratic’ dialogue. She suggests that even the lehrstücke, often assumed to be his most dogmatic pieces, in fact offer choices and question the spectator's intellect, and compares Brecht's techniques with the concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ in educational theory – the gap distance between a child's actual and potential level of development, and between his/her individual skills and functioning within a social group. Elizabeth Russo has worked with children in Chicago under the volunteer programme of the Inner-City Teaching Corps, and is currently teaching at St Mary of the Angels School in London. She is a history graduate of Villanova University, studied in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola University, Chicago, and has an MA in Theatre Education from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

In 2001, when David Soul sued the Daily Mirror for printing a defamatory review of his West End show, The Dead Monkey, questions surfaced about the critic's rights and responsibilities under the law. There have been numerous accounts in recent years of the relationships between law and literature, and the general assumption is that critics can claim the defence of ‘fair comment’. However, very little work has been done on the history, rationale, and implications of that defence, or on the actions before Soul's in which aggrieved theatre people have attempted to bring critics to account. David Roberts evaluates individual cases from legal history in which the critic's rights have been tested, and considers what they have to tell us about the way our society conceptualizes critical activity. Bourdieu's history of taste is invoked, but modified to show how the law's concern with formalism in its own processes has endorsed a matching version of the critical process. David Roberts is Head of English at the University of Central England, Birmingham.

Since the post-war reorganization of education that began in 1949, the purpose and nature of German theatre training has perpetuated a division between performance and technical training, provided by vocational schools (or Hochschulen), while university programmes offer degrees in Theatre Science (Theaterwissenschaft), theory, or other academic areas. The course of studies at Justus Leibig Universität Giessen is one of the first to break away from this established model, offering a hybrid programme combining the study of theory and practice. Having featured a number of international guest artists as teachers, including Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, John Jessurun, and Heiner Goebbels, the programme continues to be a centre of innovation in the changing landscape of German theatre education. Steve Earnest is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University, San Bernardino. His published work includes The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999), and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), Theatre Journal, Western European Stages, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. He is also active in southern California professional theatre.

A conference organized by the CET (Centre d'Etudes de la Traduction) to be held at the University of Metz (UFR Lettres et Langues) on 19–20 March 2004.

Report on the International Theatre Institute forum held at the Soho Theatre and Writers Centre Studio, London, on 25 February 2003.