In August 1995 I directed a studio production of an unfinished piece called Luna Park Eclipses for the National Theatre Studio. The production was non-public and experimental. We rehearsed for two weeks, and then put on a one-off show for an audience of about twenty-five. The cast comprised Peter Bayliss, Timothy Bateson, Dilys Laye, Diana Fairfax, Sheila Burrell, and David Neal.

The words ‘success’ and ‘failure’, mercifully, are not relevant in this context. If they were, the project could be called ‘sucessful’ if only because it threw up questions and I was encouraged to continue: the old mould had cracked open for a moment and I saw, briefly, drama in a new light again. A year later I decided to write about what I am trying to do in Luna Park Eclipses.

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.

Oscar Asche is one of a number of Edwardian actor-managers who have been largely ignored by theatre historians in favour of the dominant figure of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. Asche was one of that generation of directors, which also included Lewis Waller, Sir John Martin-Harvey, and Arthur Bourchier, who regarded the staging of pictorial productions of Shakespeare as a sign of status – a claim to be taken seriously in his profession. He had an adventurous career, representative in many respects of the energy and enterprise that characterized the Edwardian theatre – yet his work also exemplified attitudes and practices that would be discounted by a generation of playgoers enthused by different ways of interpreting Shakespearean drama, a new theatrical aesthetic, and the broader social and educational aims of the non-commercial stage. After his death in 1936, he was remembered more as the author of one of the new century's most successful romantic fantasies – Chu Chin Chow – than as a Shakespearean actor-manager. The author of this reassessment, Russell Jackson, is Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His publications include editions of plays by Wilde and Jones, and Victorian Theatre: a New Mermaid Background Book (1989). He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in Victorian criticism and performance.

Deborah Warner is one of the most exciting of the generation of directors who emerged during the 'eighties – incidentally claiming for women a natural entrance into a profession previously dominated by men. In 1980 she formed the Kick Theatre Company, with whom over the following, formative years of her career she directed The Good Person of Szechwan, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Woyzeck. In 1988, following a production for the RSC of Titus Andronicus in the previous year, she became one of the company's resident directors, staging King John and Electra before moving in 1990 as an associate director to the National, where her first two productions were of The Good Person with Fiona Shaw and King Lear with Brian Cox. During the 'nineties, she has extended both the nature and the range of her work, directing Shaw in Hedda Gabler in Dublin, Coriolanus in German at the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni at Glyndbourne – and, in 1994–95, the season she discusses below, a revival of Beckett's Footfalls at the Garrick, controversially banned by the Beckett Estate, a dramatization of Eliot's seminal inter-war poem The Waste Land, premiered in Brussels, Richard II at the Cottesloe, with a woman, Fiona Shaw, in the title-role, and a project for the London International Festival of Theatre site-specific to the old railway hotel at St. Pancras. In September 1995 she discussed her recent and future work with Geraldine Cousin, who teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, where she has just completed a study of contemporary plays by women entitled Women in Dramatic Place and Time.

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.

Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as opposed to the dramatist's, voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled ‘Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a Feminist Methodology’. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

Our occasional series on early Marxist theatre criticism – which has already included Trotsky on Wedekind in NTQ28, Lunacharsky on Ibsen in NTQ39, and Mehring on Hauptmann in NTQ 42 – continues with two essays by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose concepts of hegemony, the national-popular, and the organic intellectual have had a profound influence on twentieth-century western thought. From 1916 to 1920 Gramsci was also a theatre critic, writing a regular drama review column in the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! in which he first explored ideas about the ideological function of theatre. His review of a 1917 Italian production of Ibsen's A Doll's House is a particularly strong example of his attempt to generate notions of the theatre as an arena of political struggle in which the cultural values of the bourgeoisie were expressed, but which also had the potential to subvert these values and provide the proletariat with the critical wherewithal to express its hegemony. He saw the function of the theatre critic as promoting social, cultural, and moral awareness in the spectator, and Ibsen's play as a particularly apt vehicle for critiquing the moral superficiality of Italian bourgeois women in its powerful portrayal of the oppressions of a patriarchal society. While Gramsci's review of A Doll's House can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary feminist ideas, he saw Pirandello's use of the ‘power of abstract thought’ as making him a potentially revolutionary playwright, whom he described as ‘a commando in the theatre’. His plays were ‘like grenades that explode inside inside the brains of spectators, demolishing their banalities and causing their feelings and thoughts to crumble’. After reviewing ten of Pirandello's early plays for Avanti! Gramsci later expressed his intention of writing a full-length study of the playwright's ‘transformation of theatrical taste’. All that came of these intentions were the rather fragmented notes he made in the Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed his views on Pirandello in the context of the politics of culture and the idea of a national popular literature. Gramsci saw Pirandello's metatheatre as subverting traditional dramatic principles, but failing to establish new ones or to subvert the social and economic aspects of tradition. Gramsci responds to the critical debates on Pirandello in the 1920s by Tigher and Croce about Pirandellism's combination of art and philosophy and its conflict between ‘life’ and ‘form’, but his final comments about his views being taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ indicate that they are not definitive.

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.

Nigerian playwrights face the problem not only of finding ways of communicating with their audiences which address popular concerns in an assimilable manner, but of deciding the appropriate language in which to do so, in a notion which embraces many language groups and cultures. The solution of employing English as a lingua franca poses problems hung over from the colonialist past – and a tendency for plays written in English also to employ an inappropriate western dramaturgy. In the following article, Sam Ukala considers the various objections raised to English-language Nigerian plays, conceding some points and answering others, and proposing the concept of ‘folkism’ as a national aesthetic principle – a way of reconciling the use of a common language with the distinctive and often disparate needs of the Nigerian people.