Over the last three decades the work of Peter Zadek in Germany has consistently aroused strong reactions, whether of lavish enthusiasm or disdainful rejection (Peter Stein is supposed to have commented that Zadek's productions of Shakespeare were ‘Shakespeare with his trousers down’). Whatever the critical reception, Zadek's work demands close attention for its free-wheeling, unpredictable, and dangerous qualities, as well as for the remarkably sensitive interplay he achieves between his actors. If Stein's productions at the Schaubühne and elsewhere are masterpieces of formal perfection, Zadek's work by contrast is characterized by a flamboyant, imaginative exploration of the text and a healthy suspicion of polished results. In the interview which follows, Roy Kift discussed with Peter Zadek not only his attitudes to the problems of acting, but also his opinions on German theatre and literature and the experiences which shaped his development as one of West Germany's leading directors. Roy Kift has been living in West Berlin since 1981, where he has written plays for stage and radio and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for theatre and television. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ 39 (1981).

Although literary criticism has moved on since the work of A. C. Bradley, his Shakespearian Tragedy (1904) is still regarded as the greatest achievement of the ‘biographical’ approach to dramatic characterization – and a reprint of that classic work, with a new introduction by John Russell Brown, has just appeared from Macmillan. But the teachings of his close contemporary Stanislavski remain more widely disseminated than disputed, though they spring from very similar assumptions and concerns. Alice Rayner, an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine, investigates what the writings of the two men had in common, how their insights and approaches can be mutually revealing – and how some of their underlying beliefs can be the cause of mystification.

Drama-in-education is a subject – or a set of theories – which became an educational discipline almost by historical accident, and about which strong feelings can still be aroused. That the arguments are too often confined to educationalists is symptomatic of the way the problems raised have seldom been shared with or considered by people working in professional theatre – and this in turn reflects the way that the subject has tended to be taught, with the emphasis strongly on its ‘educational’ rather than its ‘theatrical’ potential. Back in 1973. David Clegg's article ‘The Dilemma of Drama in Education’, in TQ9, caused a briefly wider flurry of interest, and in the present article David Hornbrook also attempts to put the subject into a contemporary critical perspective, looking here at what children are supposed to ‘learn’ and ‘experience’ through drama, and in the second part of his article, to follow in NTQ 5, examining present and future prospects for the subject. A repertory actor in the 1960s. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

Is Broadway necessary? As the focus for new writing and major experimental work in the USA shifts ever further from the old theatre district around Times Square – first to off- and then to off-off-Broadway, more recently to the flourishing regional theatres – many critics have come to regard Broadway either as an economic anachronism, failing to perpetuate past glories, or simply as an irrelevance to ‘real’ theatre. Yet Stanley Kauffmann argues that a focal point for a nation's theatre is more than the sum of sometimes fraying parts, and works on the imagination in ways that cannot be evaluated by the fragmentary assessment of succeeding productions; and here he analyses the ‘organism’ that Broadway remains, and the function it performs. Stanley Kauffmann has been theatre critic for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review, while the most recent of his full-length works is Theater Criticisms (1984).

With Grotowski and Szajna, Tadeusz Kantor has become one of a trio of contemporary exponents of experimental theatre whose influence has spread far beyond the boundaries of their native Poland: and Kantor himself has toured widely with his three major works. The Dead Class, Wielopole, Wielopole, and Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear? Both in his published manifestoes and in forthright interviews about his approach, as also through his personal participation as on-stage ‘conductor’ of his productions. Kantor has proclaimed a theatre philosophy rooted in his own past as surrealist painter and creator of happenings, and now exponent of what he has called ‘in-formal’ theatre, in which ‘the director must die with the actors’. While acknowledging the innovative significance of Kantor's work, Andrzej Zurowski – a leading Polish critic who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics – here questions some of the premises behind the creator's presence on his own stage.

All too many teachers and theorists treat acting as if it were a sort of puzzle to be solved, a role as a sort of summit to be conquered. Eugenio Barba sees it rather as a process, involving the use of trained energies which often work intuitively, even contradictorily, in search of new relationships between actions and ideas. Using examples as diverse as the legend of the Flying Dutchman and his own company's work on a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Barba explores the way in which the mutation of a narrative line can interweave with the presence of the actor to create that ‘sudden dilation of the senses’ which he sees as the essence of the theatrical experience. Eugenio Barba has just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his formation of Odin Teatret, now based in Holstebro, and is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Video recording has recently become an accessible, unobtrusive, and increasingly inexpensive way of making a permanent record of theatrical performances. This might seem to anticipate a revolution in theatre studies, once the theatre of the present has become the object of study by future generations: yet little thought has been given to the dramaturgical or the pedagogic implications of this new tool. How, for example, will the medium affect the message it transmits, by the way in which it makes permanent what is in essence ephemeral, and ‘fixes’ what is constantly changing? Marco de Marinis here offers some tentative thoughts about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the audiovisual recording of theatre, intended not so much to present a definitive methodology as to clear the ground of some prevailing mistakes and misconceptions. His paper was first presented to a round-table at the Prato Centre for Theatre Semiotics in February 1983.

John McGrath is one of those few writers who, having begun his career in a success-fully orthodox manner, came to prefer working through ‘alternative’ channels – notably, in his formation and continuing work with the two 7:84 Companies, England and Scotland, their names reflecting the persistent fact that 84 per cent of the nation's wealth is owned by seven per cent of the population. Thus, McGrath's early work as one of the creators of the vintage TV series Z Cars, and his major ‘commercial’ success with the film version of his play Events while Guarding the Bofors Gun, has been succeeded by numerous plays and productions less familiar to conventional audiences, but which have made an enormous and often stirring impact in touring venues (frequently of a less expected kind) both north and south of the border. The full range of his work is charted in the ‘NTQ Checklist’ which follows this interview, and its development through to the mid– 'seventies was discussed in the earlier interview with McGrath in TQ19. reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). Here, Tony Mitchell talks with John McGrath about some of his more recent work, and discusses his views on the nature of popular theatre, as set out in his important study of the subject, A Good Night Out (Methuen, 1981).

A series of nearly two dozen ‘Theatre Checklists’ appeared as supplements to the old series of Theatre Quarterly, recording biographical, performance, and bibliographical information in accessible form about a wide range of mainly living playwrights. The format was subsequently extended by Simon Trussler for the ‘Writers on File’ series he now edits for Methuen London, of which the first six titles have recently appeared. However, it was felt that the former style of checklist would still provide a valuable source of information for writers not scheduled for early inclusion in the new series, expecially when this complemented other forms of documentation in the journal: and this first ‘NTQ Checklist’ on the work of John McGrath thus appears alongside Tony Mitchell's interview with the playwright. Its compiler, Malcolm Page, teaches in the English Department of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Besides contributing several of the earlier series of ‘Theatre Checklists’. Malcolm Page has published widely in the field of modern British drama: his study of John Arden appeared last year from Twayne, and his volume on Arden was among the first of the ‘Writers on File’ from Methuen.