WE RECORD with sadness the death in February of Martin Esslin, who had been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1972.

THE LAST Goon Show radio script Spike Milligan wrote, No. 227, dealt with murder, betrayal, starvation, and cannibalism, with a passing reference to the Holocaust.

In 2001 Split Britches presented a double bill entitled Double Agency, consisting of one new piece, Miss Risqué, and one already in their repertoire, It's a Small House and We've Lived in it Always – both works having been created in collaboration with the Clod Ensemble. In this article, Geraldine Harris re-stages her earlier encounter with Small House, in the light of seeing it again as part of the double bill, as a means of examining a number of issues concerning the work of Split Britches in general and its reception in the academic world. Particular consideration is given to the manner in which Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver's performances have been read in terms of their ‘real’ lives and relationship and the various ways in which this may reflect the preconceptions of the spectator–critic. Focusing on how their work reiterates specific theatrical traditions and conventions, Harris suggests that utopian tendencies in academic feminist criticism may have underplayed the ways in which, like many famous theatrical double acts, Split Britches constantly perform on the border – between tragedy and comedy, optimism and despair, fantasy and the possible, escape and entrapment. Geraldine Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. Her previous publications include a number of articles on female practitioners in nineteenth-century French popular theatre and on gender issues in contemporary performance. Her latest book, Staging Femininities, Performance and Performativity (Manchester University Press, 1999), explored the relationship between feminist performance and a range of postmodern and poststructuralist theories.

By the early 'eighties, Dario Fo seemed to have achieved a unique place in British theatre, with both Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay? Won't Pay! enjoying long West End runs, while he himself retained the respect of the alternative and fringe community for his radical politics and championship of popular theatre forms. Yet although he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, interest in Fo's work seems to have gone into a steady decline in Britain. This is only in part attributable, argues Marco Ghelardi, to a less favourable political and theatrical climate: it has also to do with the topicality and adaptability which is integral to Fo's approach to playwriting, and more especially with an acting style apparently inimical to British traditions – a style based in the collective and the situational rather than the individual and the psychological. Marco Ghelardi is a young playwright, director, and producer whose career has involved him in both the British and Italian traditions. He has also been an assistant director in opera (notably at Covent Garden), and with his theatre company, Outlaw Theatre, he has recently managed to bring a Fo production, Johan Padan and the Discovery of America, back to the Riverside in London, where it opened in May of this year.

Fugard's identity as a playwright was firmly rooted in the struggle against apartheid. What happened to this identity when the post-apartheid ‘New’ South Africa emerged? Black South Africans have followed Nelson Mandela's lead in accomplishing their ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. Why is it so difficult for Fugard to find a role in this new country and put an end to his inner exile? Hilary Burns explores this question in the light of the development of Fugard's whole opus, and the relationship between form and content in plays where the content has tended to overshadow the form. Burns is a professional actor with a career-long commitment to theatre that seeks to challenge or develop issues relevant to today's society. She has worked extensively in small-scale touring theatre, the London fringe, and regional theatre, and has also made appearances in TV and film. In November 2000, she spent a month with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg which inspired her book, The Cultural Precinct, about South African theatre, in particular how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society. Her study of the Market Theatre yesterday and today will follow in NTQ72.

Following her survey of site-specific performance companies and their understanding of their work and its circumscriptions in NTQ70, Fiona Wilkie here proposes that places as such can be characterized in terms of differing sets of rules in dialogue with one another. She examines one place in particular in order to suggest some principles for approaching site-specific performance. Various spatial experiences – visual, physical, and mythical – are read through a range of attempts to theorize our relationships with space (including Foucault's heterotopia and de Certeau's pedestrian tactics). Moving away from more mundane examples of site ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’, Fiona Wilkie expands the notion of spatial rules to develop two related concepts – the repertoire and the inner rule – that offer complex ways of imagining and articulating the rule-bound site. Finally, she suggests that site-specific performance meanings emerge out of a process of negotiation between three sets of rules: those of the site, the performance, and the spectators. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD thesis (provisionally entitled Constructing Meaning/Performing Place: Site-Specific Performance in Contemporary Britain) at the University of Surrey, from which article is drawn.

Surveys are used to define an audience in a quantifiable way. Awareness of the typical gender, age, and income of their patrons, along with their rating of a theatre's facilities, help theatre producers to address an audience's needs. However, producers seldom explore the audience response to a specific performance – something that is difficult to quantify. Thus, the audience's interaction with the performance – whether with particular actors, the space configuration, or with fellow spectators – is neglected in favour of such demographics as age, income, and occupation. Christopher Olsen suggests that surveys handed out to audience members might benefit from a more qualitative approach based on semiotic analysis. He asked sixty professional theatres in the USA – ranging from major repertory institutions to small theatres targeting specific audiences – to send examples of recent audience surveys they have conducted. Using the surveys (of which the most extensive is reproduced in full), as a guide, he tabulates the most common questions asked, and offers examples of further survey questions guided by semiotic principles. Chris Olsen is currently an adjunct professor at Montgomery College and Shenandoah University in the Washington, DC, area. Having written his dissertation on the Arts Lab phenomenon in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he is now working on a book about the second wave of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in New York.

Maxwell Anderson's plays have been overshadowed in the American and world theatre, alike by the canonical post-war writers of the succeeding generation and by writers such as Clifford Odets and Thornton Wilder of his own, who are felt to be more representative of the prevailing mood. Russell DiNapoli argues that it was Anderson's very atypicality which merits his reconsideration. As a playwright, he steadfastly kept to his own ideological course while influenced at the same time by the changing fashions which made for success on Broadway – the resulting creative tensions having both positive and negative effects on his contemporary as on his posthumous reputation. A New Yorker, Russell DiNapoli took his Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his doctorate in Philology at the Universidad de Valencia, Spain, where he is currently a member of the Department of English and German. He has written and directed several plays in Valencia, where he has lived since 1977, the most recent being a Spanish adaptation of the Prologue in Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo.

The twelfth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) held in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2000, set out to explore, under the title ‘Action, Structure, Coherence’, the relationship between the actor and text – and specifically between actors trained in the Odin and other physically-rooted traditions and texts of the supposedly ‘classical’, text-based theatre of western Europe. David Korish here reports on three encounters between different pairs of actors and their texts, and their several means of developing a dynamic physical score appropriate to the text concerned. The co-founder and director of Teatro Abya Yala, an independent theatre company based in San José, Costa Rica, David Korish is also a member of the faculty of the School of Dramatic Arts of the National University of Costa Rica.