Richard Schechner is presently working towards a production of his The Prometheus Project, planned to open at the Performing Garage in New York before the appearance of this issue. Simultaneously, he is trying to come to terms with his own failures of communication with his eighty-year-old father. Personal preoccupations, theatrical work-in-progress, and performance theory mesh together in what amounts to the overview offered here of an avant-grade confronted by the prospect of global genocide – and, more specifically. Schechner offers an explanation of the tone of parody which seems increasingly to have characterized performance work. Richard Schechner took The Drama Review from its origins as a small academic journal to a lively forum for theatrical debate during his editorship from 1962 to 1969, by which time he was already directing the Performance Group, whose opening production was the controversial Dionysus in 69. He has been a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University since 1967, and resumed the editorship of TDR in 1985.

For the western observer, ‘liberation theology’ can appear an unexpected mixture of orthodox religious belief and revolutionary political thinking. When Karl Gaspar, a lay Catholic who had been working with the poor on the island of Mindanao, was detained in 1983 under a Philippine law permitting arbitrary political detention, the mixture took theatrical form, in the creation of a passion play with a Christ conceived as labour-organizer. Karl Gaspar, who was released in February 1985, describes how liturgical drama took shape in a prison camp, in an account which appears by courtesy of Other Side magazine.

Following his analysis in NTQ 4 of the origins and effects of the ‘philosophy’ of drama-in-education which prevails in most schools. David Hornbrook here complements his critique with specific proposals for a positive future approach – building upon existing teaching strengths, but also giving the subject a greater curricular authority in the present educational climate, while correcting the ‘romantic fallacies’ from which current practice is too often derived. 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.

As a philosophy which is in effect a way of life. Zen has offered insights into most aspects of human activity from the martial arts to motorcycle maintenance. Here, Adrian Cairns, associate principal of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, analyzes the ways in which, despite their widely different origins, development, and purposes, the tenets of an eastern philosophy actually mesh with the principles common to most western styles of acting.

The critical concept of ‘montage’ has been familiar in film studies ever since Eisenstein. But the fixed focus and apparently continuous flow of live theatrical performance seemingly makes it an inappropriate tool for dramatic analysis. Franco Ruffini argues, however, that actors and audiences find their own ways of ‘selecting’ from and emphasizing aspects of the full theatrical vocabulary and its many means of expression, which make live performance no less subject to creative self-assembly and juxtaposition than film. Ruffini develops the distinction between ‘horizontal’ montage in time, and ‘vertical’ montage as a sort of cross-section of performance; and examines ways in which the ‘audience's performance’ can, both fruitfully and otherwise, differ from the ‘director's performance’. Franco Ruffini is Professor of Theatre Semiotics in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Bologna.

New Theatre Quarterly does not normally include purely text-based studies of plays. since it is our feeling that journals of literary criticism offer a more appropriate home for such work. However, there are certain important plays which are in danger of becoming virtually lost to the world repertoire, when non-performance or flawed first productions have seemingly closed them off from further critical attention. One such play – or, to be precise, sequence of three plays – is The Island of the Mighty, which in a condensed form was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972, but in a production from which the authors dissociated themselves, in a dispute they described in an article in Performance (Fall 1973). Javed Malick, who has recently been awarded his doctorate from McGill University for a study of Arden's plays, here argues that The Island of the Mighty forms an important part of the Arden canon, expressing in its fullest and most coherent form themes and attitudes discernible in the earliest plays – and that its characteristic refusal to ‘do things properly’ is essential both to the authors' view of a polarized world, and to the dramaturgy they have evolved to give expression to that view, which made The Island one of their last works for the conventional theatre. Javed Malick now teaches English at Khalsa College in Delhi University.

THE PUBLICATION of Theatre Quarterly's feature on Australian theatre in its Summer 1977 number seemed at the time one of a number of tokens of the coming of age of ‘the new Australian drama’. It is probably a truer sign of maturity that the present revisiting of the subject offers a form of international recognition which, though still very welcome, seems now a less important and alluring prospect. Australia's cultural cringe – the over-dependence on the models and approval of the parent country which was one of our more notorious legacies of colonialism – is not as noticeable in the theatre these days as it was even in the mood of heady self-conscious nationalism of the early 'seventies.

The increasing diversity of activity outlined in the introductory article to this feature creates some difficulties even for the factual enterprise which follows: the noting of significant events, and even the listing of first productions of Australian plays, is necessarily a selective one, determined partly by debatable criteria and partly by a lack of consolidated sources of information. The compiler was able to draw on the invaluable resources of the University of Queensland's theatre research project in compiling the list of first productions up to the end of 1983, when (lamentably) its funding was withdrawn; and the scale of the task of selection is indicated by the fact that those records, for the period 1977–83, include 4342 distinct productions of Australian plays. Often, of course, it takes a longer retrospective view than is possible in this feature to establish ‘significance’, and, regrettably, there are likely to be some notable omissions. The demise of Theatre Australia in 1982 and the aborting of the University of Queensland theatre research project in 1983 were disastrous for people involved with theatre, and for theatre research in particular; they leave a vacuum which must cause continuing concern, and will create mounting difficulties. Both were indispensable sources in compiling this chronology. The research assistance of Doreen Dougherty from the Monash University English Department was absolutely vital in its preparation, as was the co-operation of Veronica Kelly and Alrene Sykes from the University of Queensland, and Katharine Brisbane of Currency Press.

The Australian Labour government elected in 1972 (and sacked in highly controversial circumstances by the Governor-General in 1975) instituted under the premiership of Gough Whitlam a policy of greatly increased subsidy for the arts. But this was succeeded by a period of neglect, culminating in a drastic policy of cutbacks in 1981; and the election of a new Labour government in 1983 thus coincided with a major debate over both the nature and the distribution of arts subsidy, which has resulted in a wider spread of funding for culturally diverse forms of theatre. Malcolm Blaylock works both as director of one of the new community-based companies. Junction Theatre, and as a member of the federal funding body, the Theatre Board of the Australia Council: he talked to Graham Ley about both aspects of his work, and the background to the present funding policy.

In the interview above, Malcolm Blaylock referred to Sidetrack, a community theatre company in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, as ‘arguably the best company in Australia’. Here, Tom Burvill examines some of the company's recent work, and sets it in the context of an understanding of community theatre which he traces back to Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Tom Burvill, who has himself acted as a dramaturg for Sidetrack, lectures in English and linguistics at Macquarie University.

If theatre-in-education achieved its impact by taking theatre to the young in the 'seventies, then the developing youth theatre movement might be seen as part of the reaction to that initiative in the 'eighties. Here Keith Gallasch, artistic director of the State Theatre Company in South Australia, himself a writer, recalls his first involvement with youth theatre, and goes on to sketch some of its dilemmas and prospects.

As in most English-speaking nations, the success or otherwise of a production in Australia is heavily dependent upon its critical reception: yet, argues Michael Morley, much Australian reviewing is both ill-equipped and ill-informed for such a responsibility. Michael Morley is himself currently theatre critic of The National Times, and has also written for The Advertiser, Theatre Australia, and the Sydney Morning Herald. A Brecht-Weill scholar, who has worked as musical director on a number of productions in Sydney and Adelaide, Michael Morley is Professor of Drama at Flinders University in South Australia.