The original series of Theatre Quarterly ran for ten years and forty issues, from 1971 to 1981. The relaunched journal intends to continue the best traditions of the old, while reflecting the changes that have overtaken the English-speaking theatre in the intervening years. Simon Trussler, who was an editor of the old TQ throughout its existence, here offers some personal reflections on the appearance of New Theatre Quarterly, the present mood of the theatre, and the challenges now facing theatre practitioners and researchers alike. Simon Trussler is also author of over twenty books and monographs on theatre, was drama critic of Tribune from 1966 to 1972, and currently teaches in the Drama Departments of Goldsmiths' College, University of London, and the University of Kent. Clive Barker, his associate editor on TQ since 1978, joins him as co-editor of the new journal. Formerly an actor with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, and author of the influential guide to actor training Theatre Games, Clive Barker is currently Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick.

The first article in the first issue of the original TQ was a piece by Jan Knott, utilizing the concept of the absurd as a means of understanding Greek tragedy. Recently, his essays, of which many first appeared in TQ, have been published in a new collection, The Theatre of Essence, from Northwestern University Press. Kott's idiosyncratic approach to the interpretation of theatre texts continues to distinguish him as one of those rare literary critics whose insights illuminate the play in production – the reflection in the Brook–Scofield King Lear of his Beckettian interpretation in the seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary being just the most famous instance. Now Jan Kott, who teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, turns to the world of Shakespeare's own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and examines Doctor Faustus as the meeting-place of many kinds of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan theatre, contributing to an understanding of the play that is rooted not in a dead theology but in a living theatricality.

The recent death of J. B. Priestley, in the same year as that of the finest exponent of his plays, Sir Ralph Richardson, seems to signal the close of an era. We had hoped in an early issue of New Theatre Quarterly to arrange an interview with the playwright to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, and although generous tributes have been paid to Priestley's work in the theatre, two aspects of this work (incidentally of crucial importance to the policy of this journal) have been somewhat neglected. After the end of the Second World War, during the discussions and plans for building the new Britain (and by extension Europe) from the ruins of the old, Priestley stood for a particular kind of integrity in the British theatre: and his role in the creation of the International Theatre Institute and his own conception of the British Theatre Conference of 1947 raised many interesting questions about the social, national, and international role that theatre could play. If the intervening years have not seen developments to match that vision, our theatre nevertheless owes a great deal to the various reforms that have followed from such initiatives, and in future issues we intend to return to those ideals and ideas – to see what basis they constitute for a critique of our own time, and to assess what continuing relevance they have for our future. Any theatre journal today also owes a debt to Priestley for his pioneering championship and criticism of the various forms of popular entertainment in which he so delighted, and in which he discerned strong social values – essentially, the inspiration for a line of criticism carried forward brilliantly by Raymond Williams and others over the last three decades. Tragically, two of the great comedians who earned his admiration, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe, departed before him, too far short of his own fullness of years. The world's stock of laughter has slumped since their passing and, as Priestley showed us, we have lost two innovators in the art of theatre. Tommy Cooper's deconstruction, if not demolition, of the stage was a masterly exposure of the polished sales techniques of showbusiness, and his exploitation of the art of anti-climax showed new ways through which to hold an audience and relate to them. Eric Morecambe, equally ruthless and proficient at puncturing the pretensions and posturings of glib naturalism and pseudo-aestheticism, had also the self-deflating wisdom of the true philosopher. One day, when we have grown over-familiar with the reruns of the reruns of the shows he has left behind, a retrospective examination of all the work of Morecambe and Wise will surely show that, underlying the technical brilliance of the comic playing, there is also a serious progression through the process of ageing, as brash optimism is tempered by the disillusionment of experience in the struggle to survive and extract what advantages one can from life. We learned a great deal about theatre from Tommy Cooper, and a lot about living and growing older from Eric Morecambe: they have gone leaving that education unfinished, but to commemorate them in the power of their effect, and to remind us of our debt to Priestley, we reproduce here the two pieces he wrote about them as living performers in the collection of essays Particular Pleasures, published in 1975 by Heinemann (to whom our grateful acknowledgements are extended).

The musical has long been recognized as one of the few distinctively American art forms. How far do these roots result in an ‘Americanism’ of ideological content – and how, indeed, does one measure the ‘content’ of a musical, with its fusion of the spoken word, song, and choreography? David Hirst, who teaches in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts of the University of Birmingham, here examines the problems of critical methodology posed by the musical form, and also traces the development of the musical as an expression (at times a critical expression) of the American way of life and the ‘American dream’. After demonstrating its reflection of themood of the Depression era, he analyzes its response to the social and political mood of the war and post-war years, and to the changing standards which made Hair an international success, yet which have consigned the work of Sondheim to Broadway failure – in a world where ‘failure’ and ‘success’ carry their own, pervasively American connotations.

After his experimental work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which bore fruit in the production of Marat/Sade in 1964 and culminated in the controversial Vietnam play US in 1966, Peter Brook returned to the classical repertoire in which he had made his name as ‘enfant terrible’ of British theatre, with Seneca's Oedipus for the National Theatre in 1968, and, two years later, A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC. But the very success of ‘Brook's Dream’ – the way in which its transformation into an ‘event’ required actors ‘to do their duty rather than what came from life’ – heightened Brook's sense that he could no longer work creatively under such conditions, and in 1970 he formed his Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale, which developed its early work for the Persepolis festivals and in the treks across Africa chronicled by John Heilpern in Conference of the Birds. Eventually the company settled in Paris at the Théâtre aux Bouffes du Nord in 1974: but while their work there has been widely acclaimed, it has been subjected to little detailed analysis in English. In the original series of TQ, Kenneth Tynan offered a highly critical view in TQ25. Here, David Williams – a graduate of the Drama Department of the University of Kent, currently working in community theatre at Hoxton Hall in London's East End – corrects the balance with a full descriptive analysis of Brook's major productions at the Bouffes – Timon of Athens. The Ik, a conflation of Jarry's Ubu plays, and a re-creation of the Conference of the Birds

Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a full retrospective of the company's work – based since 1966 at Holstebro. in Denmark – will appear in a future issue of NTQ. It is a mark of the insularity of English-speaking theatre, however, thatBarba himself probably remains best known as an early collaborator of Grotowski's, whose ideas he was responsible for assembling into Towards a Poor Theatre. But Barba's own workhas in fact developed in entirely distinctive directions, always substantiated by a framework of theoretical debate – most recently through his involvement in the International School of Theatre Anthropology, whose activities will also be documented in forthcoming issues. Here, Barba discusses the concept of ‘dramaturgy’, and how methods of theatre analysis may best be utilized in discussing theatre works based in performance rather than in written texts.

Susan Bassnett's ‘Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’ appeared in TQ38 (1980). reflecting in its very title the need to make theatre people of the English-speaking world better aware of approaches to theatre analysis which had been influential on the Continent since the work of the pioneer Czech semioticians of the 'thirties. But, as she now points out. these early workers in the field were themselves theatre practitioners, while more recent approaches have suffered from a tendency to divorce creators of theatre from the process and the vocabulary of analysis. Developing her account from the papers presented at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Susan Bassnett here introduces the corrective work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts, and relates their ideas and approaches to the recent decline of energy felt in British (as in most European) theatre, paralleled as it is by a growth in the influence of non-western theatre forms.

Keir Elam's study The Semiotics of Drama and Theatre, published in 1980. was the firstfull– length account of its subject in English. Here, he argues not only that semiotics canvaluably be employed in the study of Shakespeare, but that the playwright himself displays a sophisticated sense of the significance of signs– indeed, that Elizabethan culture was highly self-conscious, sometimes to the point of obsession, with the nature and practice of signification, both verbal and visual. Keir Elam illustrates his argument with examples from a wide range of Shakespeare's plays, also suggesting some tentative distinctions between the way in which signsare utilized in the various genres. Keir Elam. who teaches English in the University of Florence, delivered an earlier version of this paper at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held at Warwick University in May 1984

The fool occupies an uneasy place in Shakespear's plays-half way between character and commentator, in part carrying over his real-life role as jester into the ‘court-world’ of the play, but also serving as a metadramatic intermediary between author and audience. And of course, Shakespeare's use of the role in turn modifies our own expectations and understanding of it. Roberta Mullini. of the University of Bologna, here examines the full range of the fools created by Shakespeare, both in terms of their specific dramatic functions, and as holders of the ‘fool's licence’ to disrupt language, action, and the very relationship between seeming and being.

The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.