The origins of the tableau vivant can be traced back at least to the pantomimus of ancient Rome, but the form achieved its peak of modern popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when poses plastiques sometimes struck an ambiguous balance between art and pornography. In the following article, Volker Schachenmayr calls for a re-evaluation of the form, investigating how far and in what ways a static pose, or attitude, can be a theatrical performance. His article focuses on the attitudes of Emma Lyon, later and more familiarly known as wife to Sir William Hamilton and mistress to Nelson. Drawing on connections with Sir William's archaeological pursuits, and with the performance theory of Goethe, an admirer of Emma's attitudes, he suggests a vocabulary to make the tableau accessible to performance critics, using Goethe's Italienische Reise and Poussin's Inspiration of the Epic Poetto to shape the discussion. Volker Schachenmayr received his PhD in Drama from Stanford University, and this article is part of a larger research project on Winckelmann, the Grand Tour, and stage performance in the age of Goethe.

In this article, Ronald Tavel argues that the commercial American theatre, endorsed by the American educational system and theatrical establishment, has never nurtured a vision of the scripted play as art – and has consequently produced no single example of it. The nation's genuine playwrights who saw their tasks as makers of art have, he claims, been neglected throughout American history, and left to wither in the wings. In the 1960s, Ronald Tavel founded and named the still-extant Theatre of The Ridiculous, and has written forty produced plays, a number of which have been translated into a dozen languages and staged in four continents. He has written and directed thirteen films for Andy Warhol: ten of these have recently been restored for international distribution by the New York Museum of Modern Art, and all are to be collected for publication later this year by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles. Ronald Tavel lives in Taipei, but is currently teaching a course on Warhol and the filmmaker-architect Jack Smith at the Art Centre College of Design in California. The American Institute in Taiwan selected the article which follows as the keynote address at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Studies Association of the Republic of China.

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.

The debate in NTQ about editing Shakespeare has engaged with the practices embodied in recent scholarly projects from the Oxford Complete Works (1986) to the continuing ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. The issues raised have been philosophical, concerning the nature of authorial subjectivity, and practical, concerning the interventions made by editors in manifestly corrupt or incomplete texts. Here, Gabriel Egan surveys the progress of the debate and responds in detail to Andrew Spong's defence in NTQ 45 of the principles embodied in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ series. Rejecting Spong's claim that editorial interference cannot be justified and that early printed texts must be ‘cordoned off’, Egan argues the necessity of explained interference based on ‘enabling fictions’ of authorial intention. Since all textual transmission is necessarily mediation, he argues that scrupulous explication of interference is called for, and that this is lacking in the ‘Shakespearean Originals’ produced to date. Gabriel Egan is completing a PhD on Shakespearean original staging at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon.

When I was asked if I would like to reply to Sarah Werner's article in the August issue of NTQ entitled ‘Performing Shakespeare: Voice Training and the Feminist Viewpoint’, my first reaction was that it was so unfounded in the reality of practical voice work that it was not worth the time needed to respond. But then, re-reading it, I became incensed at the notion that voice teachers, through the work of freeing the voice, are after some romantic notion of connecting with an idyllic past – a notion so utterly absurd that I spoke with my friends and colleagues, Kristin Linklater and Patsy Rodenburg, and we agreed that Ms. Werner's assumptions must be challenged. As Edgar's words imply in the last speech of King Lear: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’ Words hurt, cost, are ugly and violent: but it is my belief that when we reach the point of articulating our dilemmas – it is then that we become free to take action. That is what my work is about. So, to follow are our answers to, and our questions for Ms. Werner.

The list of female Hamlets, in which the most familiar names range from Siddons and Bemhardt to Frances de la Tour, is extraordinarily long. Tony Howard here discusses a great but much less familiar production featuring a female Hamlet, both in its socio-political context and in the context of the earlier work of its director, Andrzej Wajda. Teresa Budzisz-Krzyzanowska was Wajda's Hamlet in Hamlet (IV) – which, momentously, opened in Poland in 1989, just as the Solidarity-led opposition came to power. Tony Howard, who is writing a cultural history of the phenomenon of female Hamlets, teaches at Warwick University. He has written for NTQ on Polish subjects ranging from the Marxist work of Jozef Szajna to such oppositional groups as Theatre of the Eighth Day and

The plays of Bernard-Marie Koltès have been phenomenally successful, not just in Europe, but worldwide – his last work before his death in 1989, Roberto Zucco, having been performed in seventeen countries. Despite an early production of Twilight Zone by Pierre Audi at the Almeida Theatre in 1981, English appreciation has been tardy, but now this situation is set to change, with the Royal Court Theatre commissioning Martin Crimp to make a translation of Roberto Zucco, to be directed by James Macdonald, and Methuen bringing out a volume of Koltès's plays. These present a unique fusion of the French classical tradition combined with Shakespeare (he translated The Winter's Tale into French) and modern influences such as Genet and Fugard (he also translated The Blood Knot). After his death, Giles Croft wrote of Koltès: ‘He considered himself an outsider, rootless, and this perception of himself is reflected in his characters, whose tragedy is their inability to connect with one another, often despite their ability to articulate their despair. He created dark, mythic, polyglot worlds where people are dwarfed by or divorced from their surroundings: hotel rooms, construction sites, quaysides.’ Koltès's career was closely linked with that of Patrice Chéreau, who produced all his major plays, and who performed in his own production of In The Solitude of the Cotton Fields at last year's Edinburgh Festival. Here, David Bradby, Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, contributes his own assessments of both men's life and work, to complement full chronological and bibliographical details of Koltès's career.