Critics and scholars continue to delve assiduously into the literary nuances of Shakespeare's plays, and increasingly the Theatre Studies community pursues the task of documenting performance. But the dynamics of Shakespearean acting continue to be fogged by ideologies and assumptions dating back to the debate between Alfred Harbage and Bertram Joseph in the early post-war period, and to even earlier disputes between inspirational and intellectual interpretations. Here, director and critic Charles Marowitz looks retrospectively at the problem by exploring the living constituents of the actor's art as it grapples with the canon, touching in the process on acting styles from the seventeenth century to the present, and on the divergence between American and British approaches. During his years in England, Charles Marowitz founded the Open Space Theatre and was a close collaborator with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company, notably during the Theatre of Cruelty season. He has published two dozen books on a variety of theatrical subjects, the most recent being Stage Dust: a Critic's Cultural Scrapbook from the 1990s (Scarecrow Press) and Roar of the Canon: Kott and Marowitz on Shakespeare (Applause Books). He is currently Artistic Director of the Malibu Stage Company in California.

Years ago, NTQ co-editor Clive Barker was tantalized by a passing and lost reference on a radio programme to a source of inspiration for musicians of the Be Bop generation: this had showed them ‘a way forward by taking them away from music based on chords and riffs to music based on modes’. Can acting aspire to an analogous state to the improvisations of jazz musicians, in which spontaneity is modulated by the discipline of true respect for the ensemble? Drawing on his own experience as an actor with Theatre Workshop – whose orchestration came close to that of jazz – and on teaching actors to break down inhibitions through the work described in his seminal Theatre Games (1977), Clive Barker looks towards a ‘next step’ in actor training and rehearsal techniques. This would work towards integrating the controlled freedom of jazz with the results he knows can be achieved through his own work with actors – the creation of ‘great and beautiful physical poetry in small rooms’. Oh – and can anyone offer a lead towards that elusive book which inspired the jazz musicians of the 'forties?

The dramatic upsurge of contemporary new writing on British stages in the past decade, and the emergence of a fresh generation of playwrights led by such talents as Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley, Joe Penhall, Phyllis Nagy, Patrick Marber, and the late Sarah Kane, has been variously characterized as the ‘New Brutalism’ or even, in Germany, as the ‘Blood and Sperm Generation’. Here, Aleks Sierz summarizes the argument for ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ as the most pertinent and inclusive description for the phenomenon, listing its salient characteristics and suggesting the areas in which it is most vulnerable to criticism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic of Tribune and writes about theatre for several publications. He is the author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber, 2001) and teaches journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the In-Yer-Face Theatre: Sarah Kane and the New British Dramaturgy conference at Stendhal University 3, Grenoble, in May 2001.

Hedda Gabler has long been acknowledged as among the most problematic as well as one of the greatest of Ibsen's plays, requiring a delicate balance to be struck in production between a clearly defined social context and the need to express Hedda's existential selfhood. Here, Erik Østerud, developing a view of the play which as early as 1893 recognized it as ‘waltz tunes over an abyss of nothingness’, defines the three distinct ‘worlds’ around which Hedda circles – those characterized by Aunt Julie, the red-haired singer, and Judge Brack – and her struggles to reconcile Løvberg's impetuous idealism with Brack's facade of conformity. Calling upon a wide range of cultual references, but with a vision focused on the actuality of the play's scenography, Østerud sees the separate social groupings as at once interlocked through a mythic analogy with the cult of Dionysus, and in more contemporary terms giving us an ‘overview of the total economy of sexuality within a bourgeois society that is dominated by panoptical supervision and strong sexual repression’. Erik Østerud is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Trondheim, having previously taught at Aarhus, Berkeley, and Oslo. His most recent publication is Theatrical and Narrative Space (Aarhus University Press, 1998).

This article describes and analyzes Barry Kyle's production of The Dillen, a community project staged by the RSC in 1983, in which The Other Place became no more than a base from which the play, its actors, and its audiences set out into the streets, fields and river in Stratford, to re-enact the life of a working-class Stratford man, George Hewins, born around a century earlier. In addition to placing the play in its social, political, and local context, the authors raise questions about the implications of the production for the RSC and the people of Stratford today. The kernel of this article was part of an English M.A. dissertation by Catherine Prentice at the University of Warwick in Summer 1998, supervised by Tony Howard. Catherine Prentice and Helena Leongamornlert, a University of Warwick graduate in English and American Literature, have collaborated in further research and interviews to present the version which follows, and both plan further work on community drama. The authors extend their grateful thanks to Tony Howard for his support and advice.

In NTQ62, Joanna Ostrowska reported on Grotowski's last visit to his native Poland before his death in 1999. Here, Paul Allain assesses the Grotowksi inheritance in Pontedera, Italy, which had been the base for Grotowski's research since 1986 – specifically, on the second Generazioni International Theatre Festival, held there in June 2001. Paul Allain's doctoral research on the Gardzienice company took him to Poland during the years of ferment around the fall of Communism. He is presently Senior Lecturer in Drama in the University of Kent, and was co-editor of the recent Cambridge Companion to Chekhov.

Surveying the intellectual passions and pursuits of a lifetime in his memoir Errata: an Examined Life (1997), George Steiner commented that ‘such was the response to The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. and to Alec McCowen's overwhelming interpretation on stage of the dominant figure that I could have made of the novel or novella my foremost business’. Adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed at the Mermaid by John Dexter in 1982, The Portage is the only example of Steiner's fiction to have been dramatized for the stage. Through the character of A. H., Steiner – Britain's foremost scholar, critic, and polemicist on the Shoah and European thought in a ‘posthuman’ era – proposes the metaphysical idea of ‘negative transcendence’ as necessary to any attempt to understand Jewish fate during the Holocaust, a perspective unique amongst dramatic representations seen in Britain. The play itself has not been produced on the professional stage in the following twenty years, and critics and commentators continue to be perplexed by Steiner's decision to present his arguments in such a fashion. Nick White argues that while the novel's weaknesses were mercilessly exposed by the ‘translation’ of Steiner's novel into the dramatic idiom of stage naturalism, it was the subsequent controversy which exposed as fundamentally flawed Steiner's attempt (through recourse to the ideas and language of his own critical writing) to construct a composite, ‘inter-textual’ identity for the character A. H. He goes on to show that the initial confusion became polarized around conflicting interpretations of Steiner's intentions: were the arguments advanced by A. H. to be understood as an accurate rendering, or a misinterpretation – by the master manipulator of language, A. H. – of Steiner's published theses about the compulsions upon which Jewish fate depended during the Holocaust?