Dario Fo needs no introduction, though he is less well known for his work as a critical theorist of theatre than in his role as a playwright. The original Theatre Quarterly was the first journal to publish his critical writing in English, and two of his more recent essays-‘Theatre of Situation’ and ‘Retrieving the Past. Exposing the Present’ - appeared in one of the earliest issues of New Theatre Quarterly. NTQ2 (1985). Here, we are pleased to publish Fo's brief but stimulating study of the conventions and the ‘language’ of theatrical masks, in which he outlines typologies stretching from Ancient Greece to commedia and beyond, and suggests some of the distinctive requirements for the contemporary actor of performing in mask. The translation is by Gail Macdonald.

In our previous issue, NTQ18 (May 1989). We carried a report on the exploratory discussions held by a number of theatre people on the left (Under the joint aegis of NTQ and the Drama Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London) to discuss the problems posed by ‘Thatcher's Theatre’ and the national priorities it reflects. A more broadly-based conference was held on 4 December 1988, devoted to the theme of ‘British Theatre in Crisis, and here Andy Lavender, theatre writer and graduate student at Goldsmiths’ College. Provides a brief report of the proceedings. We also reprint the manifesto to which the conference gave its unanimous support.

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

In his major work on Theatre Games (Methuen, 1987), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end - the development of acting skills through the enrichment of the rehearsal process. In NTQ14 (1988). he described how he came to develop ‘games workshops’ for non-theatrical purposes, and considered the value of games-playing for adults by analogy with the function of the ‘kissing games’ of his own childhood and adolescence. In this article (based on a paper presented in November 1988 at the conference on theatre and education in Mohammédia, Morocco), he considers our changing perception of the relationship between the two senses of ‘play’, and the way in which ‘games’ have been institutionalized to avoid their inherent threat to an organized, work-disciplined society-a trend still being reinforced, as the improvisatory element of drama in schools becomes subject to the rigours of evaluation and examination. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

In a companion-piece, and by way of a personal introduction to the interview and feature which follow. Andrzej Źurowski here offers an appreciation of the work of the Polish director and scenographer Józef Szajna. Andrzej Źurowski is a leading Polish theatre critic, who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics. He contributed a study of the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor to NTQ4 (1985).

In the summer of 1988 two events focused British attention on the great Polish scenographer Józef Szajna: he participated in an ambitious seminar at the Young Vic on the legacy of the absurd, and in a BBC documentary on the art produced by holocaust victims and survivors. After the war, Szajna emerged as a central figure for Polish theatre and then for the international avant-garde. He became a stage designer, sculptor, director, environmental artist, manager, scenarist and teacher. In the 1970s, Szajna created his famous series of dramatic ‘open theatre’ spectacles inspired by the lives and art of Witkiewicz, Dante, Cervantes, Mayakovsky - and Szajna. For Józef Szajna's biography has been extraordinary, harrowing, and iconic. His work has questioned the functions of theatre after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In his Warsaw flat-cum-studio and at the Studio Theatre, he surveyed forty years of work for New Theatre Quarterly, in conversation with the playwright Tomasz Lubienski - from a more literary theatrical tradition - and with Tony Howard, who here compiles a collage portrait of his career. The translations are by Barbara Plebanek.

Howard Barker was the last playwright to be interviewed in the original Theatre Quarterly – in TQ40 (1981) – and a subsequent interview was included in NTQ8 (1986). Yet he has also been accused of encouraging a credo of ‘engagement but confusion’ which serves the cult of Thatcherism which it claims to oppose: and certainly he is unique among his generation of British dramatists in having achieved both a large cult following, and a considerable body of opposition to his theoretical position. Robert Shaughnessy, who teaches in the Roehampton Institute, here analyzes not so much Barker's work as the Barker phenomenon – the process by which a self-effacing writer has been packaged into a personality, to the extent that, with the creation of The Wrestling School, he even has a theatre company devoted exclusively to the production of his work. Shaughnessy concludes that – as Barker perhaps fore-shadows in The Last Supper – it may now be necessary for the cult-figure to ‘die’ if the writer is to survive and flourish.

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.

In the first part of this series, published in NTQ17. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacements of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. In Part Two, published in NTQ18. she examined in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which had an existing sociological literature—looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters, and then considering approaches to dramatic texts and genres. From the assessment of the relatively new discipline of theatre anthropology which concluded Part Two. she now turns to examine sociological approaches to the act of performance itself, analyzing in particular the various attempts by semioticians to provide an appropriately comprehensive vocabulary for its description, and measuring these against the pioneering work of Mikhail Bakhtin. She concludes her study with some practical examples of productions which illuminate the sociology of performance. Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International, and Theatre Papers, as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.