Clive Barker made an exceptional contribution to British theatre studies and its international standing. No one else of his generation travelled the extraordinary distance from a conventional stage-management course to become a world leader in actor training workshops, as well as an editor and scholar of distinction. He was a pioneer in bridging the uneasy divide between the professional theatre and its serious study in British universities.

Clive somehow was always there. One of the first plays I ever saw in London, in my first year at UCL—from the vertiginous upper circle at the Royal Court, on Friday 13 January 1961, a tattered diary tells me,—was his production of Shelagh Delaney's The Lion in Love. Then, just a month or so later, he directed a revival of Brendan Behan's The Hostage, which I saw twice, the second time having persuaded a couple of friends who had stayed on in the sixth form that this was the best way of rounding off their day in town. We sang ‘The bells of hell go ting-aling-a-ling’ on the tube afterwards with the same gusto as on a previous visit we had giggled over our variations on Alan Bennett's sermon from Beyond the Fringe.

Clive Barker, co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since the journal was relaunched under its new title in 1985, died following a stroke on 17 March 2005, at the age of seventy-three. We plan to include a full commemoration of his life in a subsequent issue, and will welcome contributions—either directly relating to Clive's life and work in the theatre, or addressing issues close to his heart. Meanwhile, some briefer tributes are offered here—a survey of his life and achievements by Baz Kershaw, and personal recollections from his friend and archivist Dick McCaw and from fellow-editor Simon Trussler.

I picture Clive Barker surrounded by plastic bags of all colours, shapes, and sizes, each one crammed with pieces of paper. This was the encyclopedia of world theatre that he carried about with him: there were facts, anecdotes, commentaries on plays, playwrights, theatre forms, theatre companies, theatre movements—and more stories than you could tell in a thousand and one nights.

Traditionally, class has been an important category of identity in discussions of political theatre. However, in recent years the concept has fallen out of favour, partly because of changes in the forces and relations of capitalist production. The conventional Marxist use of the term, which defined an individual's class position in relation to the position they occupied in the capitalist production process, seemed anachronistic in an era of globalization. Moreover, the rise of identity politics, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism have proffered alternative categories of identity that have displaced class as the primary marker of self. Glenn D'Cruz reconsiders the role of class in the cultural life of Australia by examining the recent work of Melbourne Workers Theatre, a theatre company devoted to promoting class-consciousness, in relation to John Frow's more recent re-conceptualization of class. He looks specifically at two of the company's plays, the award-winning Who's Afraid of the Working Class? and The Waiting Room, with reference to Frow's work on class, arguing that these productions articulate a more complex and sophisticated understanding of class and its relation to politics of race and gender today. Glenn D'Cruz teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia.

Real or imaginary, babies provided the Victorian public with a favourite spectacle, featuring in sensational, domestic, and farcical plays, often at the centre of the plot. Impossible to train, their deployment was not without hazard. Under scrutiny here are the range of their manifestations and the effects they could generate. Warren's baby farce Nita's First (1884) emerges as a precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest; Morton's nameless Children in the Wood (1793) swell into music-hall stars by the time of the Drury Lane pantomime of 1888. The departure of real babies from the stage was dictated by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1889—legislation which had in turn been influenced by the rhetoric of moral reformers which constructed all theatre children as vulnerable, exploited ‘babies’ in need of protection, not applause. The author, Anne Varty, is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

New historicism rewrites history from different viewpoints in order to prove that the past is inaccessible, and all historians can do is to work on incomplete knowledge, aware of the fact that a teleological, linear approach to their subject is misleading. In this study, Zekiye Er aims not only to analyze Tom Stoppard's Travesties from a new historicist stance, but also to utilize a new historicist approach to an understanding of what Stoppard is doing in the play, in the light of the striking parallels between Stoppard's technique and the new historicist critics' methods of analyzing history and literary texts. She concludes that Stoppard himself plays the role of a new historicist while writing a brilliant comedy of ideas. Zekiye Er received her PhD for a dissertation on Stoppardian drama from Ankara University in 2004. She has been working as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature of Gaziantep University since 1993.

The narrative process is inherently selective and consequently open to distortion and falsification. J. M. Synge humorously illustrated this in The Playboy of the Western World, in which his central character, Christy Mahon, reinvents himself through the telling and retelling of his own story. Play-boy, a much more recent performance work created by Desperate Optimists, takes as its opening gambit the riots that accompanied the first performances of this controversial Irish classic and adds a bewildering variety of other narrative materials to the mix—providing, as it does so, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on this story about stories. A detailed account of the show in performance and the manner in which the company construct their own tall tales initiates an investigation into how fact becomes fiction in the creation of new narrative accounts, narrative being considered as a participatory event that is both a psychological imperative and a ludic pleasure. Neal Swettenham lectures in drama at Loughborough University. His research into the role and status of narrative in contemporary theatre has led him to fresh examinations of both traditional story-based drama and avant-garde performance work. In particular, he has written about the plays of American dramatist Richard Foreman and is currently exploring the challenges presented to both actor and director by these texts.

The explosion of new theatre writing in Britain during and since the 'nineties contrasted with a dearth of original plays on continental Europe, east and west. Sanja Nikcevic attributes this in part to the dominance over the previous decades of the role of leading directors, who increasingly sought out raw materials to shape productions conforming to their own or their company's ideas. She traces the attempts in a number of countries to correct the imbalance by encouraging new writing through workshops and festivals—yet also how the explosion and importation of the British ‘in-yer-face’ style then affected the kind of new writing that was considered innovative and acceptable at such events. She argues against the claims made for the political significance of plays such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, suggesting rather that the acceptance of the normality of violence without reference to its social context negates the possibility of remedial action. A former Fulbright Scholar, Sanja Nikcevic is Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her full-length publications include The Subversive American Drama: Sympathy for Losers (1994), Affirmative American Drama: Long Live the Puritans (2003), and New European Drama: the Great Deception (2005). She was the founder and for eight years the president of the Croatian Centre of the International Theatre Institute.

In the autumn of 2003, Poh Sim Plowright went to Rajasthan—the cradle of string puppetry, where the Creator is perceived as the Arch Puppeteer controlling humans through strings—in search of the provenance of its famed string-puppet tradition (kathputli). She found an ancient collection of thirty-two stories—Sinhasan Battisi—(hitherto unknown in the West), focusing on a golden throne and female puppet power, which provides eloquent testimony to the original importance of the puppet art in that part of India. Yet in the streets of Udaipur today, that art seems to have been reduced to gaudy souvenirs and variety acts aimed at the foreign tourist. The old stories with their nourishing narrative frameworks are gone, and the town of Bassi, once famous for its wood-carvers and specialist puppet-makers, has abandoned its traditional rituals and techniques in the face of commercialism. In this article, the author considers the current state of string puppetry in Rajasthan in the absence of these rituals and stories, and looks at the possible future of the art. Poh Sim Plowright is Senior Lecturer in Oriental Drama and the Director of the Noh Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London.