I shared some memories of Clive and paid my personal tribute in NTQ 83, the issue that immediately followed his death; so in this brief introduction to our special issue celebrating his life and work I want rather to look at the contributions we have included, and how these connect with Clive's legacy.

Point against point, note against note: the counterpoint, in music, is not just simple difference and contrast. It creates dialogue and density. It is distinguishable from harmony because it increases the firmness and the complexity of the composition by continuously keeping a distance. Different melodic lines intertwine and collaborate without melting together, each developing its own difference.

I was born in Middlesbrough in 1931, and it's been uphill all the way since then. To a certain extent my life has been a process of being sold a dream which has never been realized, along with many other people in my generation, from Henry Livings and Harold Pinter through Wesker and Arden to John McGrath. We were the wartime generation, the last generation to remember what life was like before the war and during it.

In the course of her long career as a director with Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Joan Littlewood staged some twenty foreign-language plays, of which three were Spanish: Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in His Garden, and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina, while there were also plans to perform Lorca's Blood Wedding. Gwynne Edwards argues in this article that Littlewood's attraction to the Spanish plays was sometimes political but always due to a similarity in performance style which, influenced by the methods of leading European theatre practitioners, sought to integrate the elements of speech, stage design, movement, music, and lighting into a harmonious whole. Indeed, even though Lorca and Littlewood worked independently of each other, their ideas on the nature and function of theatre were very similar, while Lorca's touring company, La Barraca, employed methods very close to those of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop. Gwynne Edwards was until recently Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is a specialist in Spanish theatre. Eleven of his translations of the plays of Lorca have been published by Methuen Drama, as well as translations of seventeenth-century Spanish and modern Latin American plays. Many of these have also had professional productions.

It has generally been assumed that the Expressionist movement had little noticeable impact on British theatre. Claire Altree Warden here suggests that in the plays of Ewan MacColl (and in particular his The Other Animals of 1948) there is a discernible challenge to this assumption. In order to advocate a specific political position, MacColl took the conventions of Expressionism and developed a highly engaged, artistically innovative theatrical aesthetic that could tackle socio-political inequalities and the suppression of the dissident voice. Through linguistic experiment, episodic structure, representational characters, and a focus on the individual mind, the playwright challenges the audience to confront class injustice and hegemonic tyranny. Claire Altree Warden is based at the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches English Literature. She also teaches Critical Theory and Theatre History at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and is currently preparing a new critical study of Ewan MacColl's plays.

Clive Barker often wrote about Joan Littlewood and his time at Theatre Workshop with a mixture of warmth and bewilderment at her unorthodox methods. While preparing her doctoral thesis, Text and Collaboration: an Examination of the Roles of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop in the Genesis and Production of Brendan Behan's ‘The Hostage’, at the National University of Ireland, Galway, June Favre wrote to Clive praising the article ‘Closing Joan's Book: Some Personal Footnotes’ (NTQ, May 2003). As a result of that first letter, Clive and June began a correspondence – exchanging questions, notes, published and unpublished material, with a final email to June dated 4 March 2005, less than two weeks before his death on 17 March. Clive had accepted the position of external examiner for the thesis with the viva voce to take place 10 May 2005 in Galway – a city Clive had never visited. An email sent on 21 February 2005 informed June that Clive was looking forward to ‘seeing the sun go down on Galway Bay’. His sudden death deprived him of that pleasure. Concluding the ‘Acknowledgments’ of the thesis, June wrote: ‘Above all my heartfelt gratitude for the dozens of emails, letters, and articles Clive Barker shared with me. He promptly supplied information on Joan Littlewood and the productions of Brendan Behan plays from first-hand experience.’ There follow some of the informative and humorous exchanges between Clive and June, who was awarded her doctoral degree later in 2005.

Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey in the Theatre Workshop production of 1959 opened to the sound of a fast twelve-bar blues played on trumpet, saxophone, and guitar by musicians sitting in a box to the right of the stage. Though rarely mentioned by historians, the ‘Apex Jazz Trio’, as they were called, were a lively and unpredictable element in the production. Between the actors' open acknowledgement of the band, and Avis Bunnage's direct comments to the audience, the play shattered the ’realistic‘ conventions that still held sway in the West End, at the same time transgressing the distinction between ‘serious’ theatre and music hall (where the boundary of the proscenium was never respected obsequiously). Alec Patton, a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, draws on original interviews with actors from the cast, a member of the first-night audience, and the leader of the band that accompanied the show to offer a re-assessment of the role of music and music hall in the original production of A Taste of Honey.

Dick McCaw was a friend and colleague of Clive Barker's for many years, notably during Clive's chairmanship of the International Workshop Festival, which McCaw created and directed to answer the continuing training and development needs of professionals working in the performing arts. In this article, he assesses the roots from which Barker's Theatre Games derives its continuing influence, and offers a critique of its vulnerabilities, interwoven with personal reflections on his association with its author. He discusses our greater understanding of the workings of the brain since the advent of fMRI imaging, and how this affects Clive's metaphor of the roles of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ brain in controlling and integrating the actor's motivation and movement, relating this to other ways in which Clive's proudly autodidactic methods often reached towards the right solutions through unscientific methodology. He looks also at Clive's use of the teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, and of his intuitive and successful use of Feldenkrais techniques in regaining momentum following his first stroke. Dick McCaw, whose DVD celebrating Clive's theatre games workshops and their background, Theatre Jazz, was issued by Arts Archives, Exeter, in 2005, is currently teaching at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This paper evaluates the development of performative theories inspired by practice in the evolution of Lizbeth Goodman's research and SMARTlab's fifteen-year oeuvre. In this piece, Goodman outlines the methodology of ‘performing in the wishing tense’, analyzing the development of her own practice from television to live theatre to broadcast and multimedia to telematics and online learning ‘stages’, to radio, and then to web presence. As the subtitle of the article suggests, Goodman has evolved a methodology for her team that has been influenced by the work of one of her academic mentors, the late Clive Barker, author of Theatre Games, and that has been extended in parallel explorations of play, time, space, and voicing in the work of women, people with disabilities and disadvantaged groups worldwide, here discussed from earliest stages to current collaborations. This work has been extrapolated to show how those with disabilities that prevent free movement and speech can benefit from interactive screenic or telematic performance tools that empower a sense of movement and play: a ‘theatre games’ rubric translated into multimedia performance modes, using technology tools created by the team. She discusses the place of the (damaged or fractured) body of the theorist in relation to the bodies of the people she directs and whose words and movements she choreographs. Written specifically as a ‘response’ to Barker's work, this piece maps the journey of SMARTlab's performances around the globe and through the recent history of multimedia, ending with a postscript describing a collaborative game based on the role-play theories of Barker and on the ‘liveness’ of what Goodman calls ‘the wishing tense’ of lost languages, including body languages. Much of the performance material referred to is available online, and DVD versions can be provided upon request.

Chrissie Poulter read Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University from 1973 to 1976, and was taught by Clive Barker during her first year there. Now a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, her specialism is theatre games, so their paths continued to cross over the years. As a theatre director, deviser, and trainer her work centres on the use of play within and without the theatre world, with a particular focus on inter- and intra-cultural exchange. Her book Playing the Game (Palgrave-Macmillan, 1987) is a widely used manual of theatre games. Her most recent creative projects have been as one of the directors of The Bus Project – a site-specific project on a moving Dublin bus – for Performance Lab in the Dublin Fringe Festival in September 2007, and Metamorphoses with Prey Trio, a site-specific production with three musicians for the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co Wicklow, described in the preceding article by Lizbeth Goodman. Here, Chrissie Poulter takes theatre games as a springboard to discuss and define the need for ‘guardianship’ in game playing, online or in the studio workship.

As the two articles following this amplify, whatever one's views of its intrinsic merits, J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is open to a multiplicity of readings, and (notably since the RSC broke the mould in 1982) of stage interpretations – not to mention its co-option into Walt Disney's cartoon canon. Simon Trussler takes the play for a spin in such unaccustomed company as Romeo and Juliet and the almost contemporaneous ‘tragedy of childhood’ by Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening, exploring the theme it sustains of betrayed childhoods, surrogate parenting, and changing attitudes towards grown men sleeping with small boys – a magical experience for Barrie, but much less comfortable for the singer Michael Jackson in his ranch called…Neverland. Simon Trussler is Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly and presently Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College. His numerous books on drama and theatre include Shakespearean Concepts (Methuen, 1989), the award-winning Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (1993), The Faber Pocket Guide to Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (2006), and Will's Will: the Lives and Last Wishes of William Shakespeare (National Archives, 2007).

To consider racial difference in terms of exclusion enables whiteness to retain its relative invisibility. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of critical whiteness studies, Mary Brewer examines J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, exploring how the amorphous status granted to whiteness in the text lends it cultural authority. She aims to uncover how race and racism structure the play and to find ways of exploiting the gaps in its representation of white identity. These gaps potentially may be exploited in production – that is, made to operate against the grain and yield explicitly oppositional performances that work toward the denaturalization of hegemonic constructions of whiteness, gender, and sexuality. Mary Brewer lectures in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University. Her books include Race, Sex, and Gender in Contemporary Women's Theatre (Sussex Academic Press, 1992) and Problems of Exclusions in Feminist Thought: Challenging the Boundaries of Womanhood (Sussex Academic Press, 2002).

John Doyle's centennial adaptation and direction of Peter Pan for the Oxford Playhouse in December 2004 provides the starting point for a fresh investigation of the play. As Clive Barker has placed the playing of games as central to the training of actors, so Doyle's setting for this production, which never departs from the Darling nursery, places games at the heart of his interpretation of this play about learning to act an adult part. The adult roles in Doyle's production all display a small element of Peter Pan, as their acting style requires them to step in and out of role, to demonstrate the playfulness of their actions, and so to resist growing up. These observations invite a backward glance at the ideological significance of play for late nineteenth-century thinkers about childhood. An exploration of playground and parlour games that formed a common currency of childhood experience during the late Victorian era is set against the documentary evidence of games which Barrie played with the Llewellyn Davies boys, and these in turn are shown to be not just manifest within Peter Pan itself, but also to afford the play a structural and ideological cohesion. Anne Varty is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and her monograph Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain will be published later this year.

Based in Poznań, Poland, Teatr Ósmego Dnia (Theatre of the Eighth Day) is now recognized not only as one of the most important companies in the history of Polish theatre, but as one of the leading avant-garde ensembles in the world. From its origins in a student theatre group of the late sixties, Theatre of the Eighth Day developed during the early seventies the artistically and socially radical methods of work and of living which have continued to be the hallmark of its work over four decades, but has remained in touch and in tune with the rapid changes in Polish life, first under martial law, and then in the new Poland of the ‘free market’ – towards which the company has sustained an attitude no less critical than to Communist authoritarianism. A number of its productions have accordingly left indelible marks on the sensitivities and even life choices made by two generations of Polish spectators. Juliusz Tyszka is Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. A contributing editor of NTQ, he has been a close witness of more than thirty years of the work of Theatre of the Eighth Day, and here sets the artistic development of the group in the changing context of Polish life and politics.