A personal introduction by Clive Barker on the place of the Shysters in Midlands theatre: I moved from London to Birmingham around the time the new Birmingham Rep was built. I thought it had all the worst features of a theatre and all the best features of a municipal crematorium. There were serious flaws, too, with the Midlands Art Centre, although my children enjoyed the Saturday morning activities. However, soon a group of idealists founded the Birmingham Arts Lab, whose work was exciting and enjoyable, and brought to the city the best of new experimental theatre. Some years later I moved to Coventry, which I had thought of as a theatrical desert since the death of Brian Bailey, with the Belgrade staggering through a succession of unfortunate managements. But the past ten years have seen a glorious flowering of small companies which display both vision and technical ability. Central to this activity are the Shysters, a group of actors with learning disabilities who have found ways of turning these into their own distinctive theatrical style and language. Since I sit on their board of directors I have felt it difficult to write personally about their work in NTQ, and was delighted when Rachel Karafistan remedied this deficiency by offering us the following article. I love the Shysters: their work entrances me, and I would willingly see their shows once a week if possible. They help to make being sent to Coventry a rich theatrical experience.

Clara Armand, author of the preceding article on ‘Dialogism and the Theatre Event’ in relation to Deborah Warner's production of Euripides' Medea, talks with Fiona Shaw about her close working relationship with the director in earlier productions, and the process of creating and developing the title role in the play. The interview took place in the Queen's Theatre on 21 February 2001, during the West End run of the production.

Since the mid-twentieth century, urban cultural policies have tended to broaden citizens’ access to cultural and arts facilities in most European cities. Italy saw its theatre infrastructure being enhanced by the teatri stabili which have emerged since the late 1940s, in developed urban contexts, and the decentralization of theatre activities during the 1970s, in the suburbs of cities as well as in small regional towns. This changed the distribution of theatregoing accessibility, but not sufficiently to make opportunities equal across the country's different geographical areas. In the present article Marco Serino discusses the decentralization of theatre in Italy, in particular as it has affected the southern Campania region, basing his argument on his own census of the venues in existence in southern Campania in 2008. Social, economic, and political issues are involved in the discussion since these always influence theatre policy and practice. Marco Serino was awarded his PhD in Sociology, Social Analysis, and Public Policies in 2010 at the University of Salerno, Italy. His research focuses on cultural and communication processes, particularly on theatre organizations and audiences.

London's theatre industry and charity culture have been closely connected since the mid-nineteenth century. In this article Catherine Hindson explores the nature of this relationship in the later years of the century. Focusing on a charity bazaar held at the Royal Albert Hall in June 1899 to raise funds for the Charing Cross Hospital, she argues that extra-theatrical occasions staged for charity organizations were firmly located within the stage culture of the day. Rather than peripheral occasions, high-profile, public charity events functioned as significant forces in the reputation and success of the West End theatre industry and its personnel. They held cultural, social, and economic potential for theatrical performers and represent a key factor in the improvement in the moral and social status of the stage in this period. Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on popular performance between 1820 and 1930 and is currently completing a monograph on the actress, the West End stage, and charity between 1880 and 1930.

How has post-war Japanese theatre grappled with Japanese responsibility for its imperialistic/militaristic past in Asia, and for institutionalized discrimination against resident minorities? Using the tools of guilt, nostalgia, and the valorization of victimhood that are embedded in the idea of hōgan biiki (sympathy for the loser/victims), Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei here analyzes Japan's often contradictory, flip-flopping self-image as both victimizer and victim in relation to Korea and resident Koreans. Looking at both mainstream and alternative performances, her article suggests that despite attempts to discuss these issues openly, most theatre artists actually present images that soften or displace responsibility for the past. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA, and was recently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Interweaving Performance Cultures, Freie Universität, Berlin. An authority on post-war Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and award-winning playwright. Her books include Unspeakable Acts: the Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan and the co-authored Theatre Histories: an Introduction. She has published numerous articles and presented papers and keynotes throughout the world. Professor Sorgenfrei is Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the Association for Asian Performance Newsletter.

British actor training has always been linked closely with the names of particular schools or conservatories. American actor training, however, has at least until recently been associated with the names of charismatic individuals – star teachers who conceived it as their function to prepare their pupils to be star actors, whether in film or on stage. Now that generation of teachers has died, and in the following article Richard Hornby explores the legacy of their teaching, in terms both of the training methods now practised and the expectations about a future career they are framed to meet. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and for over twenty years has been regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of five books and over a hundred articles on theatre. Notable books include Script into Performance, Mad about Theatre, and The End of Acting.

In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific artists/performers Wrights & Sites, and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance. The paper describes four main features of the proposal for ‘actors as signposts’ – pointing to specificity, movement from anti-character to collective subject, performance as trajectory, and the restoration of corporeality – illustrating these with reference to the work of Punchdrunk, Francis Alÿs, and geographer Michael Zinganel, among others. Phil Smith is a Senior Research Associate at the School of Art and Media, University of Plymouth and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Dartington College of Arts. Author and co-deviser of over a hundred plays or performances for companies including St Petersburg State Comedy Theatre, Tams Theater (Munich), and New Perspectives (Nottingham), he is company dramaturg for TNT (Munich) and a core member of Wrights & Sites. His solo walking-based performances include The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside (texts published by Intellect, 2009).

Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels. Victor Emeljanow is Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His full length works include Anton Chekhov: the Critical Heritage, Victorian Popular Dramatists, and, with Jim Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (University of Iowa Press, 2001), which was recently awarded the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize for 2002.

In this article Daphna Ben-Shaul explores politically engaged Israeli and Palestinian site-specific re-enactments that pursue what she terms a ‘performative return’. This includes performed aesthetic and political re-enactments of real-life events, which bring about a re-conceptualization of reality. Three contemporary cases of return are discussed with regard to the historical precedent of Evreinov’s 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace. The first is an activist, unauthorized return to the village of Iqrit in northern Israel by a group of young Palestinians, whose families were required to leave their homes temporarily in the 1948 war, and have since not been allowed to return. The second is Kibbutz, a project by the Empty House Group, which involved an unauthorized temporary settlement on an abandoned site in Jerusalem. The third is Civil Fast, a twenty-four-hour action by Public Movement, which was hosted mainly on a central public square in Jerusalem, integrated into the urban flow. The article draws attention to the fine line these actions straddle between political activism and aesthetic order, and explores their critical and performative effectiveness. Daphna Ben-Shaul is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University. Her current research on site-specific performance in Israel is funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation. She is the editor of a book on the Israeli art and performance group Zik (Keter, 2005), and has published articles in major journals.

Israeli institutional theatre has only just begun to toy with the idea of ‘feminist theatre’ and, despite a demonstrable increase in violence against women in Israel, with increased visibility in the mass media, the subject has yet to be confronted in mainstream theatres. However, women's creation has been longer at the frontier of theatre activities, and the issue of battered women has been a central theme of several community-based performances over the past two decades. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem offers an overview of these plays – the first performed by professional actresses who had just graduated from university, and who were mostly Ashkenaziyot (of European origin); the two following produced by community amateur actresses who were Mizrahi (of Arabic origin) – women from a low social stratum who, although being acquainted with domestic violence, had wished to avoid being regarded as battered women; and the last performed by a group of amateur actresses who came from more heterogeneous backgrounds, but who were all being treated in one of the centres for prevention and treatment of domestic violence. The author argues that in the first performance the battered woman was articulated by another, distant woman; in the next two she was presented by a more closely, identifying relative; while only in the fourth production did she publicly represent herself by herself, articulating her own voice through the symbolic system of theatre. The author proceeds to analyze in detail the first and the last of these performances, which clearly present the process of passage from acting woman-as-object to acting woman-as-subject. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a lecturer, researcher and practitioner in the Community Educational Unit of the Theatre Department at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, who trained and worked as an actress and community theatre animator/director for many years. Her writings in areas of play theory, and performance and cultural studies, and their relation to community theatre, educational drama, drama therapy, and feminist theatre, have been published in numerous periodicals in the USA, Europe, and Israel, and her article ‘Ethnicity, Class, and Gender’ is forthcoming in Theatre Research International.

In the third volume of The Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004), editor Baz Kershaw initiates his chapter ‘Alternative Theatres, 1946–2000’ with a short discussion of ‘contesting terms’ used by commentators to describe theatre outside the mainstream in the second half of the twentieth century. Kershaw's discussion serves as a necessary preface to ground his use of multiple historiographical strategies to address the subject with necessary brevity. But teasing out the terminology used to describe alternative theatre remains a fascinatingly complex task, constitutive of precisely the issues at stake in the variant historiographical approaches to the post-war period. Using a genealogical approach inspired by Foucault, and drawing on first-person interviews with artists who worked with alternative theatre companies such as Joint Stock/Out of Joint, Gay Sweatshop, and Women's Theatre Group/The Sphinx across the closing decades of the twentieth century, Sara Freeman analyzes the branching relationships of these terms, arguing the need to develop useful rather than funerary or bewildered historiographical approaches to the 1980s and 1990s. Sara Freeman is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on contemporary women playwrights and British alternative theatre, and she has published articles and reviews in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, and Theatre Journal. Work on this article was supported by an Artistic and Scholarly Development Grant from Illinois Wesleyan University.

This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoir Joan's Book. Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the company's distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Léon Moussinac's The New Movement in the Theatre of 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinac's chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewood's last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote on Oh What a Lovely War in NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.

Recently a number of young, ultra-talented, Māori and Pacific Island performers have emerged on local stages in Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) and beyond. Exemplifying this bright, youthful energy is Hone Kouka's multi-media production The Beautiful Ones, a joyful exploration of luminous rangatahi (youth) unleashed in a liminal realm. Adopting the Māori cosmological concept of Te Kore, in this article Nicola Hyland explores the depiction of rangatahi in this performance as transformational: liberated – culturally, sexually, and performatively – from historical tropes of youth and indigeneity. Nicola Hyland is a lecturer in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has ancestral ties to the Te Ati-Haunui-a-Paparangi and Ngati Hauiti iwi tribes of Aotearoa.

David Greig is one of Britain's most versatile and exciting playwrights, whose awardwinning work – commissioned by, among others, Suspect Culture, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Traverse Theatre – has been performed all over the world. His personal voice is characterized by the sensitive musicality of his text, an individual sense of humour, and an acute awareness of the world around us. Whether his protagonists are Cambridge ornithologists, Scottish lords, or American pilots, Greig creates works of extreme visual beauty and emotional directness in lyrical soundscapes. In the interview which follows, completed in June 2010, he discusses the themes of politics and national identities; language, music, and experimental forms; directors, directing, and adaptations; and watching bodies on stage. Greig believes that theatre is a form of voyeurism, ‘a consensual exchange’ to ‘look at people and watch how they behave’. In his work, the act of watching thus acquires a new role surpassing the simple function of pleasure, and enabling the viewer to engage further with the theatre's mediation to comment, justify, explain, and promote a better understanding of the complexities of human nature – voyeurism in theatre being re-read as a new freedom of the gaze, and its fetishistic attributes re-evaluated as an emancipation of restrained energy, testing the boundaries of taboo. George Rodosthenous is Lecturer in Music Theatre at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds. He is Artistic Director of the Altitude North theatre company, and also works as a freelance composer for the theatre. He is currently working on the book Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasure(s) of Watching.

In his earlier article, ‘Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre’, (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of ‘performative contradiction’ which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the ‘hidden agenda’ of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients – the ‘national’ fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale ‘reminiscence theatre’ group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's ‘parent’ company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.

Theatre de Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni, and has since established its reputation as one of Britain's leading experimental physical theatre companies. Here, Helen Freshwater discusses the construction, performance, and implications of one of their recent works, Mnemonic, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 1999, and has since toured to London's National Theatre and the John Jay College Theatre in New York. The work questions our metaphorical conceptualization of memory, displacing the conventional model of retrieval with an understanding of memory based upon a performative paradigm. This is memory as an act of imagination: transient; grounded upon narrative; open to interpretation; intrinsically corporeal. Freshwater interrogates the impact of the performance's incompletion, addressing the ethical issues raised by recognzing the indeterminacy of the past. Under Simon McBurney's direction, the original cast comprised Catherine Schaub Abkarian, Katrin Cartlidge, Richard Katz, Simon McBurney, Tim McMullan, Kostas Philippoglou, and Daniel Wahl. Helen Freshwater is currently completing her PhD on performance and censorship in twentieth-century Britain at the University of Edinburgh and will shortly be taking up a post as Lecturer in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the forthcoming anthology Crossing Boundaries (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).

‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.

With hopes for a repeal of Clause 28 poised for imminent realization or disappointment, a successful European challenge to Britain's policy on gays and lesbians in the armed forces, and an overwhelming House of Commons vote to equalize the gay ‘age of consent’, gay issues are high in the public consciousness. But to what extent are these political events being reflected in contemporary theatre? In this article, Brian Roberts considers the fluctuations in gay visibility, and asks what happened to the gay theatre that sprang to prominence in the 'eighties. He situates the best of present gay theatre work as standing in a critically defining role to mainstream theatre culture, not only through its political conscientizing of ‘queer’ and theatricality, but also in its opposition to an assimilationist gay subculture. Brian Roberts lectures in Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is presently revising his book Artistic Bents: Gay Sensibility and Theatre for publication.

Howard Brenton began his theatrical career in the late 'sixties as one of the ‘Portable playwrights’, but quickly felt the need to utilize the resources available on larger stages-without compromising the political impact of his plays. Now established as one of the leading playwrights of his generation, Brenton works regularly with the National Theatre, and in the interview which follows the discussion ranges from his feelings about the ‘scandal’ worked up by the production there of The Romans in Britain to how his feelings about Brecht were affected by preparing their version of The Life of Galileo, and also covers his recent collaboration with David Hare, creating a monstrous press baron, in Pravda. Touching on other recent plays such as The Genius and Bloody Poetry, the discussion thus complements an earlier Theatre Quarterly interview with Howard Brenton, included in TQ17 (1975) and reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). The interviewer, Tony Mitchell, currently teaches in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is the author of Dario Fo: People's Court Jester (Methuen. 1984). His Methuen ‘Writer-File’ on Howard Brenton is due for publication in 1988.