For many theatregoers whose sensibilities were shaped by the new theatre writing of the late ‘fifties, the adaptation in 1963 of Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays into the three-play cycle The Wars of the Roses came as a startling revelation of the ‘political’ Shakespeare. Directed for the still-fledgling RSC by Peter Hall and John Barton, with the latter also responsible for the adaptation and revision, the sequence was perhaps most memorable for the performance by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret-Shakespeare's ‘first heroine’ –whose presence first illuminated and then haunted the production. Robert Potter, who now teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, encountered the production while on a Fulbright scholarship to England, and here recollects in tranquility the disturbing impression of Ashcroft's performance, and its impact upon our understanding of the plays. Robert Potter, who as a practising playwright made his own adaptation of the Roses sequence in 1977, has also published widely in the field of medieval drama, and wrote on theAbraham and Isaac play as presented in Aztec Mexico in NTQ 8.

PETER SCHUMANN's Bread and Puppet Theatre began 25 years ago as a new way of making modern theatre, and as Schumann sees it, still is. As he recently stated, “there are two aspects to this newness: (1) the proposal for a much bigger, wider space for the arts to exist in than the space that the arts occupy now – a way for painting, music, sculpture, and language to exist together and in response to the questions of the time in which they live; and (2) the puppet theatre aspect: puppet theatre not as a special branch of theatre but as a challenge to theatre, as a concrete proposal for the overcoming of its shortcomings – a liberation from that fixed old schmaltz – a proposal for much bigger form, much more compositional freedom and adventure than an actors' theater can ever come up with.”

The work of Carolee Schneemann, who celebrated her sixtieth birthday last year, has from the first challenged suppressive sexual and other taboos, and placed her own body as an artist into a fluent relationship with her art. She both pioneered and in her new work continues to energize forms of what we now call performance art. The retrospective of her works from 1963 to 1996, recently seen at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, affirmed her recognition as a major artist – yet threatened also to ‘fix’ her art, which remains very much ‘in progress’. The exhibition included the installation Mortal Coils (1993–94), in which a slide projection system is combined with motorized ropes, flour, and sand to explore taboos of death and loss; Up to and Including Her Limits (1979), a video installation depicting the actions which produced surrounding wall drawings; and Video Rocks (1989), in which a hundred hand-sculptured rocks merge into a wall of seven monitors on which feet walk back and forth over virtual rocks. Vulva's Morphia (1995), a colour grid of photographs with text and motorized components, was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in 1995, and her multi-media installation Known/Unknown – Plague Column (1996), was seen in New York and Montreal in 1996. Schneemann's published books include Parts of a Body: House Book (1972); Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter (1976); ABC: We Print Anything – in the Cards (1977); Video Burn (1992); and More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1997). Her Body Politics: Notes and Essays of Carolee Schneemann is forthcoming from MIT Press, and a selection of her letters from Johns Hopkins University Press. Alison Oddey, Professor of Drama at Loughborough University, interviewed Carolee Schneemann on 29 August 1997 in her Manhattan loft in New York, and what follows is an edited version of that interview, which focuses on her more recent performative work.

In one sense Tara belongs to a loose grouping which could be described as ‘companies of identity’, which might include the Black Theatre Co-operative, Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group), Graeae, and Gay Sweatshop. The classic funding pattern here is that the company is initially founded by individuals with shared educational, cultural and political backgrounds: then, after a number of projects or productions, the group receives funding for a specific proposal, either from a special-interest organization, a trust, or local government.

The functions of the critic in the theatre and of his or her responsibilities towards the theatre have long been debated and disputed, and are now in a state both of flux and contradiction – flux, because of the rapidly changing state of the media in which criticism is published and the new forms which ‘publication’ can now take; contradiction, because of the dual perception of criticism as at once an ‘offensive’ art and an ‘art of solidarity’. Especially for the critic of theatre, the dilemma has always been heightened not only by the ephemerality of the art to which the review gives a vicarious and subjectified after-life, but also by the shifting sands between the journalistic and the academic landmarks of the craft. Rather than attempting impossible solutions, Josette Féral offers illuminating definitions and suggests helpful boundaries – aesthetic, cultural, social, and historical. Josette Féral is full professor in the Drama Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has published several books, including Mise en scène et jeu de I'acteur, (two volumes, 1997, 1999), dealing with many European as well as North American directors, Rencontres avec Ariane Mnouchkine (1995) and Trajectoires du Soleil (1999), both on Mnouchkine's work, and La Culture contre I'art: essai d'économie politique du théâtre (1990). She has also published several articles on the theory of theatre in Canada, the United States and Europe, in journals such as The Drama Review, Modern Drama, The French Review, Discourse, Theaterschrift, Cahiers de théâtre, and Théâtre Public. She is currently President of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

The exponential growth of ‘theoretical’ approaches to theatre in the last twenty years has given rise to a vast body of literature and a swag of highly influential ‘command metaphors’. In this article, Julian Meyrick describes and analyzes the rise of such theories, contrasting academic understanding of theatre with the more experiential problem-solving of the profession. He argues that sophisticated ‘theoretical’ approaches to the theatre too often preclude or traduce the thinking of artists themselves, presenting practical concerns as epiphenomenal or untutored. This, in turn, points to important short-circuits in some academic takes on theatre which need modifying if ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are once again to feed into each other in a meaningful way. Julian Meyrick Is currently an Associate Director and Literary Adviser at Melbourne Theatre Company, and an Honorary Associate with the Drama Program, La Trobe University. His production for the Melbourne Workers' Theatre, Who's Afraid of the Working Class? attracted numerous awards, and toured widely in Australia. He has published in the areas of arts policy, the theory/practice nexus, and post-1945 Australian theatre. His book on Sydney's Nimrod Theatre, See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave was published by Currency Press in 2002.

Sistren Theatre Collective has been producing theatre and working with community groups in Jamaica for the last thirty-five years. Over the last decade the company has changed its profile to include male drama specialists and social workers in its team. This has come about due to new funding arrangement with the Jamaican Ministry of National Security, which won a large grant from the Inter-American Development Bank to establish the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP). The CSJP has a community outreach component in which Sistren has been employed to run socio-drama workshops and provide counselling to residents in Kingston's ‘garrison’ communities. In this article Karina Smith compares Sistren's theatre and outreach work under the CSJP programme with the group's previous theatre productions and workshops, devised when it was the leading women's popular theatre company and Women in Development non-government organization in the Caribbean region. Karina Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary and Gender Studies in the College of the Arts at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. She has published on Sistren Theatre Collective's work in Modern Drama, Theatre Research International, and in Suzanne Diamond's Compelling Confessions: the Politics of Personal Disclosure (2011). Her monograph on the Caribbean community's oral histories of migration to Victoria is forthcoming from Breakdown Press.

Challenging contemporary orthodoxies, notably Derrida's perception of the actor as an ‘interpretive slave’, Richard Hornby here suggests that so far from exerting a tyranny, the fixed text provides a lifeline which the actor, having grasped, then makes his or her own. If a tyranny exists, it is that of the auteur-director who denies the actor the creative freedom that can be claimed from the text on the page. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of six books and over a hundred articles on theatre, the most recent being The End of Acting, published by Applause Books in 1992, and Mad about Theatre, a collection of his theatre reviews published by Applause in 1996. His well-known Script into Performance has gone through many editions, most recently in 1996, and his latest work, Theatre in Crisis, is due out next year. This essay is an adaptation of a paper he delivered in Amsterdam for the ‘Theatre and Cultural Memory’ conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research, held in July 2002.

Taking mobile theatre in Assam as an example, Ina Ross questions in this article how professional, contemporary theatre can be successful in India, where it is considered to be a niche culture and economically precarious. She examines what would be needed for contemporary theatre in India to appeal to all segments of the population and asks how the theatre can compete with its omnipresent big brother, the cinema. A brief historical introduction to the mobile theatre movement is followed by an analysis of recent performances, complemented by interviews conducted with the major players in Assam's mobile theatre movement. The article shows that the success of mobile theatre is not to be found on the stage alone: it is also a social and societal model that is lived and experienced with the audience, and this ultimately is the key to its success. Ina Ross is a cultural manager with a focus on the performing arts. She has held the position of Associate Professor at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Art in Berlin, and since 2015 has been teaching arts management at the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi. She is the author of Wie überlebe ich als Künstler? (How to Survive as an Artist, 2013).

Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years directed masked Greek drama. On the basis of the research she has undertaken using her own masks, in this article she considers some of the practical issues involved in a masked staging of the plays today, drawing specifically on her experience of directing the Bacchae and the Antigone. Here she extends the discussion started previously in ‘Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek New Comedy’ in NTQ 79 (August 2004). Earlier, with David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001). In 2008 she completed a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Teatr ZAR has been developing its Gospels of Childhood triptych since 2003, when the company was founded after several years of research in Armenia, Iran, and Georgia. It was in Georgia that ZAR learned polyphonic songs from the Svan oral tradition, which it developed in its unique song theatre. In this article Maria Shevtsova maps the first of a series of expeditions, the latter notably including Greece, Corsica, and Sardinia. She describes how the ancient hymns and chants gathered through direct oral transmission (ZAR's choice of material reflects its interest in the songs of early Christianity) provide the subject matter and the spiritual dimension of the group's performance pieces. The idea of the ‘spiritual’ is here distinguished from the strictly religious/denominational as well as the ritualistic or cultic framings of the word. Details from the triptych show how breath, vibration and energy are the forces of ZAR's sonic compositions in which singing, instrumental music, sound making, and movement are vehicles for experience other than immediate material sensation. Reference is made to ZAR's link to the Grotowski legacy in the song theatre of Poland today. Maria Shevtsova, Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, wishes to thank the International Research Centre of the Freie Universität Berlin for hosting her research, of which this article is an integral part.

Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, acknowledged by Derek Paget in NTQ 12 (November 1987) as a formative influence on the emergence of what he called ‘Verbatim Theatre’, have been given a new lease of life following their recent release by Topic Records; but his theatrical experiments in multi-media documentary, which he envisaged as a model for ‘engendering direct creativity in the common people’, remain largely unknown. The most ambitious of these – The Maker and the Tool, staged as part of the Centre 42 festivals of 1961–62 – is exemplary of the impulse to recreate a popular culture which preoccupied many of those involved in the Centre 42 venture. David Watt, who teaches Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, began researching these experiments with work on a case study of Banner Theatre of Actuality, the company Parker co-founded in 1973, for Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970, co-authored with Alan Filewod. This led to further research in the Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham Central Library, and the author is grateful to the Charles Parker Archive Trust and the staff of the Birmingham City Archives (particularly Fiona Tait) for the opportunity to explore its holdings and draw on them for this article.

This conversation took place during the Gdansk Festival, 1–10 August 2009, where The Wooster Group performed its internationally acclaimed Hamlet (2006), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. The conversation, led by Maria Shevtsova and edited by her for publication, was part of the conference organized under the auspices of the Festival by Jerzy Limon, the Festival's director. Here LeCompte and two performers from the company, Kate Valk and Ari Fliakos, discuss how they generated the work, and develop their thoughts in answers to questions from the audience. Later this year The Wooster Group will perform Hamlet on 10–13 August at the Edinburgh International Festival. Maria Shevtsova is the Chair Professor of Drama and Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Co-Editor of New Theatre Quarterly.

Hysteria, first performed in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiro's Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the show's critique of Western feminism's claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.

Theatre historians are now reconsidering traditional attitudes towards ‘theatre riots’ of the past, in the light of the new perception of ‘mob’ activity pioneered by the social historian George Rudé. Here, Athenaide Dallett looks at two more recent audience revolts – the well-documented riots at the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, and the indignant response of Berkeley students in 1968 to the Living Theatre's presumption in Paradise Now, in lecturing them about a revolution already taking place on the streets. In both cases, she suggests, riots were provoked by a breach of the contract between performers and audience, taken as legitimating a revolutionary response by such social theorists as Locke and Rousseau. Athenaide Dallett, who recently gained her doctorate from Harvard, teaches at the University of Connecticut at Torrington, and is currently working on a study of the connections between political philosophy and theatre.

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue of Theatre Quarterly (1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, The Staffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary, Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

Metropolitan snobbery and the logistics of scale both militate against the success of comedians working in the regions. Yet, as Oliver Double here argues, the scene has been a lively one, often daring in its style and range alike – at least until the absorption of its big names into the London circuits by the agencies which increasingly control most of the bookings and much of the talent. Oliver Double, himself a working comic, describes the distinctive characteristics of regional alternative comedy, and the now very real dangers of stagnation, illustrating his argument from interviews with leading comics on the regional circuits – Nick Toczek, Stu Who?, Roger Monkhouse, Malcolm Bailey, Anvil Springsteen, Adam Caveleri, Kevin Seisay, Henry Normal, and John Simmit. Offering some hopes for the future, he points out the relatively low audience figures required to ensure a vigorous growth – if only emerging talent can be nurtured rather than condemned to still birth.

David Mamet's book, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor (Faber, 1998), is rapidly becoming recommended reading amongst the acting fraternity. In this article Bella Merlin offers a critical dissection of Mamet's approach, drawing on the working knowledge of Stanislavsky's Method of Physical Actions, or Active Analysis, which she acquired at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. She underlines the fragility of Mamet's dismissal of Stanislavsky, and illustrates how much of his ‘common sense’ actually derives from the principles underlying the Method of Physical Actions. Bella Merlin is an actor and lectures in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University.