The Footsbarn company had its beginnings in a Cornish commune, very much in the spirit of the early 'seventies: yet unlike most companies formed in those years, it has not only survived but developed its work in ways which now communicate as fully to the cultural elite at international festivals as to non-theatre audiences in rural England. Geraldine Cousin, a lecturer in theatre studies at Warwick University. talked with members of Footsbarn at the time of their production of Hamlet in 1980, and again four years later while they were performing King Lear. Her descriptive analysis of those productions here runs parallel with the company's own assessment of how their work has developed. offering both a documentary retrospective of Footsbarn itself, and an individual approach to playing Shakespeare for contemporary audiences.

The visit to Britain in the spring of 1994 by the St Petersburg Maly Drama Theatre – described by Peter Brook as ‘the finest theatre ensemble in Europe’ – was warmly received by audiences and critics alike. Yet in Britain the idea of this kind of ‘permanent’ theatre company, so dear to earlier generations of actors and directors, seems not to have survived the climate of the 'eighties, and there is a sense that such remaining permanent companies as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble are dinosaurs from a more collectivist past. In an interview with Izvestiya, however, the Maly company's director, Lev Dodin, castigated western theatre for being ‘just a branch of the economy’ and having no permanent companies on what he called ‘the Russian model’. What is the truth about ensembles and permanent companies? In 1991, as part of research for an essay on Chekhov and the ‘company problem’ in British theatre, Patrick Miles interviewed Peter Hall on the subject of ensembles and companies. Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company as a permanent ensemble in 1960, directed the National Theatre for fifteen years – but not as a permanent theatre company – and since 1988 has been running his own, impermanent company in the theatrical market-place. At the time of the interview, here edited for publication, Peter Hall was rehearsing Twelfth Night at the Playhouse Theatre, London. Patrick Miles's essay ‘Chekhov and the Company Problem in the British Theatre’ was included in Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993).

The jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in the early ninteenth century had by 1806 established Islamic cultural and religious hegemony over the Hausa territory of present-day Northern Nigeria. In the process, Islam had succeeded in pushing indigenous religious and cultural practices such as Bori to the margins or underground. However, while most of the other indigenous forms died or became inactive and ineffectual, Bori has managed to hold its own against the persecution and cultural war waged against it by Islam, mainly because the belief in the power and ability of the spirits to influence human life which is at the centre of Bori practice was never lost. In this article, Osita Okagbue argues that marginalization has made Bori attractive to groups and individuals in Hausa society who feel themselves similarly marginalized and oppressed for articulating alternative identities and viewpoints to those of the mainstream society. He also examines how the possession performances of the Bori cult enable members to subvert and occasionally to use moments of trance and possession to invert the power relationships between oppressed groups and their oppressors. Osita Okagbue teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of African Theatres and Performances (Routledge, 2007). He is President of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) and editor of African Performance Review.

Few studies of African ritual and festival performance have been written from a theatrical perspective, and Sam Ukala believes that the richness of such events has yet to be fully explored by African dramatists – while most of the western paratheatrical experiments derived from them have been influenced more by anthroplogical models than aesthetic principles. In pursuit of a dramaturgical approach to the study of African rituals and festivals, he focuses on the role and nature of impersonation in these events, and examines the relationship between the forms, objectives, and contexts of the performances and the kinds of impersonation to be found in them. Distinguishing between the western actor and the African role-player, and between ‘intense impersonation’ and possession, he suggests also some generic parallels between western theatre and African performance. Sam Ukala is a Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Edo State University, Ekpoma, Nigeria. A theatre director and playwright, his published plays include The Slave Wife, The Log in Your Eye, Akpakaland, The Trails of Obiamaka Elema, Break a Boil, and Two Plays: The Placenta of Death and The Last Heroes. In 1998–99 he was resident writer and director at Horse and Bamboo Theatre in the United Kingdom, where, with Bob Frith, he wrote and directed Harvest of Ghosts, a first experiment with wordless visual theatre, an extension of his preoccupation with ‘folkism’, a dramaturgy based on folk compositional and performance aesthetics formulated in his article in NTQ47 (August 1996).

Both in his practical work with Odin Teatret, and his close involvement with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Eugenio Barba has developed an approach to theatre which is highly personal in expression, yet far-sightedly comparative in its concern with the nature of the actor's work and the ways in which it crosses cultural and other divides. An Advisory Editor of NTQ, Eugenio Barba contributed earlier pieces on the nature of the actor's energies to NTQ 4 and NTQ 11, and now further develops his thinking, in a consideration of what he calls ‘the body-in-life’, and the balance between its ‘three vital organs’ which is essential if the actor is to realize his full potential.

In this article Vicki Ann Cremona traces the development of the complex process of montage used by Eugenio Barba for Ur-Hamlet, based on the oral tale Amleth, which Saxo Grammaticus included in his history of the Danes (circa 1216). Besides Odin Teatret, the project involved a large number of actors and musicians from Bali, Brazil, and Japan, and other participants and trainees with whom Barba had worked at the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA). The author here recounts how the work was developed from different cultural perspectives, describing how the actors' physical scores were combined without their cultural specificity being modified in any way. Vicki Ann Cremona is an Associate Professor at the University of Malta, currently serving as Malta's Ambassador to Tunisia. Her co-edited texts include Costume in Malta: a History of Fabric, Form, and Fashion (1998) and Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004). She updated, revised and edited Nicola Savarese's Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present, translated from the Italian by Richard Fowler (Holstebro, Malta, Wrocław: Icarus Publishing, 2010).

The television studio play is often perceived as a somewhat compromised, problematic mode in which spatial and technological constraints inhibit the signifying and aesthetic capacity of dramatic texts. Leah Panos examines the function of the studio in the 1970s television dramas of socialist playwright Trevor Griffiths, and argues that the established verbal and visual conventions of the studio play, in its confined and ‘alienated’ space, connect with and reinforce various aspects of Griffiths's particular approach and agenda. As well as suggesting ways in which the idealist, theoretical focus of the intellectual New Left is reflexively replicated within the studio, Panos explores how the ‘intimate’ visual language of the television studio allows Griffiths to create a ‘humanized’ Marxist discourse through which he examines dialectically his dramatic characters' experiences, ideas, morality, and political objectives. Leah Panos recently completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Dramatizing New Left Contradictions: Television Texts of Ken Loach, Jim Allen, and Trevor Griffiths’, at the University of Reading and is now a Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC funded project, ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’, which runs from July 2010 to March 2014.

In this article Andrew Filmer examines performers' experiences in the areas of backstage space known as the wings. Opening with architectural and experiential definitions of the wings, he describes the dangers performers encounter in these spaces, and the various compensatory tactics they employ in response. While the backstage spaces of theatres have traditionally been of little academic interest, Filmer argues that performers' perceptions of the wings are vital in informing their own understandings of what it is to be a professional performer. Andrew Filmer was awarded his PhD by the University of Sydney in 2007 and is currently a lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Aberystwyth University.

In the following article Fiona Buckland describes how the leading British experimental dance company, DV8 Physical Theatre, was formed out of a disillusionment with its own dance medium, and how DV8 now works towards a reinvestment of creative need in stage performance. The first part reviews the company's work, methodology, and content to date, while the second offers a detailed analysis and explication of their award-winning and provocative Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), which expresses the paradox of gay male cruising as a need for security and desire for risk, both in terms of content and as an exhilarating contact-release form. The article explores the dynamism and theatricality of a style in which the body is both subject and mode of performance, and also the media, critical, and audience response DV8 performances have evoked. The author, Fiona Buckland, received her MA in Film and Theatre from the University of Sheffield in 1993, after which she worked there and at Sheffield College as a part-time lecturer in movement and choreography. She has also held workshops in Loughborough, Sheffield, and New York, and is currently the recipient of a Fulbright award on the doctoral programme in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article, of which the first part appeared in NTQ42 (May 1995), deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents. Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography, Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving the Choice and American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of that year. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared in Artforum, Theatre Research International, and Comparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning book Dada and Surrealist Performance has recently been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.

Peter Brook's work has always figured in debates over ‘intercultural’ projects in the contemporary theatre. However, the controversy has most often centred on his engagement with Asian theatrical traditions, and in particular on his production of The Mahabharata. David Moody here examines Peter Brook's writings on Africa, as theatrical ‘discourse’ with its own theoretical half-life quite distinct from actual productions. This discourse, it is argued, can be described as ‘primitivist’, in that it constructs the African audience as, in Barthes's term, ‘degree zero’ – a ‘limit-text’ to universal theatrical communication. In doing so it presents a limiting version of African theatrical traditions themselves, and, as a result, reinforces a broader, more destructive global discourse of cultural primitivism concerning African and so-called ‘indigenous’ art and performance. David Moody, who currently lectures in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is a playwright, actor, and director who has written extensively on African, post-colonial, and popular theatre, and is now engaged in his own problematic intercultural projects.

Our impressions of Broadway tend to be a compound of past glories as reflected in new musicals, ritual laments of lack of intellectual substance, and the no-less-confusing mix of tawdriness and glamour in the place itself. The showbiz press, meanwhile, concentrates on the hard cash of the theatrical situation. However, as Glenn Loney here suggests, even economic generalizations can falsify the details of a complicated picture: and he considers other relevant factors, from pressures for environmental preservation to the paranoid fear of ‘the Times review’, and the often-overlooked attitudes of the playwrights and performers themselves. Glenn Loney is a widely-published writer and teacher, who contributed a survey of American academic drama to NTQ20, and here he provides a clear overview of the current Broadway scene for a British readership, while offering some lateral thinking which will also prove stimulating for an already-informed American audience.

If the playwright is the most written about of all theatre practitioners, he or she is also, financially, the least underwritten. Despite the emergence of a Theatre Writers' Union during the 'seventies, the path for the novice writer into the profession remains as uncertain as ever, and security is tenuous even for the established dramatist. Christine Eccles has worked in the theatre both as a director and as a member of that elusive species, the playreader, and is currently reviewing for Time Out and Plays International. Here, she looks at the various ways in which a script may – or, more probably, may not – reach the stage, and at the few sources of financial support for the aspiring playwright. NTQ will be looking in depth at each of the major areas here outlined in future issues.

How can the socially critical aspects of comedy be reconciled with a ‘happy ending’ which seems to affirm the existing order of things? This perennial problem has become acute in a period when both playwrights and comic performers are increasingly conscious of the dangers inherent in the stereotyping – racial, sexual, and hierarchical – on which so much comedy depends. In this article, Susan Carlson looks at some recent ‘meta-comedies’ which have used the form, as it were, to expose itself – notably, Trevor Griffiths's Comedians, Peter Barnes's Laughter, Susan Hayes's Not Waving, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine – and analyzes their responses to comedy, which range from the despairing to the affirmative. She concludes that only Churchill has found a positive way of ‘connecting the painful recognitions of twentieth-century dissociations to comic hope’. Susan Carlson is Associate Professor of English at lowa State University. In addition to numerous articles on modern drama and the novel, she has published a full-length study of the plays of Henry James, and is currently working on a book about women in comedy.

AFTER THE one‐act Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, the opening‐night gala performance at the Teatro d'Arte concluded with The Gods of the Mountain by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, whose work had never been performed in Italy before. In the early press releases about the future programme of the company, there was even talk about a second Dunsany play, A Night at the Inn, but this never reached production. There were also plans for Dunsany to visit Rome and give some lectures about his work: clearly, he was intended to play a large part in the work of the newly established theatre.

The recent death of J. B. Priestley, in the same year as that of the finest exponent of his plays, Sir Ralph Richardson, seems to signal the close of an era. We had hoped in an early issue of New Theatre Quarterly to arrange an interview with the playwright to coincide with his ninetieth birthday, and although generous tributes have been paid to Priestley's work in the theatre, two aspects of this work (incidentally of crucial importance to the policy of this journal) have been somewhat neglected. After the end of the Second World War, during the discussions and plans for building the new Britain (and by extension Europe) from the ruins of the old, Priestley stood for a particular kind of integrity in the British theatre: and his role in the creation of the International Theatre Institute and his own conception of the British Theatre Conference of 1947 raised many interesting questions about the social, national, and international role that theatre could play. If the intervening years have not seen developments to match that vision, our theatre nevertheless owes a great deal to the various reforms that have followed from such initiatives, and in future issues we intend to return to those ideals and ideas – to see what basis they constitute for a critique of our own time, and to assess what continuing relevance they have for our future. Any theatre journal today also owes a debt to Priestley for his pioneering championship and criticism of the various forms of popular entertainment in which he so delighted, and in which he discerned strong social values – essentially, the inspiration for a line of criticism carried forward brilliantly by Raymond Williams and others over the last three decades. Tragically, two of the great comedians who earned his admiration, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe, departed before him, too far short of his own fullness of years. The world's stock of laughter has slumped since their passing and, as Priestley showed us, we have lost two innovators in the art of theatre. Tommy Cooper's deconstruction, if not demolition, of the stage was a masterly exposure of the polished sales techniques of showbusiness, and his exploitation of the art of anti-climax showed new ways through which to hold an audience and relate to them. Eric Morecambe, equally ruthless and proficient at puncturing the pretensions and posturings of glib naturalism and pseudo-aestheticism, had also the self-deflating wisdom of the true philosopher. One day, when we have grown over-familiar with the reruns of the reruns of the shows he has left behind, a retrospective examination of all the work of Morecambe and Wise will surely show that, underlying the technical brilliance of the comic playing, there is also a serious progression through the process of ageing, as brash optimism is tempered by the disillusionment of experience in the struggle to survive and extract what advantages one can from life. We learned a great deal about theatre from Tommy Cooper, and a lot about living and growing older from Eric Morecambe: they have gone leaving that education unfinished, but to commemorate them in the power of their effect, and to remind us of our debt to Priestley, we reproduce here the two pieces he wrote about them as living performers in the collection of essays Particular Pleasures, published in 1975 by Heinemann (to whom our grateful acknowledgements are extended).

In NTQ 30 (1992) Dorothy Knowles provided a description and explication of the recent work of the visionary French director Armand Gatti. For what he calls his ‘plural writing’ projects, Gatti has increasingly come to recruit not actors but ‘actors’: those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them – together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether developing a performance within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre are entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. Here, he speaks for himself, describing both the inspiration and the evolution of his work in a style which characteristically combines pragmatism with lyricism. The article derives from a series of interviews conducted in 1991 by Hélène Châtelain – an actress who has worked with Gatti since 1966 – and first published in Le Monde Diplomatique for February 1992. The translator for NTQ, Wesley Hutchinson, wrote his doctoral thesis on Gatti at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lectures in the English Department of the University of Paris, Nanterre.

In this article John Freeman focuses on theatre after postmodernism as exemplified by the Belgium-based Needcompany. If, as is suggested here, we are all more than a little ‘postmoderned out’ through an over-dependence on individualism, the shadow cast by postmodernism remains large in the contemporary Western world, and its impact is still clearly felt. As the postmodern came to offer a safety net through which bad practice could not easily fall, the modernist theatre it followed offered its own elusive ideal. In arguing this, Freeman forges links between Brecht's knowing embrace of amateurism and the faux uncertainty of much contemporary work, where Brecht the arch-dramatist becomes the archetype of the postdramatic, as twenty-first century theatre moves in the shadow of the past. John Freeman has written extensively on contemporary performance, creative learning, and arts policy. He is currently Associate Professor at Curtin University, Western Australia, where he leads the Humanities Honours programme.

Reinhard Goering's play Die Südpolexpedition des Kapitäns Scott (1929) tells the story of the famously tragic British polar expedition led by Robert F. Scott in 1911–12. As the first public staging of the story, the play created considerable controversy in Britain when it premiered in Berlin in 1930. A late Expressionist drama, it offered perspectives on the expedition quite different to those coming out of Scott's homeland. In this article, Hanne Nielsen and Elizabeth Leane contextualize the play within Goering's own career; outline its performance history; examine its reception in both Germany and Britain; and analyze the play text in terms of its innovative treatment of Scott's story. Hanne Nielsen is a postgraduate student at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury. Her background is in Antarctic Studies and German literature and she is currently undertaking a study of representations of Antarctica on stage. Elizabeth Leane is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, where she holds a research position split between the School of Humanities and the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies. She has written and edited several books, most recently Antarctica in Fiction (Cambridge University Press).