The production during 1987 of no less than three plays by the usually-neglected Spanish dramatist Lorca – Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba – provided a rare opportunity for a reconsideration of the plays as works for the live theatre, and of the particular problems involved in ‘translating’ them (in every sense of the word) for the English-speaking stage. In the following article. Gwynne Edwards considers the difficulties which confront the translator of Lorca's plays, the production-style which is implicit in Lorca's theatre, and the varying extents to which the three recent productions approximated to it. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He has published full-length studies of Lorca and of Luis Buñuel, and numerous translations of Spanish plays, including two in the volume of Three Plays published by Methuen in 1987, and the version of Blood Wedding used in the Contact Theatre production here considered.

Hanns Johst's play Schlageter is generally regarded as the most successful piece of Nazi theatre. Following its first performance in the early months of the Third Reich, it dominated German theatrical life throughout 1933 and 1934. This has traditionally been regarded as evidence of the essential conformity of the Third Reich's stage; yet since no other play achieved a similar prominence in the period, Gerwin Strobl finds that line of argument unconvincing, arguing that the success of Schlageter was due to its clever manipulation of its audience's emotions. The play was perfectly suited to the mood of many German theatregoers in 1933, betraying in its plot and characterization considerable psychological insight and a ruthless determination to exploit that insight for Nazi purposes. As such, Schlageter was the prime example of the Third Reich's ‘theatre of inner experience’, the ultimate aim of whose practitioners was to get German audiences to abandon reason and accept the irrational vision of history underlying the Nazis' ideological project. Gerwin Strobl is Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, specializing in popular perceptions and propaganda. He is the author of Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has published on Shakespeare in the Third Reich in History Today (May 1997) and the Journal of Contemporary History (July 1999), and is currently writing a study of Nazi theatre.

Dario Fo has developed his own brand of epic theatre by adapting principles and techniques from various forms of popular performance and the oral tradition. He stays detached from the role he plays by frequently shifting in and out of character and by calling attention to the performance as such. This, argues Antonio Scuderi, allows him to emphasize the interpretive frame – the ‘messages’ he establishes in his prologue. His most recent play, The Two-Headed Anomaly, is thus at one level a farcical romp; but a closer look reveals an intricate metatheatrical structure that allows Dario Fo and his fellow-performer Franca Rame to deliver their political satire. Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and with Joseph Farrell edited Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal (2003) and Modern Language Review (2004).

John McGrath is recognized as a leading practitioner and theorist of popular and political theatre, in large part due to his work with 7:84 (England) and 7:84 (Scotland), but also through the contributions he has made to the debate surrounding this form of theatre, as summed up in his publication of A Good Night Out in 1981 and of The Bone Won't Break in 1990. McGrath has also written numerous articles, including those to be found in TQ19, TQ35, and NTQ4, in which he documents the work of the 7:84 companies and discusses the defining characteristics, ideological perspective, and potential for socio-political intervention of political theatre. Here, Nadine Holdsworth looks specifically at the importance of the audience as it related to 7:84 (England) in the 1970s and 1980s, and identifies some of the strategies employed by the company to attract and maintain a radical working-class audience. Nadine Holdsworth lectures in Theatre Studies at De Montfort University and has recently completed her doctoral thesis on McGrath and the 7:84 (England) Company, from which this research is derived. She has also catalogued an extensive archive on the company which is held at Cambridge University.

In today's diverse and evolving world of performance there is a place for the reinvestigation of the archaic realm of shamanism, and the extent to which it relates to modern theatre practice. To what extent do the calling, initiation, trance, and performance states of the shaman resemble the experience of today's actors? Is there really a dichotomy between a theatre of greed and a theatre of need? Inspired by her own personal sense of the evolution of the actor from the role of the shaman, Rachel Karafistan here considers the work of contemporary, so-called ‘third theatres’ such as Odin Teatret, Teatr Biuro Podrozy, and Derevo in the light of shamanic precedent. Having initially studied Psychology at university, Rachel Karafistan worked as a freelance director, teacher, and actor in England for seven years while researching her doctoral study: Shamanic Dimensions within Theatre Practice Today: a Theoretical and Experiential Investigation, which she completed in 2001. She is currently working as an actress and teacher in Poland with Teatr Biuro Podrozy and her own company, COSmino.

In today's technologically complex and racially hybrid society, what is the meaning of ‘cultural memory’? Like performance, Ian Watson argues, culture ‘exists only in the doing’ – yet if our formative experiences are in that sense ‘rehearsals’ for life, the subsequent ‘performance’ is in a constant state of flux and renewal. Here, Ian Watson looks at the interface between theatrical and cultural training in American society, from the old apprenticeship system of the stock companies, through the Delsarte-based approach of the earliest conservatoires and the pervasiveness of Americanized Stanislavsky in the post-war period, towards a renewed concern with the techniques of voice and movement to meet the demands of both the classical and the contemporary experimental repertoires. In contrast to the deep cultural roots of much eastern theatrical training, perceptions of actor training in America are, he argues, as eclectic and diffuse as American society itself, and so (using Eugenio Barba's distinction) lean strongly towards creating a ‘professional’ rather than a ‘personal’ identity for the performer – one which ‘bears the signature of the hybrid narrative it springs from’. Ian Watson, who is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University–Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has also published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

In this article Aamir Aziz argues that Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a wilful and purposeful theatrical response to the operations of Joseph McCarthy and his henchmen. He highlights the theatricality of the McCarthy trials and examines them through the frame of spectacle, as outlined by Guy Debord, to show how Miller used his play theatrically to unhinge the machinations of McCarthyism and the seemingly unassailable frame of an American democracy defending itself against Communist subversion. Miller's play was thus a theatrical intervention into an ideological force field that served to puncture and expose the veil of this spectacle. Aamir Aziz received his doctorate from Universiteit Leiden in 2014, and is now an Assistant Professor in English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. He has recently published articles in International Policy Digest, New Authors' Journal, Sydney Globalist, and London Globalist.

Joan Lipkin, playwright, poet, and theatre director, has won considerable critical acclaim – and some calculated abuse – for the political work of her company, That Uppity Theatre, in St Louis, Missouri. Her role-reversing pro-choice musical, He's Having Her Baby, provided the focal point for the preceding article, and one of her earliest pieces, Half-Time, about football in American life, performed in front of a bank vault, launched the city's alternative space movement. Her other better-known pieces include Some of My Best Friends Are …, Love and Work and Other Four-Letter Words, Will the Real Foster Parents Please Stand Up? and Small Domestic Acts. To support her theatre work over the years, Lipkin has worked in roles as various as waitress, art critic, journalist, and television producer: initially trained as a historian, she has also taught at university level for ten years. She is, in her own words, ‘always a rabble-rouser, that's been in the family history for a while’. Lizbeth Goodman interviewed Lipkin in Canada, during the ‘Breaking the Surface’ festival and conference at the University of Calgary in November 1991.

Comparisons between King Lear and the biblical Book of Job have become commonplace in scholarship. This paper traces the impact of the Lear–Job connection on the staging and reception of Shakespeare’s play in Hebrew theatre. Due to this connection, King Lear was put within the orbit of a central cultural endeavour for Zionism: the re-appropriation of the Hebrew Bible for the formation of a new national identity. In the mid-twentieth century, the play appealed to directors who searched for Hebrew ‘biblical’ theatre, and a web of intertextual allusions in the press tied Shakespeare’s tragedy to the Book of Job and to rabbinic interpretations of it. However, the equivocal position held by Job within the Zionist imagination undermined the place of King Lear as well. Ultimately, the two were intertwined in the politics of their reception in Hebrew theatre. Yair Lipshitz is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts in Tel Aviv University. In his research, he explores the various intersections between theatre, performance, and Jewish religious traditions. He is the author of two books in Hebrew: The Holy Tongue, Comedy’s Version (Bar Ilan University Press, 2010) and Embodied Tradition: Theatrical Performances of Jewish Texts (forthcoming).

Our ‘Update from Eastern Europe’, following this article, includes reports from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia – on all of which countries we have published earlier features concerning the problems faced by theatre people in the wake of the disintegration of the Communist bloc. However, the theatre of Bulgaria has been little previously noticed, whether by NTQ or its contemporaries, and requires a more detailed overview. This is now provided by Gabriella Giannachi and Lizbeth Goodman, who visited the country in October 1991, interviewing a wide range of people working in its theatres and seeing a selection of productions in which they were involved. Gabriella Giannachi is a graduate student based at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, whose series of feminist theatres interviews has been published in earlier issues of NTQ.

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.

Eugenio Barba here discusses the desires and ideas driving his early years as a practitioner, some of the creative, social, and ethical principles underlying the work of the Odin Teatret, which he founded in 1964, and the group's most recent, new-style ‘barter’ events with and within local communities. His public dialogue with NTQ co-editor Maria Shevtsova and members of the audience provides fresh insight into the workings of one of the most influential figures, and one of the most widely known non-official theatre collectives, of the late twentieth century. The conversation took place on 31 October 2005 at Goldsmiths College, University of London, during the Odin's UK tour (as documented in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ 86), and included questions from the audience and concluding words from Odin performer Iben Nagel Rasmussen, who had performed White as Jasmin earlier in the evening. The transcript of this conversation, inaugurating a series of such public conversations at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, was edited for publication with the full and warm collaboration of Eugenio Barba.

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.

It is now twenty-one years since Joe Orton's death, though his relatively slender theatrical output has retained its freshness and power. After the modest West End success achieved by his first play to reach the stage. Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the New York production proved a failure, and the interview given by Orton to Glenn Loney in New York in October 1965, a few days before the Broadway opening, therefore went unpublished at the time. We print it now, as an intriguing sidelight on the attitudes and opinions of the playwright. It is placed in context by the widely-published theatre critic and teacher Glenn Loney, who also describes the brief, mainly epistolatory friendship with Orton that sprang from this first meeting.

Charles Marowitz worked extensively as a director in Britain from the late 'fifties through the 'seventies, and was one of the editors of the influential Encore magazine in the formative years of the ‘new wave’. His free-lance work included the co-direction with Peter Brook of the seminal ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, and the premiere production of Joe Orton's Loot. Later, in partnership with Jim Haynes, a season at the London Traverse Theatre led to the creation of his own, more enduring Open Space Theatre in a basement in Tottenham Court Road – one of the identifying events of 1968 and its theatrical aftermath. Since returning to his native United States, Marowitz has worked out of Malibu, and continued his parallel role as writer – in which he has become best known for his sequence of ‘collage’ Shakespeares ranging from Hamlet to The Shrew, and also as a self-professed ‘counterfeit critic’ and theoretician of acting and directing. The following article also forms the final chapter of his latest book, The Other Way: an Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing, to be published by Applause Books later this year. It represents, also, a concise charting of his own voyage of discovery – of the role of the director, and of the recognition of the autonomy and ‘higher calling’ of the actor that this has involved.

Western consciousness of Sri Lanka tends to be limited to bracketing the secessionist ‘Tamil Tigers’ among the ‘terrorist threats’ facing the world community. In truth, tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of Sri Lanka go back two millennia, and Syed Jamil Ahmed argues here that the conflict is reflected in the myths of origin of both communities and the rituals through which they are still re-enacted. He believes that one of these, the ritual of Devol Māduā, offers a possible resolution to the problematic relationship between religious and moral law, or dharma, and the pragmatics of statecraft in Sri Lanka. After examining the historical context of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the myths of origin associated with the three key deities in the ritual, he offers an episode-by-episode description of the event, and goes on to suggest that the function of the ritual in Sinhalese–Buddhist society is revealing in terms of the dialectics of pacifism and violence that Buddhism faces in Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā’ in NTQ 74, and his full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

The Café-Concert as an object of study has tended to attract the interest of art rather than theatre historians, despite the fact that it was the major form of popular entertainment in France during the nineteenth century. Similar but not identical to the English music hall of the same period, the Café-Concert produced a number of stars of national importance, a large majority of whom were women. Through the writings of journalists and commentators of the period, this article explores how these female performers were perceived and constructed as objects of the public gaze. The author, Geraldine Harris, is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, with interests in both popular and feminist theatre.

Anton Chekhov's dissatisfaction with Konstantin Stanislavsky's early productions of his plays is well known and oft-discussed. However, it may be argued that the detailed analysis to which Stanislavsky subjected the script of The Seagull, though offensive to the author's intentions, led to the germination of Stanislavsky's acting system as well as laying the foundations for the success of Chekhov's own dramatic career. Bella Merlin, Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, explores this avenue of debate by assessing the possible reasons for the Alexandrinsky Theatre's failure in its premiere of The Seagull in 1896. Thereafter, the mutual dependency of Chekhov and Stanislavsky is discussed with reference to the success of the Moscow Art Theatre's production of 1898. In the following article in this issue, she links these reflections on the play's early fortunes to its relevance to the ‘Method of Physical Actions’ developed by Stanislavsky towards the end of his career.