Jill Davis, Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, ‘spins off in other directions’ from what began as a review of Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997).

This is a personal record of a theatre worker's journey to places where theatre is inextricably mixed with politics — or is no less significantly divorced from social concerns. Visiting mainland China and South Africa in the summer of 1990, Richard Schechner records how theatre people confronted the aftermath of major political upheavals – the crushing of hopes in Tiananmen Square, and the perhaps deceptive raising of them following the release of Nelson Mandela. His trip also took in the widely different perspectives and problems of Taiwan, where pluralism struggles (almost unnoticed in the West) to displace an ageing autocracy. Richard Schechner teaches at New York University, and recently returned to the editorial chair at The Drama Review, the journal he conducted through its vintage years in the 'sixties – at the same time creating the Performance Group, and beginning his researches into theatre and anthropology, the field in which he has published widely and innovatively in the interim.

Teatro Settimo is a theatre group which was created in the Italian industrial city of Turin in 1979 by a group of theatre-making friends who wished to discover a kind of left-wing theatre that would respond directly to the problems of an urban environment. Their story is one of institutionalized success achieved – and then deliberately rejected, as the problems of administering that success, with all its attendant bureaucracy, threatened to stifle the original impulses behind the company. Their most recent production, Stabat Mater, was presented at the ‘Divina’ conference held in Turin in June 1990, as described elsewhere in this issue. Lizbeth Goodman and Gabriella Giannachi spoke there to members of the group, which has since brought Stabat Mater to the ‘Theatre under Threat’ conference in Cambridge last October.

David Allen's sequence of features for NTQ on modern British approaches to directing Chekhov began in No. 8 (1986) with a documentary study of Mike Alfreds's productions, and continued with a reconstruction of David Jones's production of Ivanov for the RSC in No. 15 (1988). Here, he explores the approach to Chekhov of Jonathan Miller (currently artistic director at the Old Vic), mainly through an analysis of Miller's production of Three Sisters, first seen at Guildford in April 1976, and subsequently transferred to the Cambridge Theatre, London, on 22 June of that year. This is complemented by original interview material with the director, and David Allen also draws on Miller's Chichester production of The Seagull in 1973, which was revived for Greenwich Theatre in January 1974. The analysis focuses especially on Miller's sense of the ways in which Chekhov perceived and dramatized human passions, his presentation of the nuances of personality, and of the changes wrought by passing time.

A series of nearly two dozen ‘Theatre Checklists’ appeared as supplements to the old series of Theatre Quarterly, recording biographical, performance, and bibliographical information in accessible form about a wide range of mainly living playwrights. The format was subsequently extended by Simon Trussler for the ‘Writers on File’ series he now edits for Methuen London, of which the first six titles have recently appeared. However, it was felt that the former style of checklist would still provide a valuable source of information for writers not scheduled for early inclusion in the new series, expecially when this complemented other forms of documentation in the journal: and this first ‘NTQ Checklist’ on the work of John McGrath thus appears alongside Tony Mitchell's interview with the playwright. Its compiler, Malcolm Page, teaches in the English Department of Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. Besides contributing several of the earlier series of ‘Theatre Checklists’. Malcolm Page has published widely in the field of modern British drama: his study of John Arden appeared last year from Twayne, and his volume on Arden was among the first of the ‘Writers on File’ from Methuen.

In NTQ4 and 5 David Hornbrook offered a two-part analysis of the purposes, practices, and projected future of drama teaching in schools. Discussion continued in NTQ7 and 8, with responses to Hornbrook's suggestions from a number of other practitioners in the area. Among them was Jon Nixon, currently research fellow in the Division of Education at Sheffield University, who now continues the debate with an article in which he provides a broader perspective, presenting a functional rather than theoretical model of classroom practice. This, he suggests, takes a three-dimensional form: drama as social interaction, as discourse, and as a mode of cognition – or what he calls the ‘depth dimension’ which ‘complements our various ways of knowing’. He concludes that drama should not by necessity be consigned to the margins of ‘the arts’, but be recognized for the vital role it can play not only in the whole humanities cirriculum but, crucially, in the cross-curricular development of communication and expressive skills.

In the first part of this feature, published in NTQ 2, Richard C. Beacham described how the pioneer of modern stage lighting, Adolphe Appia, and the creator of eurhythmics, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, came to collaborate in 1906 – in the development of the Hellerau ‘garden-city’ project. Here, they planned to provide an opportunity for active artistic participation in a specially designed performance space. The author takes up the story with the beginning of classes at Hellerau in 1911, and preparations for the two festivals which followed – including the revelatory production of Gluck's Orpheus. The First World War brought the collaboration to an end – but not before it had put into practice for the first time many of the scenic and interpretive principles of modern staging. Richard C. Beacham published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), and plans to complete the present NTQ feature with an assessment of ‘The Legacy of Hellerau’. His forthcoming full-length study of Appia will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.

Although a good deal of his work was seen in London and New York, the name of Max Reinhardt remains for most English-speaking theatre students all-too-vaguely associated with those innovations which helped to give a new importance to the ‘totality’ of the relationship between actors, audience, stage lighting and design, movement and music, in the earlier part of this century. Even less is known here about one of Reinhardt's leading collaborators. Ernst Stern – the longest-serving, most versatile, and most professional of his designers. Yet Stern settled in England in 1933, and left his papers to the Victoria and Albert Museum, upon whose resources Hugh Rorrison has drawn in assembling this view of Stern's contribution to Reinhardt's theatre in particular, and to twentieth-Century scenography in general. Hugh Rorrison, who was a regular contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, teaches in the Department of German of the University of Leeds.

In the feature on Australian theatre in NTQ5 (1986). Peter Fitzpatrick pointed to a burgeoning community theatre movement, made possible by the shifts in arts funding which were the subject of Graham Ley's interview with Malcolm Blaylock in the same issue – while Tom Burvill's article on Sidetrack Theatre described one of the emergent companies. His concentration on Sidetrack's workplace shows, and on Loco in particular, highlighted an area in which the community theatre movement had made some strides in the construction of a popular political theatre. These have been achieved since the Australia Council – the antipodean equivalent of the Arts Council of Great Britain – introduced its Art and Working Life Incentive Programme, designed to foster arts activities within the trade union movement, in 1982. David Watt, who teaches Drama at Newcastle University, here offers a report on a developing relationship between theatre companies and the union movement, with particular reference to two companies which have been most closely associated with the programme, and places their work in the industrial contexts of state patronage and the trade union movement.

In Spain, alone among western nations, political theatre has arguably had a real impact upon the course of social and political change – yet it remains little noticed or assessed in other countries. This article examines the leading Spanish theatre groups which operated first in Franco's declining years, under strict though often incompetent government censorship, then in the period of transition to democracy – and now facing very different challenges under a nominally socialist government. The author. Eugène van Erven, who contributed a study of the popular theatre movement in the Philippines to NTQ 10, focuses in particular on the work of El Joglars (‘The Jesters’) from Barcelona – a company which, under the leadership of Albert Boadella, has been performing almost continuously since 1962. at first subverting the censorship by evolving a style of ‘politicized mime’, then through controversial works on overtly political themes, and more recently in a ‘provocative’ style intended to engage audiences in an active process of questioning the consumerist direction being taken by a democratic Spain.

Is the ‘Performance art’ whose influence is pervasive in today's American theatre truly in the ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde – or merely modish? In an age where fashions, whether in theatre, clothing. or motor cars. are manufactured to facilitate the turnover necessary for mass-produced obsolescence, does ‘imagist’ theatre serve as a force for social change – or merely titillate palates as jaded by yesterday's art as by yesterday's styles? R. G. Davis looks at the ways in which visually- oriented forms of theatre have been constructed and received in America since the ‘happenings’ of the early ‘sixties – and at the changing political climate since that time, which has itself modified the impact of any artistic statement. He asks whether the progressive theatre worker should in today's reactionary climate regard such forms as suspect, or look for ways of harnessing them to the creation of a ‘dialectical view of pleasure’ through the multi-faceted potential of epic theatre. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 'sixties, is a leading director of Brecht and, more recently, of Dario Fo in the United States, and is currently directing his adaptation of llya Ehrenburg'sLife of the Automobile as an imagistc theatre piece. He has been a regular contributor to TQ and NTQ.

On 7 May 1988 a meeting was held at Goldsmiths' College, London, involving a number of theatre practitioners and academics on the left, to discuss the current state of British theatre under Thatcherism and suggest some possible responses. The meeting was organized by Vera Gottlieb, and NTQ Editor Simon Trussler, who both teach in the Drama Department at Goldsmiths' College. Also present were Clive Barker, Pam Brighton, Colin Chambers, Trevor Griffiths, Peter Holland, Kate Harwood, Albert Hunt, Nesta Jones, John McGrath, Paul Moriarty, Rob Ritchie, and Juliet Stevenson. Apologies for absence were received from Caryl Churchill, Tilda Swinton, and Clare Venables. This abbreviated transcript was edited by Andy Lavender.

In the first part of this three-part series. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacement of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. Here, she examines in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which have an existing sociological literature – looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters from Duvignaud onwards and (perhaps more pertinently) backwards, to Gramsci and Brecht. She then considers approaches to dramatic texts and genres, especially as exemplified in the explication of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Finally, she explores the implications and assumptions of the relatively new discipline of ‘theatrical anthropology’, in which theatre is taken to be the prototype of society. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International, and Theatre Papers, as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.

Defiantly, Nicaragua mounted its International Theatre Festival in 1986 while the country remained on a war footing against the contras and their American backers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe were invited, and found the experience very different from other such occasions, east or west. Despite problems of logistics – which left the company without their equipment for much of the visit and virtually having to camp-out in an American-owned hotel – the experience, as recorded here by Daniel Chumley, who has been an actor and director with the group since 1968. was finally and triumphantly affirmative.

Our inclusion in NTQ5 of a piece by the priest-playwright Karl Gaspar, recording his experiences of creating drama in a Philippine prison-camp, coincided with the overthrow of the Marcos regime – a revolution in whose preparation and support. Eugène van Erven now argues, the theatre played a significant part. In the following article, he describes the organization and work of the Philippine Educational Theatre Association – PETA for short – from its creation in the early 'seventies, to the fully-established network of companies and activities of the present day, and discusses its future role in a society not yet certain of the success of its revolution. Eugène van Erven is currently involved in a long-term project researching liberation theatre in the Third World, funded at present by his postdoctoral research fellowship in the Drama Studies Programme of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His earlier publications have been in the field of contemporary western European political theatre, on which subject he was awarded his doctorate from Vanderbilt University. Tennessee.

The twelfth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) held in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2000, set out to explore, under the title ‘Action, Structure, Coherence’, the relationship between the actor and text – and specifically between actors trained in the Odin and other physically-rooted traditions and texts of the supposedly ‘classical’, text-based theatre of western Europe. David Korish here reports on three encounters between different pairs of actors and their texts, and their several means of developing a dynamic physical score appropriate to the text concerned. The co-founder and director of Teatro Abya Yala, an independent theatre company based in San José, Costa Rica, David Korish is also a member of the faculty of the School of Dramatic Arts of the National University of Costa Rica.

Following the rules of self-sacrifice for a higher cause, the Palestinian female bomber performs the values of the struggle through and on her body in a farewell video statement. She leaves herself behind to create an image of a strong and victorious soldier. The female bomber's performance of the new self introduces her as a role model for younger generations. Her public appearance in hijab challenges notions of the body, physical beauty, and freedom in the secularist world at the same time as it deviates from the norms of a fundamentalist view of women. It is the dual impact on local and international viewers that politicizes the female bomber's public performance and makes it significant. Rana Salimi has received her PhD from the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She currently lectures at UCSD and at National University on a variety of subjects, including theatre history and language arts.

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).

The author aims in this article is to highlight a significant moment in the history of the reception of Shakespeare in modern Greek theatre. The article outlines the main developments in the perception of Shakespeare's work in Greece from the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, and examines Karolos Koun's early experiments in Shakespearean production. Koun's initiatives were diametrically opposed to local theatre traditions, which emphasized psychological or historical realism and pictorial or spectacular illusion. The use of non-realistic stage conventions such as masks and simple, abstract and allusive settings, flamboyant costumes, stylized acting, and the fact that all roles were played by young boys demonstrate the significance of Koun's contribution to a modernist Shakespeare in Greece, culminating in his Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1967. Antonis Glytzouris is Associate Professor in the School of Drama at the Aristotle University Thessaloniki, and is author of Stage Direction in Greece: the Rise and Consolidation of the Stage Director in Modern Greek Theatre (Herakleio: Crete University Press, 2011), among other publications.