Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre was formed in New York in 1963, and gained an international reputation for its unique combination of larger-than-life puppetry and celebratory pageantry. After leaving New York in 1970, Schumann finally settled on a thirty-acre site in Vermont in 1974, but Bread and Puppet has continued to travel far afield, and in the original Theatre Quarterly. No. 19 (1975). their Californian residency for the ‘anti-bicentennial’ celebration, A Monument for Ishi. was documented, along with practical material on the making of the puppets-and the bread. While Bread and Puppet continue to perform regularly in North America and Europe, much of their recent work, however, has centered on or been performed for Latin America – including the two projects in Nicaragua described in the following feature. In the opening part, Peter Schumann discusses with Rosa Luisa Márquez the company's 1985 production – The Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Archbishop Romero – and its place in their work. John Bell then provides an introduction to a later interview describing the production of the Nicaraguan Passion Play in 1987, accompanied by the text of the play itself. Rosa Luisa Márquez, who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Puerto Rico, and John Bell, who is completing his doctoral studies and teaching theatre history at Columbia University in New York, have also both been personally involved in the work of Bread and Puppet Theatre.

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret, and more recently with the International School of Theatre Anthropology, has always been substantiated by a body of developed critical theory, and in NTQ he has specifically developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual. In NTQ1 (1985), he outlined the problems involved in analyzing theatre-works rooted in performance rather than the written word; in NTQ4 (1985) he discussed his concept of the ‘dilated body’, through which the performed taps the wellsprings of art and experience; and in NTQ16 (1988), he expanded his idea of the ‘body-in-life’, describing the balance of energies which is essential for the actor to be fully realized. Here, he looks at the way in which the body is falsely perceived as the ‘actor's instrument’, as somehow separate from himself, and discusses the processes of ‘inculturation’ and ‘acculturation’ – which give the actor a true ‘second-nature’, and distinguish his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’.

Dario Fo needs no introduction, though he is less well known for his work as a critical theorist of theatre than in his role as a playwright. The original Theatre Quarterly was the first journal to publish his critical writing in English, and two of his more recent essays-‘Theatre of Situation’ and ‘Retrieving the Past. Exposing the Present’ - appeared in one of the earliest issues of New Theatre Quarterly. NTQ2 (1985). Here, we are pleased to publish Fo's brief but stimulating study of the conventions and the ‘language’ of theatrical masks, in which he outlines typologies stretching from Ancient Greece to commedia and beyond, and suggests some of the distinctive requirements for the contemporary actor of performing in mask. The translation is by Gail Macdonald.

Theatre scholarship is only just beginning to respond to the insights and emphases suggested by feminist criticism. In this introductory article to what we intend to be a strong and continuing thread in NTQ, Susan Bassnett outlines the resulting problems, and explores the historical context and conditions in terms of one central issue – the role of women as performers (and non-performers) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also examines some of the wider implications for theatre studies, affected as these also are by new historicist approaches to the study of cultural change. Susan Bassnett teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory in the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly and other journals, notably in the field of Italian theatre. Her most recent books include a feminist study of Elizabeth I, and (in collaboration with John Stokes and Michael Booth) Bernhardt. Terry, Duse: the Actress in Her Time.

Never mind the theory, face the facts: is there room in the American theatre for all the performers graduating as drama majors from American universities? Glenn Loney, who has himself been teaching drama since 1960 as well as writing widely on theatrical subjects, sketches in the background to the American system, looks at the limited horizons for the newly qualified actor, and suggests a shift in the aims and orientation of academic drama – and the expectations of those who pursue it.

In our previous issue, NTQ18 (May 1989). We carried a report on the exploratory discussions held by a number of theatre people on the left (Under the joint aegis of NTQ and the Drama Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London) to discuss the problems posed by ‘Thatcher's Theatre’ and the national priorities it reflects. A more broadly-based conference was held on 4 December 1988, devoted to the theme of ‘British Theatre in Crisis, and here Andy Lavender, theatre writer and graduate student at Goldsmiths’ College. Provides a brief report of the proceedings. We also reprint the manifesto to which the conference gave its unanimous support.

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.”

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.

Although many disciplines have helpfully (and a few less helpfully) interacted with theatre studies over the past decade, progress has been notably slow in the discovery of a dialogue with sociology. Indeed, such progress as has been made has too often, argues Maria Shevtsova. resulted in perceptions and emphases which are not always sympathetic (or seemingly even relevant) to the interests of theatre workers. In this, the first of a three-part introduction to the sociology of theatre, Maria Shevtsova combines an objective analysis of progress to date with a study of the problems and misconceptions encountered along the way, and also proposes a possible methodology for correcting the present imbalance. In future instalments, she will look in particular at the ways in which theatre anthropology and theatre semiotics have helped and hindered this problematic relationship. 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.

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).

In NTQ16, Adam Versényi explored the theatricality of performance rituals in pre-Columbian Latin America. Here, he takes up a line started by Robert Potter in NTQ8, and examines the way in which the Spanish mendicant friars who followed hard on the heels of Cortés adapted Aztec rituals for their own pedagogic purposes. Less expectedly, the friars were also to some extent ‘adapted by’ those rituals, in moulding a performing medium that borrowed from the medieval cycle drama, yet also anticipated the later form of the auto sacramental - and which, intriguingly, combined an expression of the internal politics of conquest with its theatricalization of Christian baptism. Adam Versényi is currently preparing a study which parallels recent developments in Liberation Theology and Liberation Theatre in Latin America.

The First International Women Playwrights Conference took place in Buffalo, New York, from 14 to 23 October 1988. It was attended by over 200 playwrights (and a few non-playwrights) from 34 countries. That number included many eminent women – Renée (New Zealand), Alice Childress (USA), Bai Fengxi (China), Miriam Kainy (Israel), Zulu Sofola (Nigeria), Somalatha Subasinghe (Sri Lanka), Iren Kiss (Hungary) – plus women (mostly, because of the cost, American) whose plays are as yet unproduced or who are beginning to write. Much of the focus was on how much theatre work is being written by women, but which meets with obstructions to performance.

Outside its ‘classic’ forms, little is known in the West about the theatre of Indonesia. The colonial ‘heritage’ proved largely sterile, and the more fruitful recent developments of the past few decades have been dominated by attempts to integrate the indigenous tradition with contemporary problems and needs. Eugène van Erven has spent several years exploring new theatrical movements and activities in the Pacific region, and earlier results of his studies appeared in NTQ 10 (1987), on the People's Theatre Network of the Philippines. Here, he introduces the work of the two leading theatre-of-liberation companies in Indonesia, Teater Arena and Teater Dinasti, and analyzes their contrasting approaches to the integration of ‘theatre-of-liberation’ techniques with distinctively Indonesian social, religious, and theatrical traditions. Eugène van Erven also contributed a study of recent political theatre in Spain to NTQ 13 (1988), and has recently taken up a post lecturing in English at the University of Utrecht.

‘Jagran’ means ‘awakening’ – as Aloke Roy, the director of this Delhi-based company points out, a more immediate term for most of his marginalized Indian audiences than ‘consciousness-raising’. In a multilingual society. Roy also found in mime a more immediately expressive means of theatrical communication for the street-corners and other sites of urban dereliction where his company typically performs its fifteen to forty-minute pieces, each of which focuses upon a particular social issue or contemporary problem. Parminder Kaur Bakshi, of the University of Warwick, recently visited the company in Delhi and experienced their work, which she here introduces before discussing with Aloke Roy the origins, development, and techniques of the group. Outline scenarios of a selection of the Jagran pantomimes accompany the feature.

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.

In his major work on Theatre Games (Methuen, 1987), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end - the development of acting skills through the enrichment of the rehearsal process. In NTQ14 (1988). he described how he came to develop ‘games workshops’ for non-theatrical purposes, and considered the value of games-playing for adults by analogy with the function of the ‘kissing games’ of his own childhood and adolescence. In this article (based on a paper presented in November 1988 at the conference on theatre and education in Mohammédia, Morocco), he considers our changing perception of the relationship between the two senses of ‘play’, and the way in which ‘games’ have been institutionalized to avoid their inherent threat to an organized, work-disciplined society-a trend still being reinforced, as the improvisatory element of drama in schools becomes subject to the rigours of evaluation and examination. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

Richard Schechner has recently come full circle back to the editorship of The Drama Review, which he earlier transformed from a quietly respected academic journal into the voice of American avant-garde theatre between 1962 and 1969. By this time, he had also joined the Drama faculty of New York University, where he still teaches, and created the Performance Group, for whom his productions included Dionysus in '69, Makbeth. The Tooth of Crime. Oedipus, and The Balcony. His early advocacy of environmental theatre, celebrated in his book of that name in 1973, developed into his present concern with theatre anthropology, the focus of his recent study. Between Theatre and Anthropology, discussed by Eugenio Barba in NTQ10 (1987). In October 1988 Schechner contributed to the Leicester conference ‘Points of Contact: Theatre. Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology’, and there Nick Kaye discussed with him the relationship between his practical and theoretical work, its evolution, and the influences upon it–also looking in more detail at his most recent production, a performance combining Don Juan and Don Giovanni.

When Gordon Craig settled in Florence before the First World War, he found himself amidst a flourishing avant-garde artistic community. which he regarded with some caution. Between the staging of Rosmersholm with Duse in 1906 and the closing of his short-lived theatre school at the Goldoni Arena in 1914, he also conducted a correspondence with the eclectic cosmopolitan Carlo Placci – a previously unpublished source on which Alessandro Sardelli has drawn to illuminate Craig's Florentine years, during which his influential journal The Mask made its earliest appearance, and Craig also developed the idea of his adjustable screens, first employed during his Moscow collaboration with Stanislavski on Hamlet.

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.

In a companion-piece, and by way of a personal introduction to the interview and feature which follow. Andrzej Źurowski here offers an appreciation of the work of the Polish director and scenographer Józef Szajna. Andrzej Źurowski is a leading Polish theatre critic, who is also president of his national section of the International Association of Theatre Critics. He contributed a study of the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor to NTQ4 (1985).