In suggesting an answer to the question which forms the title of this article, Jan Kott seeks relevant connections between the rites of a past civilization and the history of the twentieth century – each age sharing across the millennia the capacity to hate those it chooses to make its victims. Since the publication of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, in 1964, Jan Kott has published in a wide range of fields, always displaying a characteristic combination of critical perception, insight into performance potential, and open sensibility towards the cultures of past and present. Jan Kott has also from the first been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly as of New Theatre Quarterly. He will be eighty in 1994, and in NTQ40, due for publication in November of that year – as it happens, also the eightieth issue of this journal and its predecessor – we plan a special issue by way of celebration. Although a number of contributions have already been commissioned, further ideas for articles of a kind appropriate to the occasion are welcome.

The process of rehabilitating the reputation of the great Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold began soon after Krushchev's repudiation of Stalinism in 1955. However, it was only with the recent opening of the KGB files on ‘Case No. 537’ that the mystery surrounding the circumstances of his trial and presumed execution was finally resolved. The full story, which combines the horrific torture of an old, sick man with the petty niceties of bureaucratic form-filling, has been gradually unfolding in Russian-language journals over the past three years: and here Edward Braun provides the first detailed account in English of what happened to Meyerhold – and to his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh – between the liquidation of his theatre in January 1938 and his own liquidation on 2 February 1940. Edward Braun, Professor of Drama in the University of Bristol, edited the pioneering English-language selection from Meyerhold's writings, Meyerhold on Theatre, in 1969, and in 1979 published his major critical assessment, The Theatre of Meyerhold, now in process of revision to incorporate the new material released in recent years. He also contributes to this issue of NTQ a report on the opening of the new Meyerhold Centre in Moscow.

Whereas the director of a play in performance never ventures more than a provisional interpretation, content with its truth at a particular moment in time, literary critics have until relatively recently presented their judgements as definitive. Jan Kott, who has probably had greater influence over the living theatre than any other critic of his generation, is closer kin to the director in his acceptance that any written judgement of a play also stands open to redefinition. Thus, his first view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, offered in his seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, was reconsidered some fifteen years later in the title essay of The Bottom Translation. Now, in a third major essay on the play, Kott addresses the issue of ‘translation’ in relation to the practicalities of the Elizabethan theatre, and the likelihood that the mechanicals, doubling as the fairies, were played by boys brought in for the wedding celebration where it is thought to have been first performed. Jan Kott, who has been an advisory editor successively of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1971, has most recently published The Gender of Rosalind and The Memory of the Body: Essays on the Theatre and Death (Northwestern University Press, 1992). Next year NTQ plans to celebrate his eightieth birthday in a special issue, NTQ40, for which appropriate contributions are invited.

The problems confronted by most women's theatre in reaching its own constituency and, when desired, gaining a wider hearing have been exacerbated in Spain by the long period of emergence from the Franco dictatorship, with its legacy of oppression. In this article, Maria–José Ragué offers an overview of the subject, outlining the historical context and exploring the work of women playwrights, then looking in particular at women's theatre groups based in Barcelona, at whose university she teaches theatre history. Maria–José Ragué is also a theatre critic and a playwright, having published Clytemnestra and Crits de gavina in Catalan and Gaviotas, lagartijas y mariposa in Spanish. Among her research she has published, in Catalan, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Catalan Theatre (1990), and, in Spanish, The Feminine Characters of Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Galician Theatre (1991). Her Themes of Greek Tragedy in Spanish Contemporary Theatre is also in print. She is currently completing a book about women and theatre in contemporary Spain, and beginning work on a study of African ritual theatre. Marias-José Ragué was born in Barcelona in 1941, and has always lived in her home town except between 1968 and 1970, when she lived and studied in Berkeley.

In the ten years between 1982, when Giorgio Strehler announced his intention to stage both parts of Goethe's Faust over six evenings, and the eventual two-evening performance amidst a ‘Faust Festival’ in 1992, the Faust project underwent a series of modifications and manifestations, in parallel with the struggle to create the Teatro Grande in Milan as a new house for the Piccolo. The progress and realization of the project are here charted by Christopher Balme, who not only describes the work processes involved, but how these became enmeshed both in the politics of Strehler's relations with the city of Milan, and with his own identification, as actor of Faust as well as director of the project, with the role of the hubristic artist, in quest of a climax to a controversial career. Christopher Balme is a lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Munich's Instituttür Theaterwissenschaft. He has published on modern German theatre, theatre theory, and post-colonial drama and theatre. He has previously held posts at the University of Würzburg, and was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Theatre Studies at Munich University. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Film at Victoria University in New Zealand.

In the first issue of NTQ, in February 1985, we included a feature on the Footsbarn company, tracing their work from its origins in a Cornish commune in the early ‘seventies to their development of a highly distinctive performing style, strong in physicality, visual imagery, and knockabout humour. By then, this was establishing the group's international reputation – and winning them audiences as much through word-of-mouth in out-of-the-way rural communities as on the festival circuit, where they achieved a more conventional critical acclaim. The compiler of that feature, Geraldine Cousin, here provides an update, complementing a company interview conducted in July 1991 with a personal response to the most recent of Footsbarn's regular encounters with Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Geraldine Cousin, who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of Churchill the Playwright for Methuen, and has also published articles on Shakespeare in performance, Stanislavsky, and Brecht.

How do modern archeological discoveries mesh with and affect present views of ancient theatrical techniques – specifically, of the interrelationship between performers and audience? Looking especially at the ways in which the audience itself was able to interact through the construction of the areas devoted to its own accommodation and circulation, Leslie du S. Read here blends narrative comment and photographic illustration to create a picture of the essential sociability of ancient theatre spaces – an aspect usually ignored by scholars primarily concerned with dramaturgical techniques. Leslie du S. Read, who is presently Head of the Drama Department at the University of Exeter, has for a number of years been researching both visible and known remains of classical theatres, and writing on the social context of stagecraft. He has at present a collection of over 4,000 slides of some 300 theatres, and is in the final stage of completing a history and guide to ancient theatre sites. All photographs in the present article were also taken by the author.

An earlier version of this paper was written by Harriet Walter in December 1991 for the second Divina Conference in Torino, in response to an invitation to speak from the actress's point of view about playing Shakespeare's women. In the event, she ranged much more widely across the typology of women's roles in the theatre, and the actress's response to their challenges – and limitations. The paper has since been delivered, in roughly the present form at the University of Cambridge Graduate Drama Seminar in February 1992, and in March 1992 was read in extract and discussed on a BBC Radio programme in the Art Works Series for the Open University. Opposite, Lizbeth Goodman sets the paper in the context of Harriet Walter's theatrical career.

Robert Lepage, the innovative French-Canadian director whose production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year joined the repertoire of the National Theatre, developed his working methods out of the resource-based technique of improvisation and creation devised by Anna and Lawrence Halprin at the San Francisco Dance Workshop. His devised shows, widely acclaimed for their arresting visual imagery, include The Dragons' Trilogy, Vinci, Tectonic Plates, and Opium and Needles. Here he discusses in interview his ideas on interculturalism and how these influence his approach to Shakespeare. He was interviewed at the National Theatre in London by Christie Carson, a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow, who is working on a dissertation which compares the approach taken to intercultural projects by the theatre communities of Scotland and Canada. A graduate of Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Toronto, Christie Carson has also recently been a contributor to a commemorative publication analyzing the work performed as part of the C. P. Taylor retrospective at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival.

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

Deborah Levy is a playwright, poet, and novelist, whose theatre work is informed by a concern to combine visual imagery, music, and text. After working with visual artists and sculptors, and performing her poetry in pubs and galleries and on the cabaret circuit, she was commissioned by the Women's Theatre Group to write Pax. This was followed by Clam, three more plays for the fringe, and then by Heresies for the RSC. She is currently working on an adaptation of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. A collection of Deborah Levy's poetry, An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, have both been published by Jonathan Cape. She has also worked as a writer and director with the Magdalena Project, for whom she directed a devised theatre piece entitled The B File, based on her own short story ‘Swallowing Geography’. This was performed in October 1991 in the theatre of Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, where it was well received by both critics and audience, and has since been staged for the European Arts Festival at Chapter, and at the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast. It was in Cardiff that Irini Charitou, who acted in both productions of The B File, talked to Deborah Levy about her concerns and interests as a feminist playwright who has chosen postmodernism as a means of articulating her cultural position. Irini Charitou, who complements the interview with a brief introduction to Pax, Clam, and Heresies, is presently researching towards an MPhil on contemporary British and Greek women's theatre at the University of Lancaster.

In exploring the relationship between situationist theory and theatre in the period of the ‘counter-culture’ in Britain, the following article seeks to provide an account of the ‘spectacularization’ of political action through the language and forms of drama. The relatively neglected work of Raoul Vaneigem is examined for its treatment of theatricality as one of the organizing discourses of the spectacle, and the suggestion that ‘drama’ is a constant choreographic presence in the social world is explored alongside related ideas concerning the dramatization of everyday life in the work of Raymond Williams and Aida Hozic. Attempts to ‘disrupt the spectacle’ through political action during the period of the counter-culture are discussed in relation to this material. Graham White is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London, and has been Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre since 1990.

In his earlier article, ‘Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre’, (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of ‘performative contradiction’ which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the ‘hidden agenda’ of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients – the ‘national’ fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale ‘reminiscence theatre’ group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's ‘parent’ company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.

Playwrights, directors, and theatre teachers interested in understanding the theatrical possibilities and functions of monologue soon discover that critical analysis in this area is limited alike in extent and depth. In the following analysis of contemporary dramatic monologue, Paul C. Castagno therefore begins by exploring its more expected or traditional uses, and proceeds to examine its present expanded function with particular reference to the plays of two contemporary American playwrights, Len Jenkin and Mac Wellman – both multiple Obie Award-winning writers, whose dramaturgic techniques have been highly influential yet who remain largely overlooked in the critical arena. He concludes that monologue in the new dramaturgy is actually moving in various and often complex ways back towards a kind of dialogism. Paul C. Castagno, who is himself a practising playwright, is director and dramaturg of the New Playwrights' Program at the University of Alabama, where he has developed a number of new playscripts for award-winning productions. He has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Text and Presentation, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Topics, among others, and will shortly be taking on the editorship of the journal Theatre Symposium. His study The Early Commedia dell'Arte, 1550–1621: the Mannerist Context is due for publication by Peter Lang in 1993, and he is is currently preparing a playwriting text that explores elements of the new dramaturgy.

We get not only the kind of government but also the kind of theatre we deserve, argues Liisa Hakola, who here relates the new impulses behind Shakespearean productions of the 1980s to the social and economic assumptions which came to prevail in Britain during the ‘Thatcher decade’ – and seemingly beyond. Desirable though increased subsidy for the theatre may be – in particular for the RSC, as chief purveyors of Shakespeare – what determines the relevance of Shakespearean productions to their times, she suggests, transcends the availability of cash subsidies, however symptomatic of a prevailing climate their size or scarcity may be. Although based in Helsinki, Liisa Hakola spent much of the 1980s in Britain, preparing her PhD thesis, published in 1988, on three RSC productions of Richard II. She has published two other books in Finnish, and also translated five of Fay Weldon's novels into that language.

DEBORAH LEVY wrote Pax as the result of a commission from the Women's Theatre Group to write an ‘anti-nuclear’ play. In her own words, she detests ‘those last-two-minutes-in-a-bunker-type scenarios’, so she decided to write an epic play with Europe in the twentieth century as a focal point. Pax takes on board Europe's past, present, and future. There are four women characters in the play, The Keeper, The Hidden Daughter, The Mourner, and The Domesticated Woman. In the published edition of Pax (Plays by Women, Vol. VI, ed. Mary Remnant, Methuen, 1987), Levy describes how she envisaged these characters:

I found four archetypes, who represented twentieth-century Europe for me.

In his discussion-piece for NTQ 28 (1991), Graham Ley raised questions about the self-determination of the avant-garde, drawing on analogies from dance and design to explore the problem of the post-modern in the theatre. He also outlined a critique of what he called an ‘alternative establishment in theatrical endeavour’: here, he extends that critique into an analysis of the techniques of persuasion to be found in one of the most influential texts in post-war theatrical theory, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, arguing for an enhanced attention to be given to the language and textuality of theory. Graham Ley is a writer and researcher who has taught in the Universities of London and Auckland. As Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre at the University of New South Wales in 1984, he compiled jointly with Peter Fitzpatrick of Monash University the survey of new developments in Australian theatre published in NTQ5 (1986). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991. He is currently working on a book on theatrical theory.

The retrospective season of plays by C. P. Taylor at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival marked a welcome revival of interest in the work of this prolific Scottish playwright, who had also put down roots in the North-East. Taylor, who was born in 1929 and died in 1981 still in his early fifties, was a committed socialist who wrote sophisticated working-class plays for working-class people – and this not only made much of what he wrote unacceptable in the West End, but also, for different reasons explored in this article, unsympathetic to such venues as the Royal Court. Thus, while the range of his work reflected certain trends in British post-war theatre – the drive for regional and community theatre, dissatisfaction with bourgeois naturalistic styles, and the growth of the fringe – in other respects Taylor was untypical as a left-wing writer. His work deserves the reappraisal here attempted in part because of previous critical neglect, and in part because the reasons for that neglect themselves merit attention for what they reveal about critical attitudes. The author, Susan Friesner, teaches in the Drama Department at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.

Is there a specific lesbian theatre aesthetic? If so, is butch and femme at the heart of it? Or androgyny? Or the freedom-confinement dynamic? Or, on another level, distancing role from ‘essential being’, and ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as social constructs from male and female as biological entities? By focusing on a number of lesbian texts, including her own work, Nina Rapi explores both the theory and practice of an emerging aesthetic that reveals the ‘performance of being’, seeking to ‘shift the axis of categorization’, and so to create a new and exciting theatre language. Nina Rapi is a playwright and translator whose theatre work includes Ithaka (Riverside Studios, June 1989; Link Theatre, staged readings, April 1992; published in Seven Plays by Women, 1991), Critical Moments, a trilogy of shorts (Soho Poly Theatre, June 1990), Johnny Is Dead (First One Person Play Festival, Etcetera Theatre, March 1991), Dreamhouse (Oval House and Chat's Palace, April-May 1991), Dance of Guns (touring production, including King's Head and Jackson's Lane Theatres, April-May 1992), and Dangerous Oasis (Finborough, March 1993).

By way of introduction to the interview which follows with Joan Lipkin, director and playwright of That Uppity Theatre in St Louis, Missouri, Lizbeth Goodman here provides a context for the discussion of what she calls ‘theatres of choice’ – plays, feminist or otherwise, which deal with the issue of reproductive rights, now being actively challenged in the United States and under threat elsewhere. She looks at the history of legislative change and reaction in the United States, and in particular at the Supreme Court decision in the ‘Webster case’, which represented a victory for the neo-conservative movement. Among theatrical responses to this were Lipkin's ‘pro-choice musical comedy’, He's Having Her Baby, in which gender role-reversal and comic stereotypes were employed in an attempt to reach audiences in St Louis – the city at the centre of the Webster controversy. Lizbeth Goodman, who lectures in literature for the Open University, has published a sequence of feminist theatre interviews in New Theatre Quarterly, and her ‘Feminst Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect’ appeared in NTQ33 (February 1993). She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (Routledge, 1993).