Jan Kott wrote for the first issue of NTQ, and has been one of our advisory editors since the beginnings of the original Theatre Quarterly, to which he was also a regular contributor. As a much-published critic – his most recent book being The Bottom Translation, from Northwestern University Press in 1987 – he needs no introduction, and, ever since the first publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, his sense of how criticism can be made relevant to theatre practice has also meant that he is much in demand as that mysterious creature, the dramaturg. Now read on.…

Jan Kott meets Jerzy Grotowski: a theatre critic, who has achieved in his work the merging of the interpretive and the creative acts, encounters the guru, as Kott describes him, whose life has been spent breaking down other boundaries – between ritual and theatre, between theatre and life itself. Both the original Theatre Quarterly and NTQ have been fortunate in publishing regular contributions from Jan Kott, and in his long-standing role as one of our advisory editors. Grotowski we have observed, even criticized, from a greater distance. Here, Jan Kott narrows the gap.

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.

In previous issues, NTQ has paid close attention to the theoretical work of Odin Teatret founder and director Eugenio Barba, publishing several of his articles relating to the actor's scenic presence and the manipulation of his or her performing energies. Indeed, as a result of his work with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, Barba is perhaps better known today as a theatre scholar than as a director: but he insists that virtually all of his research originates in his work with the actors of Odin Teatret. Here, David Shoemaker, who is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, on the relationship between Barba's work as theoretician and practitioner, describes his encounter with the Odin's most recent performance piece, entitled Talabot.

Peter Arnott is a young playwright whose relatively brief working career has spanned a wide spectrum not only of Scottish theatrical outlets, but of the styles and approaches open to a politically committed writer in a community which has consistently and vehemently rejected Thatcherism, yet which has to live within its political if not its cultural boundaries. Here, Peter Arnott talks with Greg Giesekam, of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Glasgow, about the development of his own thinking, and its relationship to his working methods and their theatrical applications.

The English Shakespeare Company was founded in 1986 by Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington with a commitment to take large-scale productions to regional venues. Henry IV, Parts One and Two and Henry V opened at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in November 1986 under the title The Henrys: they were then staged at the Old Vic and toured extensively. In December 1987 Richard II, with a two-part adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI (House of Lancaster and House of York) and Richard III, were added to the previous trilogy to create a complete cycle of history plays – The Wars of the Roses. The cycle was toured in England and abroad before playing at the Old Vic in the spring of 1989. It has since been filmed for television by Portman Productions. The only comparable treatment of the histories in the theatre took place at Stratford in 1964. when Peter Hall and John Barton staged seven plays as a sequence spanning English history from the reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III. Andrew Jarvis has been with the English Shakespeare Company since 1986 when he played Gadshill, Douglas, Harcourt, and the Dauphin. He has since played Exton, Hotspur, and Richard III. In 1988 he won the Manchester Evening News Award for Best Actor in a Visiting Production for his portrayal of Richard III. Prior to joining the ESC he had played many roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here, he is interviewed by Stephen Phillips, lecturer in drama at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who is currently preparing a study of Shakespeare's history cycles in performance in the twentieth century.

Peter Barnes was born in 1931, and has been writing for the theatre since 1963: but he remains resolutely uncommercial, and enjoys even among enthusiasts an essentially cult following – though this includes Terry Hands, who directed his most recent work to reach the stage. Red Noses, for the RSC at the Barbican in 1985. The Ruling Class, his ‘baroque comedy’ on the British aristocracy and the ways it exercises power, helped to bring him the John Whiting Award in 1968 and the Evening Standard award as most promising playwright of 1969, though many found his ‘neo-Jacobean’ portrait of a sublimely insignificant Spanish monarch. The Bewitched, an even richer work when it reached the Aldwych under Hands's direction in 1974. Laughter, half-set in Auschwitz, followed at the Royal Court in 1978. In between, Barnes proselytizes enthusiastically for Ben Jonson, on whom he wrote for NTQ11 (1987), but makes most of his living from writing screenplays, and as a radio dramatist – notably in his occasional but long-running sequence of monologues. Barnes's People. As a near-contemporary, NTQ co-editor Clive Barker began this interview by discussing Barnes's own background, and talks also with the dramatist about his distinctive themes, beliefs, and working methods. Peter Barnes's Collected Plays to date have recently been published by Methuen.

In NTQ15 (1988) Catherine Boyle surveyed the paradoxically rich variety of theatrical practices that have come to life in Chile under conditions of extreme hardship since the military takeover of 1973. She concluded that ‘there is more to be said about Chilean theatre and other interpretations to be made’. The following piece puts forward one such interpretation, by examining some of those practices in terms of the larger social and political questions at stake, and by drawing theatrical and historical parallels between the work of the two most important dramatists of the period – Juan Radrigán and Marco Antonio de la Parra – and the work and thought of Piscator. This article was written well before the developments that have brought Chile to the brink of a re-establishment of some kind of democracy, with the elections of December 1989 won by the opposition to Pinochet: but it still reaches an optimistic conclusion, which we can only hope is borne out by events. Enzo Cozzi is a Chilean who came to exile in Britain in the aftermath of the military coup. He now teaches in the Department of Drama at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. University of London, and runs a puppet theatre company. Travesura, devoted to Latin American popular culture.

This is the second in a series of interviews with women who are involved, in various capacities, in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, in NTQ21, was with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, and provided an update of a previously published interview as well as a discussion of contemporary work: its aim was to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by making available the views and opinions of one of Britain's leading young women playwrights, Charlotte Keatley, along with a detailed account of the origins of her 1989 Royal Court success, My Mother Said I Never Should. Charlotte Keatley was born in London in 1960, but has lived in Leeds and Manchester since she was nineteen. Her many plays include Underneath the Arndale (1982). Dressing for Dinner (1983–84), Citizens (BBC 4, 1987–88), and My Mother Said I Never Should (Contact Theatre, Manchester, 1987, and Royal Court Theatre, London, February 1989; Gaieté Theatre, Paris, September 1989, and European tour). She has been directing playwriting workshops for students while in Cambridge on a Junior Judish E. Wilson Fellowship, 1988–89, and is currently at work on her next plays. The interviewer, and compiler of this series, Lizbeth Goodman, is a New Yorker who is now a Scholar of St John's College, Cambridge, where she is preparing her doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and completing a book on the politics of theatre funding.

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.

Does vague approval for the social objectives of much third-world theatre blind sympathetic western observers to its defects? And, where those objectives are specifically socialist, are the complex dialectics which generate revolution too readily supplanted in favour of simplistic affirmation? R. G. Davis takes examples from his own experience in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Algeria to propose a closer, more active, and inter active attention to the relationship between theatre and national needs, based in a lateral approach to what theatre can and cannot do well. R. G. Davis was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and is currently teaching at San Francisco New College, while working on two films and a book. He has been a regular contributor to Theatre Quarterly and NTQ – most recently, on ‘The Politics and Packaging of Performance Art’ in NTQ13 (1988).

Continuing our coverage of South African theatre, which most recently featured a critical view of the policy of the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, by David Graver and Loren Kruger (in NTQ19), we now include a consideration by South African writer Stephen Gray of one of the Market's most recent productions, by assuredly its best-known playwright, Athol Fugard. My Children! My Africa! is, claims Fugard, ‘between me and my country’. Here, Stephen Gray acknowledges and analyzes the ways in which the play focuses with a new intensity upon the agony of Fugard's native land, as realized by a cast of three: two unknowns, plus the veteran John Kani – here cast, controversially, as a coward and traitor to his people. Stephen Gray has also edited the documentary volume on Athol Fugard in McGraw-Hill's ‘Southern African Literature’ series.

Gaston Salvatore was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1941, of an upper middle class Chilean mother and an Italian father. After completing a degree in law, he went to Berlin in 1965, where he studied sociology, and together with Rudi Dutschke became one of the leaders of the student protest movement. He was arrested and obliged to leave Germany in 1969, returning briefly to Chile. In the early ‘seventies he went to Rome, where he worked with Michelangelo Antonioni. One of the results of that collaboration was his novel. Der Kaiser von China, published in 1979. He began his work in German with a cycle of poems, Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung Natascha Ungeheurs, set to music by Hans Werner Henze, in 1970. His German theatre pieces include Büchners Tod (1972), Fossilien (1975), Freibrief (1977), Tauroggen (1978), Stalin (1985), and Lektionen der Finsternis (1989). A novel, Der Mann mit der Trommel, was published in 1974, and Salvatore's most recent work in that form, Waldemar Müller – ein deutsches Schicksal, appeared in 1982. Gaston Salvatore is co-editor with Hans Magnus Enzensberger of the Trans-Atlantik review, and also writes for Stern, Der Spiegel, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He now lives in Venice. The following interview with Salvatore by Alessandro Tinterri, one of the directors of the Actors’ Museum of Genova, took place in Venice in 1989, following two Italian productions of Salvatore's Stalin in a single season – one by the Compagnia del Collettivo di Parma, with Gigi Dall' Aglio and Michele De Marchi, and another by the Teatro di Sardegna, with Raf Vallone. The original German production opened in Berlin, at the Schiller-Theater on 31 October 1987, and was followed by several other productions, including one directed by Salvatore himself at Karlsruhe. In 1988 George Tabori staged the play at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with a woman, Angelica Damrose, in the title role. Alessandro Tinterri sets out in this interview to examine the background to Gaston Salvatore's work and to trace the multi-cultural pathways that have led to his present standing in the European, and especially German, theatre.

While considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the work of women dramatists during the wave of proto-feminist activity in the early years of the present century, the way in which women characters – whether created by male or female writers – were presented has been less adequately investigated. Here, Jan McDonald, Head of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, explores the work of well-known and largely-forgotten playwrights alike, discussing the ways in which the ‘new drama’ – the subject of Jan McDonald's recent book for the ‘Macmillan Modern Dramatists’ series – reflected the concerns of the ‘new woman’.

Unlike Avignon, still active after more than forty years, the once notorious Nancy Festival has slipped unobtrusively into history. David Looseley sets out here to trace this itinerary. After reviewing the festival's origins and its importance for the experimental theatre of the 1960s, he examines what became of it in the bleaker decades which followed, and assesses the meaning of its decline. David Looseley, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Bradford, is currently engaged in research funded by the Leverhulme Trust into the politics of culture in contemporary France. His published work includes a book on the theatre of the twentieth-century French dramatist Armand Salacrou.

A brilliant Richard III and King Lear, Ramaz Chkhikvadze has firmly established himself among the world's greatest Shakespearean actors, for whom Robert Sturua, director of the famous Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, orients all his productions. Here, the theatre critic Sergei Parkhomenko talks to Chkhikvadze about his work, and his personal definition of acting and the human qualities it demands.

Most of the heavily-quoted interviews available on feminist theatre are in serious need of updating. A current account is needed of ‘feminism and theatre’ as experienced by feminist theatre practitioners, and as perceived by feminist theatre students, critics, players and their audiences. To meet this need, NTQ plans a series of interviews with women involved in the British feminist theatre movement today, whose career paths trace developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview is with Gillian Hanna, who worked with the 7:84 Theatre Company and with Belt and Braces from 1971 to 1975, before co-founding the Monstrous Regiment feminist theatre group in 1975. Hanna worked exclusively within the Regiment from 1975 until 1981–82. and is one of the three original members who still actively participate in Regimental management, production, and performance, though she now works extensively outside the group as well, having acted in repertory at the Liverpool Everyman and in Newcastle, Sheffield and Derby. Recently, Hanna spent the best part of a year playing in The House of Bernardo Alba. which opened at the Lyric. Hammersmith, and ran in the West End, and in the Spring of 1989 she played in Caryl Churchill's Ice Cream at the Royal Court. Her acting credits include work in TV and film, and her interests extend to translation of playtexts from French and Italian: she translated Dario Fo's Elizabeth, and is currently on a commission to translate (and re-translate) the complete oeuvre of the one-woman plays of Franca Rame and Dario Fo. Three of the Rame/Fo plays – under the joint title A Common Woman – were recently produced at the Sheffield Crucible and at the Half Moon in London, for which performance Hanna won the 1989 Time Out ‘01 for London’ Award. Projects currently under way within the Regiment include an adaptation of a Marivaux play (The Colony), and possible plans to tour both A Common Woman and Beatrice. She is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, originally a New Yorker, and currently a junior member and scholar of St. John's College and a graduate researcher in the English Faculty of Cambridge University, where she is working on a doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and a book on the politics of theatre funding.

Ever since Aristotle compared the advantages of the epic and dramatic modes, their varying qualities have been a topic of critical debate – though in western theatre the solo storyteller has long since ceased to serve as performer as well as author of his works. Not so in many African nations – including Sierra Leone, where the itinerant storytelling-Performer Lele Gbomba, who sadly died in September 1989, after this article was written, was in some ways typical of his fellow-Craftsmen, in others markedly his own man. Here, Julius Spencer, lecturer in drama at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, describes and discusses Lele Gbomba's distinctive style. Julius Spencer gained his doctorate from the University of Ibadan, and has been active for many years as a playwright and director in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. He is presently researching the traditional theatre forms of Sierra Leone.

This article continues NTQ's recent exploration of the interaction between the study of theatrical performance and other disciplines – in this case, relating in particular to ‘Quantum Physics and the Language of Theatre’, published in NTQ 18 (1989). Schmitt argues that there is a correspondence between the contemporary interest in performance theory and the view of nature provided by modern physics. The analysis of nature in terms of events rather than objects, the perception of reality as a network of non-teleological, non-hierarchical relations, the interest in the interplay between nature and our perception of it: all correlate, she suggests, with an interest in theory of performance. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theater at the University of lllinois at Chicago. She published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ in NTQ 8 (1986), and has also published in Theatre Notebook, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. Her full-length study. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature has just appeared, from Northwestern University Press.

One of the persistent problems in acting, and one that seems to grow steadily in importance, comes from the public identity of the actor. This study suggests that a semiotic approach to the acting sign can help to distinguish the function of celebrity in acting, the threats to authority that celebrity imposes, and the results of celebrity acting both on stage and in the efforts of the actor to achieve an identity. This essay is related to earlier discussions of the stage figure by its author, Michael Quinn, in Modem Drama and Gestus. applying the Prague School model of analysis that also supported his article on reading and directing in NTQ11 (1987). Michael Quinn, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, is currently working on a critical study of Vaclav Havel, as well as a longer study of the stage figure in different theatrical contexts.