Teatro Ósmego Dnia, the Theatre of the Eighth Day, has for forty years flourished in Poland, never as part of the established theatre, but as one of what Eugenio Barba calls the ‘floating islands’ – those companies which live as much as make theatre, and form part of an informal international circuit of like-minded though distinct and individual groups. Ian Watson here shapes his own memories of the group in the form of a letter to one of NTQ's co-editors, with whom he has shared experiences of Polish theatre, and in particular the work of Eighth Day, relating their history to the changing political and economic environment in Poland, and the company's relationship with the outside world. Ian Watson, who is a Contributing 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 published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Real or imaginary, babies provided the Victorian public with a favourite spectacle, featuring in sensational, domestic, and farcical plays, often at the centre of the plot. Impossible to train, their deployment was not without hazard. Under scrutiny here are the range of their manifestations and the effects they could generate. Warren's baby farce Nita's First (1884) emerges as a precursor to The Importance of Being Earnest; Morton's nameless Children in the Wood (1793) swell into music-hall stars by the time of the Drury Lane pantomime of 1888. The departure of real babies from the stage was dictated by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1889—legislation which had in turn been influenced by the rhetoric of moral reformers which constructed all theatre children as vulnerable, exploited ‘babies’ in need of protection, not applause. The author, Anne Varty, is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The following interview is intended is a companion piece to the preceding article by Carl Lavery, ‘The Pepys of E11: Graeme Miller and the Politics of Linked’. The interview took place in East London in late August 2004.

In this article, Victoria Hunter explores the concept of the ‘here and now’ in the creation of site-specific dance performance, in response to Doreen Massey's questioning of the fixity of the concept of the ‘here and now’ during the recent RESCEN seminar on ‘Making Space’, in which she challenged the concept of a singular fixed ‘present’, suggesting instead that we exist in a constant production of ‘here and nows’ akin to ‘being in the moment’. Here the concept is applied to an analysis of the author's recent performance work created as part of a PhD investigation into the relationship between the site and the creative process in site-specific dance performance. In this context the notion of the ‘here and now’ is discussed in relation to the concept of dance embodiment informed by the site and the genius loci, or ‘spirit of place’. Victoria Hunter is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Leeds, who is currently researching a PhD in site-specific dance performance.

In this article, Gwynne Edwards examines recent London productions of Lorca's Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, two great Spanish plays which, in comparison with the works of Ibsen and Chekhov, are performed relatively rarely in the United Kingdom. He argues that, because these plays are among Lorca's rural tragedies and are deeply rooted in the soil and traditions of southern Spain, their performance and translation require a sound knowledge both of that background and of Lorca's dramatic style. In this context, the two productions at the Almeida and the National Theatre are seen to be a useful guide to the pitfalls of staging Lorca's plays in a cultural environment which is very different from his own. Gwynne Edwards is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a specialist in Spanish theatre. Ten of his translations of Lorca's plays have been published by Methuen, and most of these have had professional productions. A number of his translations of Golden Age and South American plays have also been published and performed.

The community dance movement in the United Kingdom has been very active in organizing and delivering dance projects for disenfranchised communities and individuals for several decades. But initiatives have gained momentum following a shift in policy for arts funding after the 1997 General Election. This article examines how dance social-inclusion projects seek not only to allow those excluded from mainstream opportunities to participate in dance, but also to empower them. The aim of the paper is critically to examine these aims while acknowledging the work that the dance community has done in welcoming participation from groups traditionally not associated with the art form. Sara Houston firstly sets the political and social context that welcomes notions of empowerment to take root within arts projects, then goes on to debate what practitioners mean by the term within the context of championing a social inclusion policy, and discusses how examples of claims manifest themselves in practice, if they do at all. She examines one three-year initiative for residents of a sheltered housing unit and an eighteen-month project in an adult male maximum security prison, outlining what the projects offered and considering the limits of recording evidence of empowerment. Sara Houston lectures in the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey. Her work on social inclusion initiatives in dance has been published by Animated, Primary Health Care, and has also been utilized in a Government White Paper.

New historicism rewrites history from different viewpoints in order to prove that the past is inaccessible, and all historians can do is to work on incomplete knowledge, aware of the fact that a teleological, linear approach to their subject is misleading. In this study, Zekiye Er aims not only to analyze Tom Stoppard's Travesties from a new historicist stance, but also to utilize a new historicist approach to an understanding of what Stoppard is doing in the play, in the light of the striking parallels between Stoppard's technique and the new historicist critics' methods of analyzing history and literary texts. She concludes that Stoppard himself plays the role of a new historicist while writing a brilliant comedy of ideas. Zekiye Er received her PhD for a dissertation on Stoppardian drama from Ankara University in 2004. She has been working as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature of Gaziantep University since 1993.

In the following article, Christine Hamilton and Adrienne Scullion review the system of theatre provision and production that exists in the rural areas of Scotland, most especially in the Highlands and Islands, assessing the policy framework that exists in the nation as a whole and in the Highlands and Islands in particular. They highlight the role and responsibilities of volunteers within the distribution of professional theatre in Scotland, challenge the response of locally based theatre-makers and nationally responsible agencies to represent rural Scotland, and raise issues fundamental to the provision of culture nationally. In doing so, they question what we expect theatre policy to deliver in rural areas, and what we expect rural agents to contribute to theatre provision and policy. Finally, they suggest that, in the system of rural arts in Scotland, there are wider lessons for the development of arts in and the arts of other sparsely populated and fragile communities. Christine Hamilton is the director and Adrienne Scullion the academic director of the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow, where Adrienne teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies.

The international circulation of commercial theatre in the early twentieth century was driven not only from the centres of Great Britain and the USA, but by the specific enterprise and habitus of managers in ‘complementary’ production sites such as Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The activity of this period suggests a de-centred competitive trade in theatrical commodities – whether performers, scripts, or productions – wherein the perceived entertainment preferences and geographies of non-metropolitan centres were formative of international enterprise. The major producers were linked in complex bonds of partnerships, family, or common experience which crossed the globe. The fractures and commonalities displayed in the partnerships of James Cassius Williamson and George Musgrove, which came to dominate and shape the fortunes of the Australian industry for much of the century, indicate the contradictory commercial and artistic pressures bearing upon entrepreneurs seeking to provide high-quality entertainment and form advantageous combinations in competition with other local and international managements. Clarke, Meynell and Gunn mounted just such spirited competition from 1906 to 1911, and their story demonstrates both the opportunities and the centralizing logic bearing upon local managements shopping and dealing in a global market. The author, Veronica Kelly, works at the University of Queensland. She is presently undertaking a study of commercial stars and managements in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, with a focus on the star performer as model of history, gender, and nation.

The narrative process is inherently selective and consequently open to distortion and falsification. J. M. Synge humorously illustrated this in The Playboy of the Western World, in which his central character, Christy Mahon, reinvents himself through the telling and retelling of his own story. Play-boy, a much more recent performance work created by Desperate Optimists, takes as its opening gambit the riots that accompanied the first performances of this controversial Irish classic and adds a bewildering variety of other narrative materials to the mix—providing, as it does so, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on this story about stories. A detailed account of the show in performance and the manner in which the company construct their own tall tales initiates an investigation into how fact becomes fiction in the creation of new narrative accounts, narrative being considered as a participatory event that is both a psychological imperative and a ludic pleasure. Neal Swettenham lectures in drama at Loughborough University. His research into the role and status of narrative in contemporary theatre has led him to fresh examinations of both traditional story-based drama and avant-garde performance work. In particular, he has written about the plays of American dramatist Richard Foreman and is currently exploring the challenges presented to both actor and director by these texts.

A momentary glimpse of Janet Jackson's breast on American television precipitated an earnest debate on the overstepping of marks (and recording-breaking TiVo replays) – while in many states, most notably Nevada, explicitly sexual performance is a respected contributor to the local economy. In this paper, Jeffrey D. Mason finds a way through the maze of state legislation and Supreme Court decision-making on the subject, exploring the interpretations of a constitutional right to self-exposure in conflict with the perceived need for protection against it; and he assesses the performance of Crazy Girls, a typical Las Vegas revue of the more ‘acceptable’ kind. He argues that the law, ‘constituting a text analogous to a playscript in its delineation of roles, actions, interactions, and even costume choices, attempts to impose taste with a special precision by addressing display, intent, and effect; and serves as both an expression of disapprobation and an instrument to censor performance’. Jeffrey D. Mason is Professor of Theatre Arts and Head of the Department of Theatre Arts in the University of Oregon. A shorter version of this article was delivered as a plenary session paper at the annual conference of the American Society for Theatre Research at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, on 20 November 2004.

The explosion of new theatre writing in Britain during and since the 'nineties contrasted with a dearth of original plays on continental Europe, east and west. Sanja Nikcevic attributes this in part to the dominance over the previous decades of the role of leading directors, who increasingly sought out raw materials to shape productions conforming to their own or their company's ideas. She traces the attempts in a number of countries to correct the imbalance by encouraging new writing through workshops and festivals—yet also how the explosion and importation of the British ‘in-yer-face’ style then affected the kind of new writing that was considered innovative and acceptable at such events. She argues against the claims made for the political significance of plays such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, suggesting rather that the acceptance of the normality of violence without reference to its social context negates the possibility of remedial action. A former Fulbright Scholar, Sanja Nikcevic is Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her full-length publications include The Subversive American Drama: Sympathy for Losers (1994), Affirmative American Drama: Long Live the Puritans (2003), and New European Drama: the Great Deception (2005). She was the founder and for eight years the president of the Croatian Centre of the International Theatre Institute.

Report on the conference arranged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Birmingham University, held at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on 16 October 2004.

In the autumn of 2003, Poh Sim Plowright went to Rajasthan—the cradle of string puppetry, where the Creator is perceived as the Arch Puppeteer controlling humans through strings—in search of the provenance of its famed string-puppet tradition (kathputli). She found an ancient collection of thirty-two stories—Sinhasan Battisi—(hitherto unknown in the West), focusing on a golden throne and female puppet power, which provides eloquent testimony to the original importance of the puppet art in that part of India. Yet in the streets of Udaipur today, that art seems to have been reduced to gaudy souvenirs and variety acts aimed at the foreign tourist. The old stories with their nourishing narrative frameworks are gone, and the town of Bassi, once famous for its wood-carvers and specialist puppet-makers, has abandoned its traditional rituals and techniques in the face of commercialism. In this article, the author considers the current state of string puppetry in Rajasthan in the absence of these rituals and stories, and looks at the possible future of the art. Poh Sim Plowright is Senior Lecturer in Oriental Drama and the Director of the Noh Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London.