In NTQ40 (November 1994), in the first of two pieces on modern directorial approaches to the staging of opera as music theatre, Maria Shevtsova discussed Peter Brook's production of Impressions de Pelléas, complementing her own analysis with an interview with one of the leading actor-singers, Vincent Le Texier. Pursuing a similar dual-faceted approach, here she provides a detailed explication of Robert Wilson's production of Madame Butterfly, seen at the Opéra de Paris Bastille in 1993, exploring the ways in which Puccini's original orientalisms are translated and transmuted into a version of intercultural theatre appropriate to our own fin de siècle. Again setting her own views against those of a leading actor-singer – here, Diana Soviero, who played Butterfly – she explores how Wilson's coolly aesthetic, even ascetic style ‘incarnates the century's tentacular, monopolistic tendencies (of which interculturalism in its many guises in the arts are a sign), as well as its polyvalencies (of which the blurring of genres – hybrid genres – is a sign)’. Maria Shevtsova, who teaches in the Department of French Studies in the University of Sydney, earlier contributed a three-part survey of ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989), and recently published a major collection of essays, Theatre and Cultural Interaction. Her present article forms part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.

The visit to Britain in the spring of 1994 by the St Petersburg Maly Drama Theatre – described by Peter Brook as ‘the finest theatre ensemble in Europe’ – was warmly received by audiences and critics alike. Yet in Britain the idea of this kind of ‘permanent’ theatre company, so dear to earlier generations of actors and directors, seems not to have survived the climate of the 'eighties, and there is a sense that such remaining permanent companies as the Moscow Art Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble are dinosaurs from a more collectivist past. In an interview with Izvestiya, however, the Maly company's director, Lev Dodin, castigated western theatre for being ‘just a branch of the economy’ and having no permanent companies on what he called ‘the Russian model’. What is the truth about ensembles and permanent companies? In 1991, as part of research for an essay on Chekhov and the ‘company problem’ in British theatre, Patrick Miles interviewed Peter Hall on the subject of ensembles and companies. Peter Hall founded the Royal Shakespeare Company as a permanent ensemble in 1960, directed the National Theatre for fifteen years – but not as a permanent theatre company – and since 1988 has been running his own, impermanent company in the theatrical market-place. At the time of the interview, here edited for publication, Peter Hall was rehearsing Twelfth Night at the Playhouse Theatre, London. Patrick Miles's essay ‘Chekhov and the Company Problem in the British Theatre’ was included in Chekhov on the British Stage (Cambridge, 1993).

Drama training in Britain at the present time is replete with horror stories. In the academic sector, intake numbers have been pushed far beyond the strength of the resources – whether of personnel or performing spaces – designed to accommodate them. In the actor training sector, those students who have somehow managed to cope with the heavy fees struggle for subsistence – often by working at full-time jobs during the night and at weekends, while some have even joined the homeless on the streets. In the following article, Clive Barker attempts to disentangle the complex web of factors which have led to this situation, and to suggest how some of the artistic, if not the economic problems might begin to be tackled. Clive Barker, who recently retired from the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly. Formerly an actor with Theatre Workshop, he is also author of the seminal text, Theatre Games.

This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoir Joan's Book. Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the company's distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Léon Moussinac's The New Movement in the Theatre of 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinac's chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewood's last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote on Oh What a Lovely War in NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment – film, theatre, and television – have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the ‘spectatorial gaze’, as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the ‘ways of looking’ currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery – with or without its sexual-political connotations – and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on Beckett and Ionesco.

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue of Theatre Quarterly (1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, The Staffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary, Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

We rehearsed here at the Bastille for eight weeks, very slowly. Every finger, every movement was specific because of the lighting. The lighting is one of the most important things in the show. He has about four hundred and fifty lights on the sides and above. We could not, for instance, be parallel to each other. We always had to be on a diagonal, because the lights from the side would shadow. My hands are very important in the production because they are lit at every angle. They are made up very much. My whole body's made up. Every gesture, every point of every finger, is at the character; and every movement reflects the light. If my fingers are open, the light comes through. If I close them, that means I'm angry and I let no light in. It's really incredible. He's a genius, the man, he's a genius.

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.

This article explores the much-debated question of the political impact or potential of theatre from a new angle. Accepting frankly the limitations of a medium which seldom reaches more than four per cent of the population, Temple Hauptfleisch looks instead at the contingent ways in which influence works – creating ‘images’ of authors, performers, venues, companies, and even of specific occasions which work upon audiences and non-audiences alike. The ideas explored in this article were first proposed in a paper read at a colloquium on ‘The Semiotics of Political Transition’, held at the Port Elizabeth Campus of Vista University in August, 1992: although most of the author's examples are thus from the theatre world of South Africa, the major thrust of his argument holds equally well for any contemporary westernized, media-dominated society. Temple Hauptfleisch is Associate Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre Research at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is co-editor of the South African Theatre Journal and has published widely on the history and theory of South African theatre.

The controversy in the United States surrounding the funding of ‘offensive‐ and ‘pornographic‐ works by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has centered on whether or not the organization should espouse a morally conservative outlook in regard to the public funding of artistic works. However, the NEA arguably already pursues conservative policies rooted in its vision of the form, function, and outlook of the arts it exists to serve. The appointment of the actress Jane Alexander as chair of the NEA may have indicated that the organization would become more liberal in its moral stance, but the question remains: can government-supported art be anything but conservative? The following is a case study of one theatre's relationship to the NEA in the context of the Washington, DC, theatre community. The author, Mary C. Resing, is a former business manager of New Playwrights' Theatre in Washington, DC, and a former grant writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently working on her dissertation on the actress-manager Vera Kommissarzhevskaia.

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Mick Wallis explored some of the characteristics of the phenomenon of working-class political pageantry which reached its peak between the two world wars, looking in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. Here, he explores earlier and later forms of modern pageantry, from the bourgeois civic style (of which Louis Napoleon Parker was virtually inventor and remained the presiding genius) to the attempts of working-class organizations to create a people's form of pageantry, whether in the interests of Communist Party recruitment or – following in the footsteps of the Victorian monarchy and provincial city fathers – of creating its own, alternative memorializing traditions. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

For British dramatists nurtured in and by the hopes for socialism which characterized the 'sixties and the 'seventies, the Thatcherite period – with the eclipse of a fatally flawed communist system as its international dimension – demanded not only new thinking, but at least the consideration of a new dramaturgy. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., here explores the ways in which one of the most consistently committed of contemporary writers, Trevor Griffiths, confronts in Hope in the Year Two, his play about the death of the French Revolutionary Danton, the dilemma not only of the revolutionary hero, but of the dramatist confronted with attacks upon the concept of history itself, whether from the gurus of post-modernism or of the New Right. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., teaches modern drama in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (1989) and Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (1994). His current research interests include post-Cold War British drama.

One of the distinguishing qualities of live theatre is its built-in ephemerality: yet all too often this involves the loss not only of the fruits of theatrical experience but of ‘experience’ itself, understood as the learning of craft – and this puts experimental companies and practitioners alike in danger of constantly reinventing the wheel. Connecting this to the needs of serious performers to acquire a wide range of expressive movements, and to explore the process of relating these movements to thoughts and feelings, Lea Logie discusses both common elements and contrasting approaches in the work of some of the great European practitioners, whose insights are too valuable to be forgotten or consigned to scholarly archives. Lea Logie is a tutor in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia, where she specializes in cross-cultural studies of Asian and western theatre.

Peter Brook's work has always figured in debates over ‘intercultural’ projects in the contemporary theatre. However, the controversy has most often centred on his engagement with Asian theatrical traditions, and in particular on his production of The Mahabharata. David Moody here examines Peter Brook's writings on Africa, as theatrical ‘discourse’ with its own theoretical half-life quite distinct from actual productions. This discourse, it is argued, can be described as ‘primitivist’, in that it constructs the African audience as, in Barthes's term, ‘degree zero’ – a ‘limit-text’ to universal theatrical communication. In doing so it presents a limiting version of African theatrical traditions themselves, and, as a result, reinforces a broader, more destructive global discourse of cultural primitivism concerning African and so-called ‘indigenous’ art and performance. David Moody, who currently lectures in Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is a playwright, actor, and director who has written extensively on African, post-colonial, and popular theatre, and is now engaged in his own problematic intercultural projects.

Despite the recognized value of semiotics in opening-out our perceptions of what constitutes the text of a performance, its literary associations have meant that most theatre semioticians concerned with reception cling to analogies between the literary reading act and the spectator's reception of a theatrical performance. For them, there is a conceptual as well as a metaphorical relationship between a literary text and what they term the performance text — and so, by implication, a similar relationship between how both are ‘read’. Taking these semioticians at their word, in the following article Ian Watson isolates the actor in the performance text, examines how s/he is read, and questions the attempts of scholars to ignore quality as an important component of this reading.

Best known in his own times as an encyclopedist, the eighteenth-century French writer, philosopher, dramatist, and critic Denis Diderot (1713–84) was to emerge a century later, though his Paradoxe sur le comédien, as a posthumous protagonist in the debate launched in Britain in William Archer's Masks or Faces? (1888). That debate – on the role of feeling and instinct versus craft and technique in acting – has been taken up and sustained by many theorists and practitioners in the succeeding century. In the following article, however, Graham Ley is more concerned with Diderot's wider role as theatrical theorist, suggesting that he offers – as also in his defence of pantomime, his proposal for the ‘serious genre’ which anticipated realism, and his advocacy of scenographic reform – not a unified vision of the nature of theatre but an enduring sense, precisely, of its paradoxical and ironic qualities. Graham Ley has just joined the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently on ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

Ian Watson and Susana Epstein went to Chile and Argentina in the summer of 1992 in order to interview several leading theatre artists about the differences the political changes in their countries had made to their own work and the work of their colleagues. Although, as the authors stress, they made no attempt to conduct a systematic study of the theatrical implications of the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, their findings suggest some parallels with the situation in Eastern Europe. Ian Watson, who heads the Theatre Division in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers University, Newark, is a theatre scholar whose main interests include contemporary Latin American theatre. Susana Epstein, an expatriate Argentine, is a Contributing Editor of The Drama Review.

Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents. Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography, Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving the Choice and American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of 1991. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared in Artforum, Theatre Research International, and Comparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning book Dada and Surrealist Performance has just been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.

In the 'fifties Brecht undertook an examination of Stanislavski's theatre which in terms of breadth and intensity was unprecedented in his career – and rehearsal documentation from that period testifies that he incorporated some of Stanislavski's methods into the stage practice of the Berliner Ensemble. The seriousness of his study is attested by the organized collection of notes on the production of Katzgraben recently discovered in Elizabeth Hauptmann's estate. Brecht's preoccupation with Stanislavski at this time has been seen as an attempt to protect his theatre's existence in an environment where Stanislavski, socialist realism, and the communist cause were regarded as interlinked. In this paper, Meg Mumford, recently appointed to a lectureship in theatre in the University of Glasgow, outlines the nature of Brecht's study of Stanislavski, and draws upon the records of the ensuing theatre practice, the Katzgraben notes in particular, to illuminate Brecht's growing recognition of affinities with Stanislavski's methods, which he found useful in fostering the young Berliner Ensemble and in creating performances he viewed as appropriate to audiences in the GDR.