HOLSTEBRO in Northern Denmark has become famous as the home of the Nordisk Theaterlaboratorium and the Odin Theatre Company, led by Eugenio Barba. In September 1986 an international congress organized by ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, also directed by Eugenio Barba, was held in Holstebro on the subject of ‘The Female Role as Represented on the Stage’ in various cultures.

The play deals with one of the characters, Ronnie, who is trying to kill the Pope. Now if you wrote about trying to blow up the Pope in 1971, people would say, ‘Where do you get your ideas? It's bizarre…’. I went to see the play in 1981 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival just after the Pope had been shot, because I wondered what that event would do to the play. Would it make audiences gasp? What it did was strange. People used to look at the play in some skewed fashion and say, ‘Oh, what a kooky… what a funny…’. Suddenly, with the shooting of the Pope, I felt as if a protective wall had shattered and the audience had tumbled onto the same side of the mirror as the play, and I felt that their perception allowed them to see the characters' needs and hungers with much more directness than in 1971.

In NTQ4 and 5 David Hornbrook offered a two-part analysis of the purposes, practices, and projected future of drama teaching in schools. Discussion continued in NTQ7 and 8, with responses to Hornbrook's suggestions from a number of other practitioners in the area. Among them was Jon Nixon, currently research fellow in the Division of Education at Sheffield University, who now continues the debate with an article in which he provides a broader perspective, presenting a functional rather than theoretical model of classroom practice. This, he suggests, takes a three-dimensional form: drama as social interaction, as discourse, and as a mode of cognition – or what he calls the ‘depth dimension’ which ‘complements our various ways of knowing’. He concludes that drama should not by necessity be consigned to the margins of ‘the arts’, but be recognized for the vital role it can play not only in the whole humanities cirriculum but, crucially, in the cross-curricular development of communication and expressive skills.

AFTER THE one‐act Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, the opening‐night gala performance at the Teatro d'Arte concluded with The Gods of the Mountain by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, whose work had never been performed in Italy before. In the early press releases about the future programme of the company, there was even talk about a second Dunsany play, A Night at the Inn, but this never reached production. There were also plans for Dunsany to visit Rome and give some lectures about his work: clearly, he was intended to play a large part in the work of the newly established theatre.

The Theatre Festival of the Americas, launched in the summer of 1985. attempts to bring this huge continent – perhaps too often preoccupied with looking back to European and other antecedents – into mutual self-awareness: between North America and South, and between both hemispheres and the newly-assertive states of Central America. Josette Feral, currently teaching in the Département de Théâtre at the Université du Québec in Montreal, reports on the companies represented at the inaugural festival, and at what their work seems to suggest about present preoccupations and potential cross-fertilization.

Although numbered among the earliest of masterpieces from the modern repertoire, Gogol's The Government Inspector has its roots deep in earlier Russian society, and much of its apparent humour is based on close observation of the gradations and prejudices of provincial Russian society in the early nineteenth century. In a detailed exploration of the revival in the National Theatre's Olivier auditorium, Mark Hawkins-Dady relates the play to its origins, suggesting that the director Richard Eyre stuck closely to the metaphorical truth, at least, of the social ambience selected by Gogol – and that the apparently eccentric casting of ‘alternative comedian’ Rik Mayall in the central role closely reflected Gogol's own feelings about the nature and playing of the character. Mark Hawkins-Dady is a graduate student in the Drama Department of Royal Holloway College. University of London, currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on directing practices at the National Theatre.

INTEREST IN ACTORS who play female roles and actresses who play male roles is periodically rekindled. At such times, one might almost suspect that behind these disguises, these contrasts between reality and fiction, lie hidden one of the theatre's secret potentialities. One also often speaks of the actor's female side and the actress's male side, and attempts to develop these forthwith by means of apposite exercises.

Early in 1986, the Ballet Folklorico Nacional de Nicaragua was invited by the London Borough of Camden to play a season at the Shaw Theatre. Its founder and director. Ronald Abud V, taked to Elaine Turner, with the assistance of the company's translator Margaret Clark, about the work and aims of a company which has become closely identified with its country's revolution, and about the means of expressing a rediscovered national identity through the performing arts.

What happens when a play without words, about one evening in the life of a lonely middle-aged woman, is transposed from its original bourgeois German setting into that of a deprived Indian city? Rustom Bharucha, himself born in Calcutta and now an expatriate living in the USA, was so impressed by an American production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Request Concert that, together with a German colleague Manuel Lutgenhorst, he set out to relate the problems, theatrical and social, posed by this one-woman play to the conditions of nine Asian cities over a period of three years. He began in his native city, where Kroetz's Fraulein Rasch became the unmarried office-worker Joya Sen in the performance by Calcutta actress Usha Ganguli. The rehearsals and the final production – in a converted puppet theatre – were illuminating both in the similarities and the differences they revealed between East and West, and in this, the first of three accounts of Request Concert in its Indian productions, Rustom Bharucha records the mutual learning process involved in a fascinating intercultural experience.

The Stary Theatre in Cracow has. since the death of its former director Konrad Swinarski, enjoyed a reputation for more eclectic work than those Polish theatres identified with a single, strong directorial ‘line’. Its recent season nevertheless reveals that this ‘old’ playhouse, as its name translates, remains in the vanguard of new and experimental work, with three productions of contrasting styles but shared stature – Wajda's Crime and Punishment. Pasolini's Affabulazione. and Bradecki's A Pattern of Metaphysical Evidence. The leading Polish critic Andrzej Żurowski. who is also vice-president of the International Association of Theatre Critics, provides an evocative comparison of plays, directors, and styles.

In the first of this series of three articles, published in NTQ 11, the director Rustom Bharucha – born in India. but living and working mainly in New York – described how he initially became intrigued by the idea of transposing Franz Xaver Kroetz's play without words, Request Concert, concerning the last evening in the life of a very ordinary German woman, into a variety of Asian contexts. His ambition was first realized – in collaboration with fellow-director Manuel Lutgenhorst, and with valued assistance from the International School of Theatre Anthropology – in a production mounted in Calcutta, with the actress Joya Sen. The following account of the second production, in Bombay, illuminates both the varieties of Indian urban life and the varieties of theatrical experience, with fascinating insights into the nature of Bombay's competitive, media-saturated society, and the perceptions of the actress Sulabha Deshpande concerning her role and its technical requirements – and how both shed new light on this play and on the nature of theatricality.

In Autumn 1986 Teatr Provisorium from eastern Poland became the latest of the radical groups from that country to visit Britain after an imposed absence. Like the pioneering Teatr Osmego Dnia a year earlier (featured in NTQ8), they came through the support of the Chapter Arts Centre. Cardiff, the Brith Gof Theatre from Aberystwyth. and contacts at Warwick University. Shortly after their previous English performances at the first LIFT festival, most of the company were imprisoned under martial law – what Poles call ‘the War State’ – and one of their company left Poland for good shortly after his release. In the Spring of 1986 they were officially downgraded to the status of unpaid amateurs in an effort to reduce their output. But the company's director. Janusz Oprynski, believes that their work has not changed fundamentally since its foundation: ‘The theatrical space has not changed; nor has our way of creating a theatrical reality. The most important thing is that drama gives us a possibility of transposing personal experience into the language of theatre and this is perhaps – it should be – the most interesting part of theatre work’. In this composite piece, the full context is provided by the whole company in discussion with Tony Howard, who also describes their most recent productions, and finally Piotr Kuhiwczak, a Warsaw lecturer and essayist, speaks with Janusz Oprynski shortly after his arrival in Britain. The translation is by Barbara Plebanek.

In NTQ7 we included an assessment by Geraldine Cousin of two recent productions of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew – one of them by Di Trevis for the touring group of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The designer for that production was Pamela Howard, who created for it a central traverse playing area adaptable to the many different kinds of venues to be visited. Here, she adds an illustrated postscript on the conception, creation, and utility of the design element, which we hope will initiate the regular documentation of this often-neglected area of theatre practice. In addition to designing for the RSC and numerous other theatres and companies, Pamela Howard has since 1972 taught theatre design at the Central School of Art in London.

Interpretive criticism applied to the plays of W. S. Gilbert verges upon self-parody, suggests Eric Midwinter. The musical plays to which Sullivan contributed his inimitable scores were careful and calculated blends of the theatrical resources which Gilbert could command with plot and character conventions of proven and sustained appeal – which could, moreover, attract to the theatre the respectable family audiences for which the Savoy became almost a home-from-home. Eric Midwinter analyzes the ingredients of the operas which contributed to this popular success, describes the veritable industry of spin-offs which they generated, and assesses their contribution to the development of the ‘musical play’ as distinct from the ‘musical comedy’. Eric Midwinter is a social historian and social policy analyst, whose books include Make 'Em Laugh: Famous Comedians and Their World (1979) and Fair Game: Myth and Reality in Sport (1986). He has published widely on social aspects of popular theatre and television, and is presently Director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing.