In the 1990s, Vietnamese traditional theatre has seen its popular base eroded by foreign videos, television imports, and the films that have poured into the country since the advent of the ‘open door’ policy, or doi moi. As that policy is primarily economic in purpose, the advantages offered to the national culture have been questionable. The traditional forms here discussed by Catherine Diamond – tuong, hat boi, and cheo – have lost much of their status in the urban areas, though still popular in the countryside. However, the forms which address contemporary issues – ‘renovated theatre’ (cai luong), spoken theatre (kich noi), and, most recently, ‘mini-theatre’ (san khau nho) – play to significant numbers in Saigon and Hanoi, often employing a distinctive vein of satirical humour. Though trained in the academies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese dramatists have now broken away from the socialist realist ideal and are looking towards the West and China for new artistic developments. The author of this survey, Catherine Diamond, is a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan. She has recently published Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about the traditional dancers in Southeast Asia.

Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in NTQ50, Paul Warwick gave an account in the following issue of its previously undocumented role during the thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence, describing the efforts of the freedom fighters to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only deployed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating the people in matters ranging from women's rights to the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods: and with victory came measures further to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Jane Plastow, in this third and concluding article, takes up the story with the invitation issued by the new government to her and her colleagues to initiate the ‘Eritrea Community-Based Theatre Project’, in an attempt both to widen the perspectives of Eritrean actors and to draw upon all relevant traditions, African and European, in developing a popular but distinctive theatre for the people. In addition to her role as director of the project, Jane Plastow is a lecturer at Leeds University, having worked in theatre for some years in a number of other African nations.