WE RECORD with sadness the death in February of Martin Esslin, who had been an Advisory Editor of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1972.

Socialism is alive. Theatre is alive. Socialist theatre is alive. And, in every sense except the literal one, John McGrath, whose body gave up a long, brave fight against illness in January this year, is alive and kicking – Liberal and Tory arses for choice.

Critics and scholars continue to delve assiduously into the literary nuances of Shakespeare's plays, and increasingly the Theatre Studies community pursues the task of documenting performance. But the dynamics of Shakespearean acting continue to be fogged by ideologies and assumptions dating back to the debate between Alfred Harbage and Bertram Joseph in the early post-war period, and to even earlier disputes between inspirational and intellectual interpretations. Here, director and critic Charles Marowitz looks retrospectively at the problem by exploring the living constituents of the actor's art as it grapples with the canon, touching in the process on acting styles from the seventeenth century to the present, and on the divergence between American and British approaches. During his years in England, Charles Marowitz founded the Open Space Theatre and was a close collaborator with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company, notably during the Theatre of Cruelty season. He has published two dozen books on a variety of theatrical subjects, the most recent being Stage Dust: a Critic's Cultural Scrapbook from the 1990s (Scarecrow Press) and Roar of the Canon: Kott and Marowitz on Shakespeare (Applause Books). He is currently Artistic Director of the Malibu Stage Company in California.

Grieving:

UNDER THE TITLE of ‘Old Friends’, Clive Barker mourned in the first issue of NTQ the passing of two men who, in very different ways, had devoted their lives to the service of the theatre – the American director Alan Schneider and the Scottish scholar who gave academic drama an international dimension, James Arnott. Both had been good friends and contributors to the old Theatre Quarterly.

And now, two more old friends to mourn, yet whose lives and achievements must also be celebrated. Jan Kott died, after a long illness, on 22 December, at the age of eighty-seven. He was the only one of our original advisory editors still on the masthead after one hundred and ten issues of the two journals. John McGrath died of leukaemia one month later, on 23 January, at the age of sixty-six.

After John's death, I scanned my diaries for memories of our meetings. I found an entry about going up to the Highlands to see one of his productions. It was There Is a Happy Land, a people's history of the Highlands in songs and stories, from pre-Christianity and the clan chiefs to absentee landlords and NATO bases. I'd commissioned him to make a TV version of it for Channel 4, filming the live performance on the road in faraway villages, school halls, community centres, mixing its bold acting and gorgeous songs and dance tunes with the elating Scottish landscape, with documents of history and economics. He made this piece, as he made all his cornerstone work, for his 7:84 company – its title pointing to the fact that seven per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the wealth.

THE LAST Goon Show radio script Spike Milligan wrote, No. 227, dealt with murder, betrayal, starvation, and cannibalism, with a passing reference to the Holocaust.

Years ago, NTQ co-editor Clive Barker was tantalized by a passing and lost reference on a radio programme to a source of inspiration for musicians of the Be Bop generation: this had showed them ‘a way forward by taking them away from music based on chords and riffs to music based on modes’. Can acting aspire to an analogous state to the improvisations of jazz musicians, in which spontaneity is modulated by the discipline of true respect for the ensemble? Drawing on his own experience as an actor with Theatre Workshop – whose orchestration came close to that of jazz – and on teaching actors to break down inhibitions through the work described in his seminal Theatre Games (1977), Clive Barker looks towards a ‘next step’ in actor training and rehearsal techniques. This would work towards integrating the controlled freedom of jazz with the results he knows can be achieved through his own work with actors – the creation of ‘great and beautiful physical poetry in small rooms’. Oh – and can anyone offer a lead towards that elusive book which inspired the jazz musicians of the 'forties?

JAN KOTT was a seminal critical mind of the twentieth century and one of the last of its theatre intellectuals. I mourn him as a friend and colleague. It is now almost half a century since this Polish expatriate first published Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a book that exploded our thinking about how Shakespeare could be produced on stage. It was Kott's habit to urge contemporary parallels on the classics, not through specious updating but through lived experience – in his case, a life under the Nazi occupation and later under Communism.

EVERY SO OFTEN, usually on a weekend, I would meet Jan Kott in Santa Monica for a coffee and a bagel. Having been weaned in the seedier cafés of Paris and Warsaw, this was a cosy reminder of the bohemian life he led before becoming an academic, a critic, a Resistance-fighter and an émigré.

Early on in the first Thatcher term, one of her young Turk backbenchers announced that his mission in life was to eliminate all small touring theatre companies with the word ‘red’ in their title. In doing so, he acknowledged that in the 'seventies oppositional theatre had ceased to be constrained within theatre buildings (in the mid-'sixties, he'd have wanted to abolish all companies called ‘English’ working in theatres called ‘Court’).

In 2001 Split Britches presented a double bill entitled Double Agency, consisting of one new piece, Miss Risqué, and one already in their repertoire, It's a Small House and We've Lived in it Always – both works having been created in collaboration with the Clod Ensemble. In this article, Geraldine Harris re-stages her earlier encounter with Small House, in the light of seeing it again as part of the double bill, as a means of examining a number of issues concerning the work of Split Britches in general and its reception in the academic world. Particular consideration is given to the manner in which Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver's performances have been read in terms of their ‘real’ lives and relationship and the various ways in which this may reflect the preconceptions of the spectator–critic. Focusing on how their work reiterates specific theatrical traditions and conventions, Harris suggests that utopian tendencies in academic feminist criticism may have underplayed the ways in which, like many famous theatrical double acts, Split Britches constantly perform on the border – between tragedy and comedy, optimism and despair, fantasy and the possible, escape and entrapment. Geraldine Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. Her previous publications include a number of articles on female practitioners in nineteenth-century French popular theatre and on gender issues in contemporary performance. Her latest book, Staging Femininities, Performance and Performativity (Manchester University Press, 1999), explored the relationship between feminist performance and a range of postmodern and poststructuralist theories.

The dramatic upsurge of contemporary new writing on British stages in the past decade, and the emergence of a fresh generation of playwrights led by such talents as Mark Ravenhill, Philip Ridley, Joe Penhall, Phyllis Nagy, Patrick Marber, and the late Sarah Kane, has been variously characterized as the ‘New Brutalism’ or even, in Germany, as the ‘Blood and Sperm Generation’. Here, Aleks Sierz summarizes the argument for ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’ as the most pertinent and inclusive description for the phenomenon, listing its salient characteristics and suggesting the areas in which it is most vulnerable to criticism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic of Tribune and writes about theatre for several publications. He is the author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber, 2001) and teaches journalism at Goldsmiths College, University of London. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the In-Yer-Face Theatre: Sarah Kane and the New British Dramaturgy conference at Stendhal University 3, Grenoble, in May 2001.

Hedda Gabler has long been acknowledged as among the most problematic as well as one of the greatest of Ibsen's plays, requiring a delicate balance to be struck in production between a clearly defined social context and the need to express Hedda's existential selfhood. Here, Erik Østerud, developing a view of the play which as early as 1893 recognized it as ‘waltz tunes over an abyss of nothingness’, defines the three distinct ‘worlds’ around which Hedda circles – those characterized by Aunt Julie, the red-haired singer, and Judge Brack – and her struggles to reconcile Løvberg's impetuous idealism with Brack's facade of conformity. Calling upon a wide range of cultual references, but with a vision focused on the actuality of the play's scenography, Østerud sees the separate social groupings as at once interlocked through a mythic analogy with the cult of Dionysus, and in more contemporary terms giving us an ‘overview of the total economy of sexuality within a bourgeois society that is dominated by panoptical supervision and strong sexual repression’. Erik Østerud is Professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Trondheim, having previously taught at Aarhus, Berkeley, and Oslo. His most recent publication is Theatrical and Narrative Space (Aarhus University Press, 1998).

Pamela Howard designed Border Warfare and John Brown's Body at the Tramway, Glasgow, for John McGrath, and Wicked Old Man, which he wrote and directed for West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1992. Here, she recalls the highly distinctive visual language of the playwright, and the differences this made in seeing through a design from initial discussion to practical use in performance. Pamela Howard is a scenographer, director, writer, educator, exhibition curator, and international producer who has created theatre events in many countries and languages. She was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in 1999 to write What is Scenography? (published by Routledge in 2001), and as adaptor, director, and scenographer created La Celestina at the Hopkins Center, USA, in February 2002, of which the text is forthcoming from Oberon Books.

Jan Kott invited me to conduct this formal ‘final interview’ early in 2001, after I shared with him a draft of the essay ‘Arden and Absolute Milan’ that follows. The essay and the interview were the culmination of over fifteen years of friendship and intermittent writing about Kott, which had extended to the translation of his works. I first met Jan and his wife Lidia at Berkeley in 1986, when they travelled from Los Angeles to see a production of Tadeusz Różewicz's White Marriage that I had directed and designed there, which proved the start of a long personal and professional relationship. I interviewed Kott at his modest apartment in Santa Monica, California, over the weekend of 31 March to 2 April 2001. Lidia had passed away the summer before, and his own health was extremely frail, requiring twenty-four-hour care by a group of charming and attentive Polish-speaking women. He shared his apartment after Lidia's death with an energetic black-and-white kitten, whose energy and mischief amused him greatly. Born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, he had a cereal box decal of Tony the Tiger stuck next to the name-plate on his apartment door (the name Kott also means ‘cat’ in Polish). He was not able to move about without a nurse and a walking frame, but he nevertheless insisted on inviting me out to dinner in a local Polish restaurant, where he heartily ate a meal of steak tartar and flaczki (Polish tripe soup), accompanied by a shot or two of vodka. His nurse, who was with us, seemed amused but not at all astonished by this performance. Afterwards, he admitted this was his first meal out of the house in months – it was possibly his last. In spite of his physical weakness, Kott's mind remained lucid, and he had clearly rehearsed the interview extensively before our meetings in person. Most of the questions I had prepared proved unnecessary. What is published here is culled from approximately five hours of taped material, which Kott later edited along with myself. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my Philadelphia colleague, Helena Morawska White, for her time and energy in transcribing the taped interviews in Polish, and to Michal Zadara for his careful work in translating the unedited text into English.

By the early 'eighties, Dario Fo seemed to have achieved a unique place in British theatre, with both Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can't Pay? Won't Pay! enjoying long West End runs, while he himself retained the respect of the alternative and fringe community for his radical politics and championship of popular theatre forms. Yet although he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, interest in Fo's work seems to have gone into a steady decline in Britain. This is only in part attributable, argues Marco Ghelardi, to a less favourable political and theatrical climate: it has also to do with the topicality and adaptability which is integral to Fo's approach to playwriting, and more especially with an acting style apparently inimical to British traditions – a style based in the collective and the situational rather than the individual and the psychological. Marco Ghelardi is a young playwright, director, and producer whose career has involved him in both the British and Italian traditions. He has also been an assistant director in opera (notably at Covent Garden), and with his theatre company, Outlaw Theatre, he has recently managed to bring a Fo production, Johan Padan and the Discovery of America, back to the Riverside in London, where it opened in May of this year.

Fugard's identity as a playwright was firmly rooted in the struggle against apartheid. What happened to this identity when the post-apartheid ‘New’ South Africa emerged? Black South Africans have followed Nelson Mandela's lead in accomplishing their ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. Why is it so difficult for Fugard to find a role in this new country and put an end to his inner exile? Hilary Burns explores this question in the light of the development of Fugard's whole opus, and the relationship between form and content in plays where the content has tended to overshadow the form. Burns is a professional actor with a career-long commitment to theatre that seeks to challenge or develop issues relevant to today's society. She has worked extensively in small-scale touring theatre, the London fringe, and regional theatre, and has also made appearances in TV and film. In November 2000, she spent a month with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg which inspired her book, The Cultural Precinct, about South African theatre, in particular how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society. Her study of the Market Theatre yesterday and today will follow in NTQ72.

This article describes and analyzes Barry Kyle's production of The Dillen, a community project staged by the RSC in 1983, in which The Other Place became no more than a base from which the play, its actors, and its audiences set out into the streets, fields and river in Stratford, to re-enact the life of a working-class Stratford man, George Hewins, born around a century earlier. In addition to placing the play in its social, political, and local context, the authors raise questions about the implications of the production for the RSC and the people of Stratford today. The kernel of this article was part of an English M.A. dissertation by Catherine Prentice at the University of Warwick in Summer 1998, supervised by Tony Howard. Catherine Prentice and Helena Leongamornlert, a University of Warwick graduate in English and American Literature, have collaborated in further research and interviews to present the version which follows, and both plan further work on community drama. The authors extend their grateful thanks to Tony Howard for his support and advice.

Annotated bibliography of Kott's contributions to the two journals.

In this essay, Drew Milne suggests affinities between the dramatization of history in the work of John McGrath and Karl Marx. He shows how both Marx and McGrath refused to mourn the histories of Germany and Scotland as tragedies, but that differences emerge in the politics of McGrath's radical populism – differences apparent in McGrath's use of music, historical quotation, and direct address. McGrath's layered theatricality engages audience sympathies in ways that emphasize awkward parallels between modern and pre-modern Scotland, and this can lead to unreconciled tensions between nationalism and socialism which are constitutive of McGrath's plays. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He has published various articles on drama and performance, including essays on the work of August Boal, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter, and is currently completing a book entitled Performance Criticism.