The Jewish-German-Hungarian director and playwright George Tabori has been one of the prominent figures of German-speaking theatre over the past thirty years. Outside Germany, Tabori is best known as the author of provocative Holocaust drama, such as The Cannibals (1968) and Mein Kampf (1987). But as a director Tabori has produced an equally impressive body of work, with ground-breaking productions of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Kafka. Tabori's promotion of theatre as therapy and his unusual actor-centred approach to rehearsal earned his work a ‘somewhat dubious’ reputation of being closely related to psychotherapeutic activity. In this article, Antje Diedrich seeks to clarify the extent to which there are concrete intersections and parallels of thought between Gestalt therapy and Tabori's early theatre practice. She identifies the influence of works by Frederick S. Perls and John O. Stevens on Tabori's discourse on acting and rehearsal practice, and concludes with a discussion of Sigmunds Freude (1975), a production based on protocols of Gestalt therapeutic sessions by Frederick S. Perls. Antje Diedrich works as a Lecturer in European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College in London. She has completed a PhD thesis about George Tabori's theatre practice and is currently working on further articles about Tabori's work as a director and playwright.

Carnival has been appropriated in many ways – by cultural critics after Bakhtin, who expanded the pre-Lenten festival to embrace all such inversions of the established order; by elegant maskers imposing their own social status on the celebration; and more recently by popular entertainers, creating the kind of mass event typified by the midsummer carnival at Notting Hill, divorced alike from religious and calendric associations. Here, Raimund Schäffner considers the critique dramatized in Mustapha Matura's Play Mas (1974) of the appropriation of carnival by the dominant political forces of the state in the context of the Trinidadian inheritance of social and racial tensions, colonial and post-colonial – the context also for the dismissal of the event as socially divisive rather than socially critical by such a figure as Derek Walcott. Raimund Schäffner teaches English and post-colonial literature in the English Department at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of a book on David Edgar and British political drama after 1968, and of articles on David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Caryl Churchill, and Doug Lucie.

Report on the conference to celebrate and interrogate John McGrath's work held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 19–20 April 2002.

Report of the conference on ‘The Greek Theatre Mask in Ancient and Modern Performance’, held at the Noh Studio at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 20–21 April 2002.