The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).

In August 1995 I directed a studio production of an unfinished piece called Luna Park Eclipses for the National Theatre Studio. The production was non-public and experimental. We rehearsed for two weeks, and then put on a one-off show for an audience of about twenty-five. The cast comprised Peter Bayliss, Timothy Bateson, Dilys Laye, Diana Fairfax, Sheila Burrell, and David Neal.

The words ‘success’ and ‘failure’, mercifully, are not relevant in this context. If they were, the project could be called ‘sucessful’ if only because it threw up questions and I was encouraged to continue: the old mould had cracked open for a moment and I saw, briefly, drama in a new light again. A year later I decided to write about what I am trying to do in Luna Park Eclipses.

The rise and (perceived) decline of Madonna has gone, so to say, hand-in-hand with that of postmodern theory – slightly démodé just at present, but none the less pervasively influential for that. The singer's two most recent albums were critical successes, and the controversy in Argentina over the choice of the star to play Eva Peron testifies to her continuing capacity to attract notoriety. But in what does that notoriety consist? How is the persona that is all we know of Madonna constructed, and how does it work? How is she able to make such distinctive use of the emergent potential of multimedia? What constitutes the coherence of Madonna's image? Mark Watts, a graduate in Film and Literature of the University of Warwick, here analyzes the appeal of the singer-actress in terms of the concept of punctum, defined by Barthes (in opposition to the rational, linear understanding of studium) as the ‘electrifying fragment’ that seizes and ravishes the imagination.

Acting style is arguably the most elusive of the theatre's always ephemeral traces – not least because each generation, while proclaiming its own actors to be more ‘natural’ than their predecessors, has tended in its criticism, as in actors' memoirs, to take style as a ‘given’. Anecdotage and plot synopsis have accordingly taken precedence over analysis of how performers actually worked and appeared on stage – let alone prepared their performances. Here, Simon Trussler introduces a project being launched at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Reader in Drama, to utilize the immense storage capacity of the CD-ROM both to record the evidence, verbal and pictorial, that has come down to us from the past, and to assess its relevance to present approaches to acting and to the playing of the classical repertoire. Specifically, the project aims to explore the ways in which the national identity – the quality of ‘Englishness’ – has been both reflected in and influenced by the ways in which it has been rendered on stage. In the succeeding article, Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues its consideration raises in relation to the Goldsmiths project. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the original Theatre Quarterly in 1971, and has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since its inception. The most recent of his many books on theatre and drama, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, was runner-up for the 1994 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Libraries Association, being cited as ‘an outstanding contribution to the literature of the theatre’.

International organizations are increasingly turning to theatre as a means of raising development issues, exploring options, and influencing behaviour. This paper examines some structures and techniques inherent in this type of applied theatre, analyzing two plays used to supplement AIDS education programmes in Uganda. One is a video production by a typical urban popular theatre group, while the second production analyzed exemplifies the Theatre for Development approach through its sub-genre, Campaign Theatre, used to raise awareness on health issues, hygiene, sanitation, child care, and the environment. The study analyzes the performance of the two plays and addresses some contradictions arising from the involvement and influence of external organizations. Marion Frank is a graduate of Bayreuth University in Germany, whose extensive field research has resulted in the publication of AIDS Education through Theater (Bayreuth African Studies Series, Bayreuth, 1995). Dr. Frank is currently living in the US, where as a Visiting Scholar at Duke University she is now working on a research project aiming to establish a closer link between literary/cultural studies and medicine/medical anthropology.

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.

Here Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues any such consideration raises in relation to the research project introduced in the previous article by Simon Trussler. Nesta Jones is Reader in Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was for many years Head of Drama, and now directs the innovative MA programme in Theatre Arts. She is also artistic director of the NXT company, and has most recently published File on Synge (Methuen, 1994).

Rustom Bharucha's Theatre of the World (Routledge, 1993), sections of which first appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, was a major intervention in the debate about the nature and ethics of interculturalism – an unfortunate side-effect being that he has, by his own wry admission, now been ‘academicized as Peter Brook's Other’, a category he finds both offensive and redundant. The following article extends his explorations by developing a careful and pertinent distinction between interculturalism and intraculturalism – a distinction derived from practice rather than theory, specifically from his experience directing an Indian production of Peer Gynt, performed in Kannada as Gundegowdana Charitre. Rustom Bharucha explores the implications of ‘translating’ such a classic text across and within cultures as well as languages – and the further paradox of this being, as for most of us, a process of transmission through English rather than Norwegian. He sums up the nature of the challenge as ‘to negotiate different selves, cultures, histories, and languages through the labyrinth of multiple Others’.

Theatre historians are now reconsidering traditional attitudes towards ‘theatre riots’ of the past, in the light of the new perception of ‘mob’ activity pioneered by the social historian George Rudé. Here, Athenaide Dallett looks at two more recent audience revolts – the well-documented riots at the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, and the indignant response of Berkeley students in 1968 to the Living Theatre's presumption in Paradise Now, in lecturing them about a revolution already taking place on the streets. In both cases, she suggests, riots were provoked by a breach of the contract between performers and audience, taken as legitimating a revolutionary response by such social theorists as Locke and Rousseau. Athenaide Dallett, who recently gained her doctorate from Harvard, teaches at the University of Connecticut at Torrington, and is currently working on a study of the connections between political philosophy and theatre.

The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.

Oscar Asche is one of a number of Edwardian actor-managers who have been largely ignored by theatre historians in favour of the dominant figure of Herbert Beerbohm-Tree. Asche was one of that generation of directors, which also included Lewis Waller, Sir John Martin-Harvey, and Arthur Bourchier, who regarded the staging of pictorial productions of Shakespeare as a sign of status – a claim to be taken seriously in his profession. He had an adventurous career, representative in many respects of the energy and enterprise that characterized the Edwardian theatre – yet his work also exemplified attitudes and practices that would be discounted by a generation of playgoers enthused by different ways of interpreting Shakespearean drama, a new theatrical aesthetic, and the broader social and educational aims of the non-commercial stage. After his death in 1936, he was remembered more as the author of one of the new century's most successful romantic fantasies – Chu Chin Chow – than as a Shakespearean actor-manager. The author of this reassessment, Russell Jackson, is Deputy Director of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His publications include editions of plays by Wilde and Jones, and Victorian Theatre: a New Mermaid Background Book (1989). He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare in Victorian criticism and performance.

The piece which follows was written in 1964 after seeing the Theatre of Cruelty season, directed by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz at the then recently opened LAMDA Theatre in West London, and has never been published in full before. It was my attempt to sum up discussions with colleagues and friends in the weeks after performances, and has served something of that purpose with students later. Following from this I was asked by Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves if they could quote from it in their recent book on Peter Brook in the CUP ‘Directors’ series. Since then, another author has quoted from this source, and, in the event of further excerpting, it seems wise to publish the document in full so that any future quotation will be in recognition of the context in which the statement is made. There are other reasons. Looking back, 1964 can be seen as a crucial crossroads in the British theatre, and the interest in Artaud and Theatre of Cruelty one of the manifestations of a growing frustration with the British actor's inability or unwillingness to physicalize the action rather than intellectualize and verbalize it. It takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Littlewood in that year with Oh, What a Lovely War! and the formation of E15 Acting School by Margaret Bury, as with the Copeau-style training work initiated by John Blatchley at Central School, which led to his formation, with Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, of Drama Centre. The founding of these two schools signalled a significant shift in the training methods and programmes for British actors. The Theatre of Cruelty season seems in retrospect to sum up Brook's frustration at being unable to realize his ideas in the British theatre. Subsequent writers, who in the main never saw the performances, have tended to mark down the season as a great success, instead of the dismal failure I thought it – whether in terms of finding solutions to the problems posed or of keeping any sort of faith with the ideas propounded by Artaud. So a mythology has grown up. Looking at what I wrote then from the position of today I stand by my critique, though I also see what I gained from the performances in the development of my own work, since they revealed clearly a number of blind alleys to be avoided and also enabled me to view the area of training actors to be the crucial issue to be addressed if the British theatre was to move forward. After this, Brook moved Paris and began to experiment further with the problems he was pursuing by importing actors, and consequently skills and styles, from other countries and traditions. Early in his time there, I was present in the Meubilier National, along with an audience of school-children, to witness work in progress on forms of narrative. The experience was as enlightening and enlivening as the Theatre of Cruelty had been stultifying. Though I assured him that I had nothing but praise, Brook asked me not to publish anything on what I had seen, and I did not want to offend him. I have often wished that I had set down my analysis of that experience to counterbalance what I had written on Theatre of Cruelty. I am happy to publish the following article to give an alternative view of this crucial moment in British theatre history, but I regret not being able to put the positive companion piece alongsid.

In this period of politically correct regard for cultural difference it is easy to overlook the unifying effect on human experience of modernity's cultural boundary-jumping. In the following essay Peter Musolf compares Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Yukio Mishima's 1954 kabuki play Iwashiuri Koi no Hikiami (The Sardine Seller), focusing on the belief these writers shared in the sovereignty of illusion over fact and their consequent conviction that life is to be lived as if it were a dramatic fiction. Taken together with Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask, the plays comprise a remarkable ironic commentary on the nature and construction of being in the modern world. Peter Musolf is a teacher and writer living in Yokohama. Gozira to wa nani ka, his book on the science fiction screen monster Godzilla in US-Japanese mass psychology, appeared earlier this year, and he is currently writing a play.

Deborah Warner is one of the most exciting of the generation of directors who emerged during the 'eighties – incidentally claiming for women a natural entrance into a profession previously dominated by men. In 1980 she formed the Kick Theatre Company, with whom over the following, formative years of her career she directed The Good Person of Szechwan, The Tempest, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Woyzeck. In 1988, following a production for the RSC of Titus Andronicus in the previous year, she became one of the company's resident directors, staging King John and Electra before moving in 1990 as an associate director to the National, where her first two productions were of The Good Person with Fiona Shaw and King Lear with Brian Cox. During the 'nineties, she has extended both the nature and the range of her work, directing Shaw in Hedda Gabler in Dublin, Coriolanus in German at the Salzburg Festival, Don Giovanni at Glyndbourne – and, in 1994–95, the season she discusses below, a revival of Beckett's Footfalls at the Garrick, controversially banned by the Beckett Estate, a dramatization of Eliot's seminal inter-war poem The Waste Land, premiered in Brussels, Richard II at the Cottesloe, with a woman, Fiona Shaw, in the title-role, and a project for the London International Festival of Theatre site-specific to the old railway hotel at St. Pancras. In September 1995 she discussed her recent and future work with Geraldine Cousin, who teaches Theatre Studies in the University of Warwick, where she has just completed a study of contemporary plays by women entitled Women in Dramatic Place and Time.

Almost in its death throes at the turn of the present century, sensational melodrama threw up a curious mutation at the hands of the prolific playwrights and managers, the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville. In numerous of their plays performed in the decade or so before the First World War, the ‘New Woman’, whose rights and rebellions were simultaneously the focus of debate in so-called ‘problem’ plays, took on a new and threatening aspect – as the eponymously ‘dangerous’ central character of The Worst Woman in London, A Disgrace to Her Sex, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, and a score or so of similar titles. In the following article Elaine Aston and lan Clarke explore the nature of these ‘strong’ female roles, both as acting vehicles and as embodiments of male fears and fantasies, in a theatre which existed in large part to serve such needs and which, through such characters, at once fictionalized and affirmed the fears of ‘respectable’ society about the moral stature of the actress. The authors both teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, where lan Clarke is Director of Drama, having previously published his own study of Edwardian Drama in 1989.

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Aleks Sierz examines Look Back in Anger not as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. After showing how the anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, he goes on to show how John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in making Look Back in Anger part of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. He then questions the prevailing assumption, common in radical drama, that culture can be revolutionary, and asks whether radicalism in culture is a substitute for political radicalism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune.

‘An actor is seen as if through crystals’, wrote Artaud in 1925, and Janne Risum here uses the analogy of the prism within which to discuss the range of inter-reflecting and interpenetrating analogies the theatre has borrowed from the other arts and from life in its attempts to define itself – analyzing also why it seems impelled to do so through the use of metaphor. Drawing upon the work of major theatre practitioners including Decroux, Stanislavsky, Craig, Meyerhold, Lecoq, Mnouchkine, and Barba, she explores terms which have sometimes been sharply redefined, sometimes allowed to remain indeterminate but allusive. She concludes that ‘in acting, many crystals are possible. There is an infinite number of ways to cut your own crystal, and some pieces of basic advice. There is only one condition: you have to cut one.’ Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also an active participant in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published widely in the fields of acting, theatre history, and women in theatre, and contributed ‘The Voice of Ophelia’, a study of the performance of Julia Varley in The Castle of Holstebro, to NTQ38 (May 1994).

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).