How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).

Although voice work presents itself as a neutral set of tools that can help actors in performing a text, an analysis of the cultural biases behind voice training reveals that both the underlying ideology and the methods of reading and acting it produces limit the possibilities for feminist performances of Shakespeare. By naturalizing the language and rhythms of the text, by focusing attention on the characters' need for the words as opposed to the dramatist's, voice training denies actors ways of questioning the politics of the playscripts. Sarah Werner has just received her PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania for her dissertation entitled ‘Acting Shakespeare's Women: Toward a Feminist Methodology’. She has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the Shakespeare Association of America and the International Conference on Medieval Studies, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania.

Frank Wedekind's theatre art is usually approached through his dramatic writing: but the argument of this article is that the clearest understanding of the dramatist's career is to be gained through an encounter with his work as a performer. The stage was for Wedekind always a deeply personal and reflexive arena: as he once wrote, ‘the critics have often reproached me that my dramas are about myself. I would like to show that it's worth the trouble to bring myself onto the stage.’ In the following article, David Kuhns seeks to demonstrate the complicated nature of ‘performance’ as the term is applied to Wedekind – for his controversial plays and essays, scandalous satirical poems, cabaret appearances, and acting for the legitimate stage were all eclipsed by the notorious public persona which they constituted. This persona, Kuhns argues, became, even for Wedekind himself, inseparable from his self-perceived identity: it was both the real subject of his dramatic art and the essential character he performed. In short, Wedekind's career from beginning to end pursued a performative autobiographical dialectic of self-inscription and self-revision. The author, David Kuhns, teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory at Washington University in St. Louis.

Playscript development programmes have been a significant breeding ground for new American drama since the mid'sixties, and in 1986 the Chicano playwright and director José Cruz González started a playwright development workshop specifically for the Latino community. Here, Eugene van Erven provides a bipolar view of the current Latino theatre scene in southern California by documenting the tenth anniversary session of González' Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep, and at the same takes a wider look at grassroots community theatre initiatives in the Chicano neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Eugene van Erven teaches in the American Studies programme at Utrecht University. Author of The Playful Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Radical People's Theatre (Indiana UP, 1988), he also designs and produces intercultural theatre projects.

The New World Performance Laboratory is an experimental theatre company based in Cleveland, Ohio, founded by a number of artists who originally collaborated in the context of Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme. NWPL investigates traditional performance techniques of various cultures, conducting private research as well as mounting publicly-accessible productions. Iranian director Massoud Saidpour, a founding member of the company, has developed a series of performances based on Sufi teaching stories which explore the adaptation of traditional Persian materials and performance idioms for presentation by a culturally-diverse ensemble. Here, Lisa Wolford examines the traditions and source materials from which Saidpour's performance structures are derived, and considers the potential impact, both for participants and spectators, of working with material drawn from esoteric or initiatory genres. Lisa Wolford participated in Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme from 1989 to its conclusion in 1992. Her book on Objective Drama Research, The Intersection of the Timeless Moment, is forthcoming, and she is also co-editor with Richard Schechner of The Grotowski Sourcebook, to be published by Routledge. Her writings on Grotowski and the New World Performance Laboratory have appeared in The Drama Review, and she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on Grotowski's recent work at Northwestern University.

By the mid 'eighties, the Thatcher government's public funding restrictions had taken a firm hold, leading to a now familiar position of crisis theatre management. In 1985, under pressure from the profession, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned an independent enquiry, the first for sixteen years, to evaluate the needs of the publicly funded theatre and to determine funding priorities. Although the resulting Cork Enquiry was seen by many at the time as a cost-cutting exercise, eight months intensive research and evidence-taking led to a carefully constructed case for a funding increase against an estimated shortfall of up to £13.4 million – and also produced a broad vision of the nature of theatre in England. It is now ten years since the Cork Enquiry delivered its report, with the aim of ensuring the healthy development of an art form placed under severe financial constraint. Here lan Brown and Rob Brannen, Secretary and Assistant Secretary to the Enquiry, provide insight into the Enquiry's setting-up, its process, and formulation of recommendations. In the light of recent consultation exercises, they examine the nature and function of such reports alongside the long-term impact of the Cork Enquiry. lan Brown was Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1986 to 1994, and is now Professor and Head of the Drama Department at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford.

This article is the latest contribution to a continuing debate on the editing of Shakespeare in relation to new conceptions of authorship and authority and to the developing contribution of performance studies. Introduced by Brian Parker in NTQ24 (1990), it has subsequently drawn submissions from Stanley Wells in NTQ26 (1991), Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in NTQ 34 (1992) and, most recently, Alan Posener in NTQ39 (1994). Here, Andrew Spong challenges criticisms which Holderness and Loughrey's ‘Shakespearean Originals’ project has received, and suggests that the sort of methodological and theoretical fallacies which its editors have been accused of displaying can be no less readily evidenced from the positions adopted by their critics. Andrew Spong is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Textual and Contextual Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include the challenge of historical materialism to postmodernism and the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre.

Our occasional series on early Marxist theatre criticism – which has already included Trotsky on Wedekind in NTQ28, Lunacharsky on Ibsen in NTQ39, and Mehring on Hauptmann in NTQ 42 – continues with two essays by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose concepts of hegemony, the national-popular, and the organic intellectual have had a profound influence on twentieth-century western thought. From 1916 to 1920 Gramsci was also a theatre critic, writing a regular drama review column in the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! in which he first explored ideas about the ideological function of theatre. His review of a 1917 Italian production of Ibsen's A Doll's House is a particularly strong example of his attempt to generate notions of the theatre as an arena of political struggle in which the cultural values of the bourgeoisie were expressed, but which also had the potential to subvert these values and provide the proletariat with the critical wherewithal to express its hegemony. He saw the function of the theatre critic as promoting social, cultural, and moral awareness in the spectator, and Ibsen's play as a particularly apt vehicle for critiquing the moral superficiality of Italian bourgeois women in its powerful portrayal of the oppressions of a patriarchal society. While Gramsci's review of A Doll's House can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary feminist ideas, he saw Pirandello's use of the ‘power of abstract thought’ as making him a potentially revolutionary playwright, whom he described as ‘a commando in the theatre’. His plays were ‘like grenades that explode inside inside the brains of spectators, demolishing their banalities and causing their feelings and thoughts to crumble’. After reviewing ten of Pirandello's early plays for Avanti! Gramsci later expressed his intention of writing a full-length study of the playwright's ‘transformation of theatrical taste’. All that came of these intentions were the rather fragmented notes he made in the Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed his views on Pirandello in the context of the politics of culture and the idea of a national popular literature. Gramsci saw Pirandello's metatheatre as subverting traditional dramatic principles, but failing to establish new ones or to subvert the social and economic aspects of tradition. Gramsci responds to the critical debates on Pirandello in the 1920s by Tigher and Croce about Pirandellism's combination of art and philosophy and its conflict between ‘life’ and ‘form’, but his final comments about his views being taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ indicate that they are not definitive.

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.

Karen Malpede's monologue, ‘Baghdad Bunker’, whose origins in an experience of vicarious empathy she describes in the following article, was first performed by Ruth Maleczech at La Mama in June 1991. It subsequently became the centrepiece of Malpede's play Going to Iraq, about life in New York during the Gulf War. Later, in The Beekeeper's Daughter, she addressed our lack of empathy in the face of ‘racial cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. Here, Karen Malpede uses both this latter play and a play by the dissident Croatian playwright Slobodan Snajder, Snakeskin, as examples of an approach to writing and experiencing plays she calls ‘theatre of witness’ – in which the witnessing imagination affirms connections ‘based upon the human capacities to experience compassion and empathy for the self and for the other as powerful, motivating forces’. Karen Malpede is a widely performed and published American playwright and director, currently with the Theatre Three Collaborative in New York, where she also teaches at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her People's Theater in America (1972) was a seminal study of its subject, as was her Women in Theater (1984) of the feminist theatre aesthetic.

The Lewes Bonfire Festival is an important piece of popular theatre, which has largely resisted attempts by higher authority to control and redefine it. Annually some 2,000 costumed participants, watched by up to 80,000 spectators, take over the streets of the usually staid county town of East Sussex, and effigies of contemporary politicians and of the Pope are burnt during six hours of carnivalesque rule. Here, David Wiles analyzes the history and organizational structure of the festival, and examines the ideology of Englishness upon which the event turns. David Wiles is Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His interest in popular theatre has principally been historical, and he has published books on the Robin Hood play and on the Elizabethan clown. Most recently, in Shakespeare's Almanac (D. S. Brewer, 1993) he has explored the structural logic of the festive calendar.

Nigerian playwrights face the problem not only of finding ways of communicating with their audiences which address popular concerns in an assimilable manner, but of deciding the appropriate language in which to do so, in a notion which embraces many language groups and cultures. The solution of employing English as a lingua franca poses problems hung over from the colonialist past – and a tendency for plays written in English also to employ an inappropriate western dramaturgy. In the following article, Sam Ukala considers the various objections raised to English-language Nigerian plays, conceding some points and answering others, and proposing the concept of ‘folkism’ as a national aesthetic principle – a way of reconciling the use of a common language with the distinctive and often disparate needs of the Nigerian people.

The single television station serving Papua New Guinea transmits between ten and twelve hours a day of programmes that – apart from the new and a musical slot sponsored by Coca Cola – lack and significant national interest. Yet an eight-episode television drama, Warriors in Transit – conceived, written, shot, and performed entirely on location by local artists and talents, and with the potential to develop into a long-running series – has for three years remained unseen, despite several good reviews and sneak previews. The assertion of the Tv executives that Papua New Guineans do not want to watch their own programmes, and the inability of the production, alike bear witness to a problem typical of the develpment of television in the Third World, as traditional national cultures ineluctably give way befor the easy attractions of homogenized imports – a problem that can only be tackled by affirmative action on the part of governments whose best intentions too often conflict with financial constraints. The author, Joseph Chika Anyanwu, teaches in the Facutly of Creative Arts of the University of Papua New Guinea, and first presented the present paper at the 1994 conference of the Australasian Drama Studies Federation.