In 1988 the Polish playwright Slawomir Mrozek was invited by the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Theatre in Stockholm to deliver a speech for the ‘Strindberg-O'Neill’ symposium on the issues suggested by this title. In defining his terms and their relationship, he combined Aristotelian precision and existential candour with a gentle irony entirely his own. The speech was first printed in the Polish theatre journal Dialog, to whose editors we are grateful for permission to print this translated version.

In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.

Several of the novels of the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867–1928) have provided the basis for theatrical adaptations: but the version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) by Peter Granger-Taylor, staged in March 1990 at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, was the first for sixty years. In the following feature, Ian Craven, who teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, provides a full account of Jon Pope's production, considering questions of adaptation, performance, and response, and also paying special attention to the influence of the screen versions of 1921 and 1962. His analysis is complemented by extracts from an interview with the adapter and director. A study by Margaret Eddershaw of Philip Prowse's production of Brecht's Mother Courage, in which Glenda Jackson took the title role during the same season at the Citizens, appeared in NTQ28 (November 1991).

Eugenio Barba's work with Odin Teatret and the International School of Theatre Anthropology has always been substantiated by a body of written theory. In earlier issues of NTQ he has developed his ideas about the nature of the actor's work in relation to its energies and their origins in experience and social ritual – most recently, in NTQ20 (1989), discussing the way in which the actor's body is falsely perceived as an ‘instrument’, somehow separate from himself, and exploring the processes which give the actor a true ‘second nature’, distinguishing his work as ‘ritual in search of a meaning’. In the present article, he looks rather at the company or the lone practitioner pursuing a vision of theatre beyond the safe confines of institutional theatre. Such ‘Third Theatre’ may be short-lived – sometimes to be revered in retrospect, sometimes almost lost to history, sometimes confined to a theory never realized in practice. Eugenio Barba looks at the elements which these disparate kinds of ‘Third Theatre’ have in common, including a shared concern with the search for meaning, necessarily combined with a ‘personal discovery of the craft’ – that ‘patient building up of our own physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional relationship with texts and spectators, without conforming to those balanced and proved relationships current at the centre of theatre’.

Our coverage of Indian theatre in NTQ, as in the original Theatre Quarterly, has been as full as opportunities allowed — notably, including a major four-part assessment by Kenneth Rea in TQ30–34 (1978–79), and a three-part personal casebook by Rustom Bharucha of his production of Kroetz's Request Concert, as adapted to the needs of different Indian cities, in NTQ11–13 (1987–88). The fact that we have never covered the theatre of the state of Manipur, which adjoins Burma and Bangladesh on India's north-eastern border, is all too symptomatic of its more general neglect – at one extreme by central government, and at the other by those who might usefully learn from and contribute to the development of its indigenous theatre. Here, Rustom Bharucha – now based once more in his home city of Calcutta, after a period of work in the United States – explains the background of exploitation and deprivation against which he proceeds to set the indigenous theatre work of the director Kanhailal. Looking in particular at Pebet, a play from the 'seventies based on folk tradition, and at the more recent Memories of Africa, Bharucha attempts to draw some conclusions about the problems and the potential of ‘seeing our cultures from below’ by means of a theatre that springs from and connects with the needs of the people.

In two earlier articles, Steve Nicholson has explored ways in which the the right-wing theatre of the 1920s both shaped and reflected the prevailing opinions of the establishment – in NTQ29 (February 1992) looking at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed on the stage, and in NTQ30 (May 1992) at the ways in which domestic industrial conflicts were presented. He concludes the series with three case studies of the role of the Lord Chamberlain, on whose collection of unpublished manuscripts now housed in the British Library his researches have been based, in preventing more sympathetic – or even more objective – views of Soviet and related subjects from reaching the stage. His analysis is based on a study of the correspondence over the banning of Geo A. DeGray's The Russian Monk, Hubert Griffith's Red Sunday, and a play in translation by a Soviet dramatist, Sergei Tretiakov's Roar China. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.

The place of Cole Porter – the centenary of whose birth fell last June – within the tradition of the American musical has been well documented and fully discussed. Usually, however, this is at the expense of his earliest work, first as an exponent of Gilbertian pastiche, later as a dilettante ex-legionnaire in France – and then, as he grew aware of his own potential as a professional, in his work for the London theatre in the 1920s and early 1930s. Much of this was for revues mounted by the legendary impresario C. B. Cochran, though in 1933 the production of Nymph Errant proved to be his first and last original, full scale book musical for Britain, shortly before Porter's decision to move his home as well as his ambitions to Broadway. James Moore is a Cambridge-based writer, whose current work in progress includes a book on the British–American musical theatre and a full-length biography of Cochran's great rival, André Chariot – with whom Cole Porter finally collaborated in 1934, contributing ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ to the topical revue Hi Diddle Diddle.

Adam Versényi here considers responses to the call for a new kind of Latin American theatre, combining anthropological awareness of the area's history and culture with the technical abilities and thematic sophistication of western theatre, through an analysis of two plays which suggests both the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. These are Nahui Ollin, a shadow-puppet play dramatizing episodes from Nahuatl cosmogeny, and Los enemigos, a contemporary adaptation of the unique Mayan script, the Rabinal Achí. Adam Versényi has written widely on the theatre of Latin America, including a study of recent developments in liberation theology and liberation theatre, and for NTQ two articles on earlier periods – in NTQ16 (1988), on the theatricality of pre-Columbian performance rituals, and in NTQ19 (1989) on the adaptation of Aztec rituals by the mendicant friars who came in the wake of Cortés – this piece being selected as the ‘Younger Scholar's Prizewinning Article’ of the year by the American Society for Theatre Research.

The actor, as a reminder of personal mutability, has always provoked the condemnation of absolutist philosophers and churchmen. Historically, this anti-theatrical prejudice has pressed even harder on the actress, for in her case ‘personal’ connotes sexual mutability. In Victorian times, when purity was enjoined on Woman for Man's sake as well as her own, the actress's situation was further complicated. In the following article, Julie Hankey examines the treatment of actress-characters in certain novels of the nineteenth century – Wilkie Collin's No Name, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Henry James's The Tragic Muse, among others – exploring in particular their peculiarly physical system of representation, a system which reproduced the social and moral attitudes of the day on a more visceral level of irrational prejudice. Irrespective of their artistry or sympathies, authors were remarkably consistent in their use of the same relatively narrow but at the same time powerful range of signals – dress, pose, interiors, gardens, flowers, and so on – clearly confident that by this means the actress could be adequately expressed. Julie Hankey is presently co-editor of the ‘Plays and Performance’ series, now published by Cambridge University Press, and has herself prepared the individual volumes on Richard III and Othello.

Why should one of Shakespeare's plays suddenly receive almost as many productions in a single season in the Swedish theatre as it had done during the whole previous decade? Kent Hagglund, in analyzing and comparing the five productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream seen in his country between July 1989 and June 1990, explains some of the accidental reasons for such a convergence of interest – such as the availability of a new and clear modern translation, which is only now becoming part of Swedish theatrical consciousness. But he also looks at those elements in the play itself which give it a sudden contemporary relevance – notably, the struggle for dominance which manifests itself in forms of sexual violence. All five productions prove to have been closely concerned with this issue, which, suggests Hagglund, also reflects an important aspect of the crisis afflicting ‘the Swedish social ideal’ today.

In an article in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. In NTQ 30 (May 1992), he took a closer look at the productions of the 1990–91 season, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. Here, he continues to trace the long decline of the ‘fabulous invalid’ through the season of 1991–92 – a season overshadowed by the death of Joe Papp, the mourning for a great showman mixed with concern for the future of his Public Theatre enterprises. The paucity of productions on Broadway – where, while one show could lose its backers four million dollars overnight, Peter Pan took American audiences happily back to the traditions of English pantomime – continued to contrast with signs of life elsewhere, and new productions marked milestone-anniversaries for La Mama and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Glenn Loney, is a widely published theatre writer and teacher based in New York.

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).

Ever since the creation of the first Departments of Drama in British universities soon after the Second World War, the most problematic aspect of assessing student work has been in the practical area – in the disciplines of acting and directing, and the design and execution of set, costume, lighting, and sound. Can acting genius be measured on the same scale as honest effort showing worthwhile progress? How far should any assessment reward individual effort and accomplishment, and how far the student's contribution to the collaborative effort which is the finished production? Should there even be a ‘finished production’ – and if so, how far should audience response and the chemistry of a particular performance affect a tutor's knowledge of the process involved? Indeed, are there criteria which can make any one or two tutors’ individual impressions more than merely impressionistic? The following paper by Val Taylor, who teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute, tackles this last area in particular. While it began as an internal discussion document, it seemed to us to raise relevant issues so fully and succinctly as to deserve wider dissemination, not only among colleagues in British universities, but among all those called upon to measure developing theatrical skills.

Our occasional series of original theatre documents continues with this translation, the first in English, of an article written in 1915 by the Russian director Nikolai Evreinov attacking his contemporary and erstwhile colleague Vsevolod Meyerhold for artistic plagiarism – an attack which, of course, reveals as much about the susceptibilities and private jealousies of its perpetrator as it does about its object. Tony Pearson, who currently teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies in the University of Glasgow, accompanies his translation with a full introduction and commentary, setting the polemics within the context of the Russian and early Soviet theatre, and the subsequent, separate careers of the two personalities involved.

How to accommodate and utilize the insights and the methodology of marxism – and, simply, its potential as a vehicle for social change – at a time when the popular perception of its political ideology stands discredited? Dorrian Lambley explores the dilemma through the specifics of developments in British theatre since 1968 – the stifling of the early radical impulses under political and economic pressures, which has produced, at best, a sense of marginalization, at worst a conviction of impotence. In proposing ways of working within this situation, Lambley draws on the writings of dramatists such as Edward Bond to suggest that marxism must recognize the most important of the liberal humanist emphases – ‘the presence of the subject’, but perceived within a marxist understanding of social relations. Dorrian Lambley is presently working on her doctoral thesis in the University of Exeter, where she helped to organize the conference ‘Theatre and the Discourses of Power’, on which she wrote in the ‘Reports and Announcements’ section of NTQ28 (1991).

When Harold Clurman died in 1980, he was almost as old as the century, but still in harness – perhaps the most venerable as well as the most versatile polymath of the American theatre. His life in the theatre extended from acting with the Theatre Guild in the ‘twenties, through his creation and direction of the Group Theatre in the ‘thirties, to a distinguished post-war career as free-lance director, highly respected theatre critic – first for the New Republic, then since 1953 for The Nation – and also theatre historian and university teacher. It was in this last role that, as a student, Joanna Rotté met Harold Clurman in 1969, and in the article which follows she blends personal recollections of an enduring friendship with a wider-ranging assessment of the qualities that distinguished Clurman as a critic and a human being. Joanna Rotté presently chairs the Theatre Department at Villanova University, Pennsylvania.

The Polish actor Ryszard Cieslak, who died in June 1990, joined Jerzy Grotowski's first theatrical venture, the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows in Opole, in 1962, three years after its formation, remaining with Grotowski throughout the life of the Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, and until it ceased touring early in 1980 after Grotowski's period of paratheatrical experiments had begun. Cieslak is best remembered for his performances in The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum Figuris, and his achievements as an actor were in some senses inseparable from those of Grotowski – but in later years he worked independently, both as a director and, before his death, in the memorable Tiresias-like role of Dhrtarastra in Peter Brook's version of The Mahabharata. In the first part of this feature, Ferdinando Taviani explores the nature and the quality of Cieslak's work, and its relationship with the Laboratory Theatre. To complement his analysis, we are reprinting the final interview given by Cieslak before his death, which was first published on 2 May 1990 in the literary supplement of the Polish-language American journal Nowy Dziennik. Its occasion was the screening of the film of The Mahabharata in Los Angeles and other United States cities in May and June 1990.

The longer I follow the activity of V. E. Meyerhold, the more I am astounded at the derivative nature of his talent. ‘Je prend mon bien, où je le trouve’, said the genial Molière, obviously without realizing what temptation such words plant in the souls of all those who are quick to spot anything lying around just waiting to be picked up while its owner isn't looking. And Moliere has finally discovered a truly ‘original’ imitator in the person of V. E. Meyerhold!

Declarations that the ‘Fabulous Invalid’ on Broadway is, at last, terminally ill tend to be subject to the law of diminishing returns – or to claims that wolf has been cried once too often. Yet environmental symptoms are now added to a chronic economic condition, as the ‘theatre district’ loses its distinctive character in a pincer movement between large-scale speculative developments and the sadly familiar signs of inner-city decay. In an earlier article, in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney, a widely published theatre writer and teacher, clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. Here, he takes a closer look at the productions of the season just past, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the Off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. He concludes that civic subsidy, even for the commercial theatre, is now the only way of saving the Invalid's lingering life.

Appropriately, this feature on the Polish theatre group Gardzienice is something of a cultural mix, in which the impressions of an English visitor may be contrasted with the voice of a Polish admirer – and the beliefs of the group itself, expressed in the words of its director, Wlodzimierz Staniewski. In the winter of 1989–90, Paul Allain, a graduate student at Goldsmiths' College, University of London, visited the company at its ‘headquarters’ – which is also, in effect, the small and remote Polish village from which Gardzienice takes its name. This was at a time when the new. Solidarity-led government had yet to be fully felt. Here, Allain describes the training methods and disciplines of the company which, within the context of its physical environment, have come to constitute a lifestyle as much as an approach to theatre. Janusz Majcherek writes rather of the significance of Gardzienice in relation to the ancient and fundamental need for a homeland – a need which, in Staniewski's writings, is related to the company's own hopes and plans. All this material was in our hands well before the upsurge in nationalist feeling which has succeeded the political changes in eastern Europe: and it may be felt to reflect ironically upon alternative ways of ‘returning home’ – on the one hand through the actuality or threat of civil war and the struggle for an elusive slice of the ‘free market’, on the other in that quest for a lost history and inheritance, for healing connections with one's environment, which is reflected theatrically in the work of Gardzienice.