At the moment, you're working with young actors teaching a course in experimental theatre at New York University. What are you trying to teach them?

How to be true in performance, that above all. I struggle to plant in them the principle that Grotowski handed on to me: we act so much in our daily lives that to make theatre what we need to do is to stop acting. Another very important thing to understand is that an actor must concentrate on his own body. The actor's instrument is not his voice or his diction, it's his whole body. Theatre can be a combination of all the arts – music, dance, painting, writing – but above all it is moving visual art. So long as an actor has elementary problems with his body, he is limited. So just as a musician has to exercise his fingers every day, so an actor has to exercise his body almost to the point of overcoming it, that is, being in complete control of it.

In an article in NTQ 29 (February 1992), Steve Nicholson looked at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed in the 1920s by the Conservative theatre establishment. Usually it is the Left that is accused of simplistic theatrical agitation: but in this, the second of two articles about the right-wing political theatre of the 1920s, the author shows how plays about industrial conflict and strikes within Britain demonstrated a level of crude Conservative propaganda that has tended to go unremarked. This article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays in the British Library, and derives from the author's broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.

This article is a comparative examination of the relationship of audience and actors on the one hand, and of a client and his psychotherapist on the other. Peter Elsass argues that in order to describe both relationships as of a healing nature, one also has to identify a ‘healing space’ beyond the consulting room, instead of focusing on the healing relationship itself. Employing an analogy with shamanism, he describes this ‘healing space’ as a ‘pinta’, or vision from an extra-contextual frame. The history of psychoanalysis shows this need for a ‘pinta’ as a driving, rebellious force, and he suggests that without a ‘pinta’ of its own, the theatre also dies. Peter Elsass is a Professor of Health Psychology in the Medical Faculty of Aarhus University, Denmark, and chief psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aarhus. In addition to writing a large number of articles within the medical and psychological fields, he has also worked in the field of cultural anthropology, and in Strategies for Survival: the Psychology of Cultural Resilience in Ethnic Minorities (New York University Press, 1992), he describes his many periods of residence with Indian tribes in Colombia. Peter Elsass has been an associate of Odin Theatre, and has taught at the International School of Theatre Anthropology, directed by Eugenio Barba.

TO GET TO GARDZIENICE, you have to go by train or car for two or three hours. This is the journey in the ordinary sense of the word. Once you have arrived at the village, you begin a very different kind of journey as you hike the country paths, struggle down ravines, run over meadows – as you walk by the light of the sun during the day or torches at night.

Shakespeare's plays have long been subject to deconstruction and reconstruction – some would argue, since the moment the words left his pen and entered the arena of theatrical intervention; some, more conservatively, dating the process to the attempts during the Restoration to rewrite him according to new tastes and old ‘rules’. More recently, of course, the long search for an almost platonic ideal of ‘authority’ has been giving way not only before new ideas of what this constitutes in theatrical terms, but through conscious attempts to subvert a play's meaning – not necessarily as ‘intended’ by Shakespeare, but as received in the prevailing culture. Feminist directors and critics have of course been prominent in this process – but the following study of the role of the witches in Macbeth is distinctive not so much for applying twentieth-century ideologies to Renaisssance plays, but for its exploration of the ‘problem’ of the witches in the light of conventions which, still current in Shakespeare's times, are hard to recover in the practical theatre of our own. The author, Lorraine Helms, is currently Mellon Fellow in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. She has published several articles on renaissance drama, and is working on studies of gender and performance in both contemporary and historical interpretations of Shakespeare.

In theatrical parlance, ‘political’ is often taken to be synonymous with ‘left-wing’, and research into political theatre movements of the first half of this century has perpetuated the assumption that the right has generally avoided taking politics as subject matter. This article, the first of two about British political theatre in the 1920s, concentrates on plays about Communism and the Soviet Union during the decade following the Russian Revolution, and offers some contrasting conclusions. Steve Nicholson, Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds, argues that, whether such plays shaped or merely reflected conventional views, they were used by the establishment for the most blatant and explicit propaganda, at a time when it felt itself under threat from the Left. The article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays, housed in the British Library, and derives from a broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre from 1917 to 1945.

The recent work of the South African dramatist Athol Fugard has addressed the present realities of a country undergoing traumatic change. But on whose behalf does it speak today? The common claim of critics has been that his work ‘bears witness’: but what does this claim amount to in the context of current debates about culture in South Africa? Central to these debates is the contextualizing work which has arisen out of the neo-Marxist emphasis on previously marginalized black dramatic forms: tending to supplant the liberal, universalizing approach which helped promote Fugard, this is fast becoming a new orthodoxy, diminishing his contribution and historic influence alike. In this article, Dennis Walder looks more closely at the European origins among the liberal-left of the idea of ‘bearing witness’, and considers its continuing potential as taken up by Fugard himself at a turning-point in the development of his plays – the moment from which sprang both Boesman and Lena and the collaborative Sizwe Bansi and The Island. These plays can still be understood to offer a voice to the voiceless – above all to Lena, the ‘Hotnot’ woman, an outcast among outcasts, who affirms her identity through her body and her language. Dennis Walder, who was born and brought up in South Africa and educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, is now Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University: a Dickens scholar, whose Dickens and Religion appeared in 1981, he also wrote the first book-length study of Athol Fugard (Macmillan, 1984), and is currently editing Fugard's plays for Oxford University Press.

In addition to being a theatre director, Vladimir Mirzoev is a novelist, poet, critic, and artist. Born in Moscow in 1957, he enrolled at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1975, and in 1981 graduated from the Faculty of Directing at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatrical Arts in Moscow, where he studied with Mark Mestechkin, a disciple of his teachers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Before he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in May 1989, Mirzoev was known in Russian theatre as an iconoclast and a leading figure of the avant garde. His productions of Voltaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Büchner, Strindberg, Claudel, Weiss, and Howard Barker became renowned for the plasticity of the actors' movement and the use of metaphor to convey meaning, and Russian critics hailed his extraordinary ability to sculpt a unique theatrical language, which blended the ironic and the grotesque. Rita Much interviewed Mirzoev in the autumn of 1991, between the abortive coup and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

When we published Barbara Day's introduction to modern theatre in Czechoslovakia in NTQ7 (1986), we could little imagine that by the turn of the decade we would be carrying regular reports from Eastern Europe on the effects of the disintegration of the Soviet empire upon the theatres and theatre people of the former satellite states. In NTQ27 (1991), we included an overview of recent developments in the Polish theatre – following this up in NTQ28 with a detailed feature on the work of a single company in the new era, Gardzienice. Here, we similarly complement Premsyl Rut's report in NTQ27 on ‘The State of the New Czech Theatre’ with a study of the work of one of the directors who, like so many people in the arts, served as a herald to the ‘velvet revolution’ – Blaho Uhlár, whose career began, in the difficult years after the Soviet invasion of 1968, with the Theatre for Children and Youth, and whose most recently completed production with the Divadle Alexandra Duchnovic company, Nono, visited the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the city's festival last October.

In this article Eckhard Breitinger traces the sources of present-day popular theatre in Uganda back to the situation shortly before and after independence, when Europeans, Indians, Goans, and Ugandans each had their own separate cultural and theatrical traditions. Theatrical activity came to a virtual standstill under the repressive regimes of Obote and Amin, when many prominent theatre people were killed or exiled, but quickly began to flourish again after 1986: in downtown Kampala semi-professional groups thus produce commercial comedies, while in the suburbs amateur companies use theatre to supplement their meagre incomes. Meanwhile, government and aid organizations involve themselves mainly in theatre for education, particularly health education, and the campaign against Aids has generated new needs – met by a new style of ‘morality play’, here illustrated and analyzed in detail. Eckhard Breitinger teaches American, African, and Caribbean literature at the University of Bayreuth, and has also taught in Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and France. He is a translator of radio plays, author of monographs on the gothic novel and American radio drama, and editor of several books on African and new English literature. Presently he is editor of Bayreuth African Studies, and directing a research project on cultural communication in Africa.

Our ‘Update from Eastern Europe’, following this article, includes reports from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Russia – on all of which countries we have published earlier features concerning the problems faced by theatre people in the wake of the disintegration of the Communist bloc. However, the theatre of Bulgaria has been little previously noticed, whether by NTQ or its contemporaries, and requires a more detailed overview. This is now provided by Gabriella Giannachi and Lizbeth Goodman, who visited the country in October 1991, interviewing a wide range of people working in its theatres and seeing a selection of productions in which they were involved. Gabriella Giannachi is a graduate student based at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, whose series of feminist theatres interviews has been published in earlier issues of NTQ.

Doppio is a theatre company which uses three languages – English, Italian, and a synthetic migrant dialect it calls ‘Emigrante’ – to explore the conditions of the large community of Italian migrants in Australia. It works, too, in three different kinds of theatrical territory, all with an increasingly feminist slant – those of multicultural theatrein-education; of community theatre based in the Italian clubs of South Australia; and of documentary theatre, exploring the roots and the past of a previously marginalized social group. The company's work was seen in 1990 at the Leeds Festival of Youth Theatre, but its appeal is fast increasing beyond the confines of specialisms, ethnic or theatric, and being recognized in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian theatrical activity. Tony Mitchell – a regular contributor to NTQ, notably on the work of Dario Fo – who presently teaches in the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Technology in Sydney, here provides an analytical introduction to the company's work, and follows this with an interview with one of its directors and co-founders, Teresa Crea.

ARTISTICALLY, Stary Theatre, Krakow, has maintained an impressive record since the 1950s. It has been a source of innovative directors including such giants as Swinarski, Jarocki, and Wajda, as well as a talented younger generation – Bradecki, Gzegor-zewski, and Lupa. It has also been a focus for good actors and designers: quite simply, it is a company for which almost everybody wants to work.

DID YOUR DESIRE to start up an Italian theatre in Australia arise from your visiting the town your parents came from in Calabria?

No, but certainly visiting that town in Calabria influenced the type of Italian theatre I wanted to make. My desire to do Italian theatre was a desire to do something I was interested in – I'd been studying drama and also studying Italian formally, both were of interest to me, and I felt that the two could be combined. At the time, strategically, I also met Christopher Bell, who was interested in both things as well.

AFTER STRUGGLING to survive over four decades of rigid government control, theatre in Czechoslovakia is struggling to survive freedom. Like every other sector of society, theatre is having to deal with the enormous problems of transition from life under a totalitarian system to the free-for-all rush of a liberal, market-based democracy.

In the early issues of New Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, already reflects at its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.