In this article Adrienne Scullion reviews the citizenship debate in education policy within contemporary – and specifically post-devolution – Scotland. She identifies something of the impact that this debate has had on theatre-making for children and young people, with a particular focus on projects that are participatory in nature. Her key examples are drawn from TAG Theatre Company's ‘Making the Nation’ project, a major three-year initiative that sought to engage children and young people throughout Scotland in ideas around democracy, politics, and government. Revisiting a classic cultural policy stand-off between instrumental and aesthetic outcomes, she asks whether a policy-sanctioned emphasis on process, transferable skills, and capacity building limits the potential for theatre projects to develop other kinds of theatre skills, such as critical reading and/or spectatorship. With its emphasis on participatory projects rather than plays for children and young people, the article complements her earlier essay, ‘“And So This Is What Happened”: War Stories in New Drama for Children’, in NTQ 84 (November 2005). Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.

The Atlantic Theater Company has been one of Off-Broadway's most successful theatre companies over the past twenty years, having won twelve Tony Awards, eight Lucille Lortel Awards, thirteen Obie Awards, and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. The company, originally founded in 1983 by the playwright David Mamet and the actor William H. Macy, has mounted over one hundred plays, many by new writers. Included among its successes are Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Woody Allen's A Second Hand Memory and Writer's Block, the revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, Celebration and The Room by Harold Pinter, Mojo and Night Heron by Jez Butterworth, and the new musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening, which won the 2007 Tony for best new musical. But producing plays is only part of Atlantic's mission: it also runs the Atlantic Acting School, which operates both as a private conservatoire and an undergraduate training studio in conjunction with New York University. Its curriculum focuses on Practical Aesthetics, the acting technique developed by Mamet and Macy. Mary McCann, in conversation here with NTQ Contributing Editor Ian Watson, is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company and Director of the Atlantic Acting School, where she also teaches. She continues to act, having appeared in many of the company's productions, on Broadway, on television, and in several independent films. The conversation took place over two meetings at the Atlantic Acting School in New York City, on 25 April and 5 June 2007.

The plays of the American avant-garde writer and director Richard Foreman present actors with a significant problem: their characters exist in a constant state of flux, detached from the usual narrative moorings, with the result that conventional acting methodologies do not apply. Drawing on interviews with Foreman himself, with the actors who worked with him on his New York production of King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe (2004), and on the rehearsal process of a student group preparing for the UK premiere of Pearls for Pigs (1993), Neal Swettenham investigates in this essay the precise challenges posed by these unusual texts. He argues that Foreman wants to provoke in his actors a sense of being permanently ‘off-balance’, requiring each of the performers in King Cowboy Rufus to develop their own way of navigating the play's contradictory demands. Similarly, the UK actors discovered that the unconventional dialogue, stripped of all contextual clues, must still be delivered with intention and rigour. Certain very specific European films cited by Foreman provide possible pointers to an acting style appropriate to the plays but, in the final analysis, the actor's problem remains. Neal Swettenham lectures in drama at Loughborough University. His ‘Irish Rioters, Latin American Dictators, and Desperate Optimists' Play-boy’ appeared in NTQ83 (August 2005).

The jihad of Uthman dan Fodio in the early ninteenth century had by 1806 established Islamic cultural and religious hegemony over the Hausa territory of present-day Northern Nigeria. In the process, Islam had succeeded in pushing indigenous religious and cultural practices such as Bori to the margins or underground. However, while most of the other indigenous forms died or became inactive and ineffectual, Bori has managed to hold its own against the persecution and cultural war waged against it by Islam, mainly because the belief in the power and ability of the spirits to influence human life which is at the centre of Bori practice was never lost. In this article, Osita Okagbue argues that marginalization has made Bori attractive to groups and individuals in Hausa society who feel themselves similarly marginalized and oppressed for articulating alternative identities and viewpoints to those of the mainstream society. He also examines how the possession performances of the Bori cult enable members to subvert and occasionally to use moments of trance and possession to invert the power relationships between oppressed groups and their oppressors. Osita Okagbue teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of African Theatres and Performances (Routledge, 2007). He is President of the African Theatre Association (AfTA) and editor of African Performance Review.

Swan Lake has a central place in the ballet repertoire. Generally seen as the ballerina's ballet, one of the greatest difficulties in presenting Swan Lake as a credible drama has been the historically marginal role played by Siegfried, the Prince. As choreographer-producers have struggled in the challenge to make the ballet work dramatically, his character has been transformed from onlooker to major influence in a series of reinterpretations of this classic work. In this article Gregory Sporton raises questions about what motivates Siegfried and why that is important for our understanding of the ballet, offering an alternative view of Siegfried's character. Gregory Sporton is Director of the Visualisation Research Unit in the Department of Art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. His interest in Swan Lake emerges from his background as a dancer and long periods of research in the former Soviet Union during 2004–2006, when he was able to see at first hand most of the Russian productions referenced in this article. His other published work includes ethnographic accounts of dance and its place in the flow of culture.

In this article, Zoltán Imre investigates the major changes in the concept of a national theatre, from the early debates in Hamburg in 1767 to the 2006 opening of the National Theatre of Scotland. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of a national theatre was regarded in most of Western Europe as a means of promoting national – or even imperial – integration, in Eastern Europe, the debates about and later the realization of national theatres often took place within the context of and against oppressive imperiums. But in both parts of Europe the realization of a national theatre was utilized to represent a unified nation in a virtual way, its role being to maintain a single and fixed national identity and a homogeneous and dominant national culture. In present-day Scotland, however, the notion of a national theatre has changed again, to service a diverse and multicultural nation. Zoltán Imre received his PhD from Queen Mary College, University of London, and is now a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, co-editor of the Hungarian theatre magazine Theatron, and dramaturg at Mozgó Ház Társulás (Moving House Theatre Company) and Természetes Vészek Kollektíva (Collective of Natural Disasters). His publications include Transfer and Translation: Intercultural Dialogues (co-editor, 2002), Theatre and Theatricality (2003), Transillumination: Hungarian Theatre in a European Context (editor, 2004), and On the Border of Theatre and Sociology (co-editor, 2005).