The flurry of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1960s and 1970s represents a significant yet largely neglected chapter of recent cultural history. This article assesses two of the more enduring adaptations – Edward Bond's Lear (Royal Court Theatre, 1971) and Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure (Open Space Theatre, 1975) – in order to show how these controversial texts anticipated later mainstream critical approaches which still affect our reception of Shakespeare in the late 1990s. Several parallels between Marowitz and Bond's adaptations and recent materialist readings of their Shakespearean sources suggest that the adaptors anticipated the critics, and that both sought meaning from their Shakespearean originals by focusing on certain aspects of the text and by disregarding others. By demonstrating that whilst Marowitz and Bond's adaptations should best be regarded as a form of stage-centred criticism, Sonia Massai suggests that literary critical approaches inevitably reflect an arbitrary and historically determined appropriation of the Shakespearean original. Sonia Massai is a Lecturer in English Studies at St. Mary's, Strawberry Hill, a College of the University of Surrey. She has published articles on Shakespearean adaptations in Studies in English Literature, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, and in a special issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy. She is currently collaborating with Jacques Berthoud on the New Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

Ian Watson's article looks at two separate but interrelated subjects – the role of the arts in remedying urban dereliction, now a global phenomenon; and the development of one specific arts gathering in healing the larger wounds of Peruvian society after years of civil warfare and economic chaos. It was from the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, in the late sixteenth century, that the first noteworthy revolt against the Spanish Conquistadors was launched, by the legendary Inca leader Túpac Amaru. It was to this city that Mario Delgado, founder of the Lima-based group Cuatrotablas, invited the Third Theatre gathering, just two years after its inauguration from Eugenio Barba's initiative in 1976. The use of the city as a base for the most prominent of the guerrilla groups made a decennial return of the Third Theatre gathering impossible – and the reasons for holding the 1998 gathering in Ayacucho all the stronger, not least because of the choice of the city by the state-funded agency PromPeru as a focus for national cultural regeneration. Ian Watson, an Advisory Editor and regular contributor to NTQ who teaches at the Rutgers campus of the State University of New Jersey, knits together the threads of the story.

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.

When, back in 1971, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBC's own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.

Edward Bond's The Sea was first presented at the Royal Court Theatre under William Gaskill's direction in 1973, and later confirmed as a modern classic in its revival in 1991 at the National Theatre– where it was claimed that it could only have been written by an Englishman. But, as La Mer, it was chosen to open the Thėâtre de la Citė in Toulouse, where Bond scholar and editor Ian Stuart saw Jacques Rosner's production in October, and here reports on the resultant meeting between an English comedy and ‘French serenity’.

In the fall of 1997, Robert Lyons assisted at the Berliner Ensemble on the production of Leben des Galilei directed by B. K. Tragelehn, who himself had assisted on Brecht's 1955 production of the play, his last before his death. The following article comprises a series of notes, thoughts, and insights gathered and written by the author during the course of rehearsals, research into the theatre's archives, and following discussions spurred by the centenary celebrations of Brecht's birth. Issues arising include the autobiographical elements within Galilei, the nature of ‘alienated’ acting and the relevance of gestus, the treatment of time in the epic theatre, the parable and the need for context in the epic theatre, the necessity of coming to terms with Brecht for our own times, the potential for using ‘Brecht’ in the American theatre, and the future of the Berliner Ensemble. Robert Lyons, who studied at Wabash College, UCLA, and Humboldt University, is an independent director currently living and working in Berlin.

Sarah Kane was born on 3 February 1971 and committed suicide on 20 February 1999. She achieved reluctant notoriety with Blasted at the Royal Court in 1995, which, like many plays later recognised as dramatic landmarks, was villified at the time by the critics but passionately defended by many theatre practitioners. Dan Rebellato mourns the death and celebrates the life of the writer, and assesses her plays and their lasting significance.

Jill Davis, Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Kent, ‘spins off in other directions’ from what began as a review of Rebecca Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997).