One of Berlin's most prominent streets, named after the East German workers' uprising of 1953 (in which Brecht was controversially implicated), serves as the performative location for Nicolas Whybrow's topographical interrogation of the politics of German nationhood. Particular attention is given to the new parliament building, the Reichstag, which has been out of action for the majority of its troubled history. The article considers attempts to perform democracy and unity since the fall of the Wall through various mediations, including Norman Foster's refunctioning of the Reichstag, Christo's facilitation of its rebirth, and a permanent installation by Hans Haacke which rewrites the building's prominent inscription of 1916, ‘For the German People’. Finally, Whybrow places the annual ‘Love Parade’ in the context of the long history of mass marches and demonstrations on this particular street, and analyzes its claims to be a unifying political event. Based loosely on the Benjaminian flâneur figure's practice of a first-hand experience of the street, incorporating both subjective immersion and detached observation of the revealing ‘detritus of modern urban life’, various tensions and superimpositions are rendered visible as the city undergoes transformation since reunification. Nicolas Whybrow, whose book Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin, and Berlin is forthcoming, is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at De Montfort University, Leicester.

For many, the death of Joan Littlewood on 20 September 2002 at the age of 87 marked the end of a theatrical era – though in practice she had lived an increasingly reclusive life following her move to France and the death of her partner Gerry Raffles in 1975, interrupted only in 1994 by the publication of an autobiography, Joan's Book. Clive Barker, Co-Editor of NTQ, became a member of Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company in 1955, shortly after the change from a touring policy to a building-based company at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, had led to the departure of Ewan MacColl and others of the original group, and subsequently to the displacement of other members as critical success led to West End transfers. What follows is not a dutiful obituary but a highly personal memoir of the years that followed, and provides an ironic contrast between Joan's own published recollections and the experience of one of her ‘slags’ – liable to be called on to do anything and everything. Joan's own recollection of Clive Barker was that ‘You could only do three things. Catatonics, menace, and I forget what the third was.’ Here, with fearful glances over his shoulder for an apparition at the window, Clive Barker reminds her, and adds a few other corrigenda to Joan's Book.

Back in 1977, Alan Plater contributed an article to TQ25 celebrating twenty-five years as a writer for stage and television. But his first play for television was not screened until 1962 – hence the different anniversary which here provides the occasion for his reflections on changes in the medium and its treatment of drama (and dramatists) over the succeeding four decades. As a stage writer, he established special relationships with Stoke-on-Trent, Humberside, and the North-East – where his Close the Coalhouse Door played to tremendous local acclaim, but to metropolitan disinterest when it reached the West End. But while his stage work has remained resolutely committed to the parts the critics seldom reach, as a writer for television he has both kept his own entirely distinctive voice, as in the Beiderbecke sequence, and remained an ever-reliable contributor to series from Z Cars in the 'sixties to Midsomer Murders in the new millennium, with excursions into glossy period dramatizations such as the seven-part Fortunes of War. Here, he reflects on the losses of spontaneity and creative freedom which have accompanied technical innovation and increasing bureaucracy, and offers some hopes for changes in direction to restore what was once the glory of British TV drama. This article is based on an inaugural lecture Alan Plater gave at the University of Bath in March 2002.

The closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first have seen a wide range of hybrid and cross-over performance forms, dance/theatre being prominent among them. In this article, Maria Shevtsova outlines the similarities between the working principles of director Lev Dodin and those of the choreographers Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, suggesting how they have set and still exemplify current trends in a networked world (Castells) of precarity (Bourdieu) and uncertainty. She also explores a broader socio-artistic context for her focus. This text is a slightly modified version of a belated inaugural lecture for her third appointed professorial chair, at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in March 2002. Maria Shevtsova is an Advisory Editor of NTQ, whose recent publications include ‘Theatre and Interdisciplinarity’ (2001), a special issue she guest-edited for Theatre Research International, and ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ (2002), edited for Contemporary Theatre Review, which includes her essay, ‘Appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's Champ and Habitus for a Sociology of Stage Productions’. Her book on Lev Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg is due for publication in 2003.

The rapid acceptance in America of Stanislavsky's approach to actor training is often presented as an unexpected and unaccountable imposition of foreign culture. But Keith Walden argues that, while the ‘method’ may have been an innovation in acting schools, its goals and techniques were already familiar in other spheres of American life – particularly in the voluminous advice literature directed at salespeople. The similarities are not surprising, since both attempts to shape performances were inspired by the erosion of older notions of coherent, stable selfhood. Though the cultural purposes of acting and selling remained sharply different, the transgressive potential of modern theatre was dependent on a widespread belief that the roles required in ordinary work should be competently enacted. Keith Walden is a member of the History Department at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. He is a former editor of the Canadian Historical Review and author of Becoming Modern in Toronto: the Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late-Victorian Culture.

The numerous interrelated ‘popular’ theatres of Indonesia provide important evidence for the study of artistic interaction and change. The West Sumatran Randai theatre emerged in a culturally hybrid space and has been a sensitive index to local, national, and international flows and conditions. Matthew Isaac Cohen traces the origins of Randai in the late-colonial period and discusses its associations with rantau – a time of temporary migration, traditionally associated with the rite of passage to adulthood, but increasingly a semi-permanent exile for many Sumatrans. He then traces how and why Randai has now become more than a local art form, having been exported out of the province of West Sumatra to be utilized as source material for modern theatre by Indonesian theatre makers in Jakarta and Australia. Matthew Isaac Cohen is a Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow, a scholar of Indonesian theatre and performance, and a practising shadow puppeteer.

This paper was prepared for the ‘Postmodernism and Spirituality’ conference held at the University of Central Lancashire in April this year, and Ruth Quinn has now reworked the piece in the light of Clive Barker's article in NTQ69, ‘In Search of the Lost Mode: Improvisation and All that Jazz’. Ruth Quinn first studied Theology at Oxford, but has been teaching Drama and Theatre Studies for eleven years, currently at the University of Central Lancashire within the Contemporary Performing Arts Department. Here she outlines some of the key elements of improvisation and how the dynamic between self and other develops in an actor's training.

In this essay Eugenio Barba, director of Odin Teatret, founder of the International School for Theatre Anthropology, and a Contributing Editor of NTQ, traces his own ‘orphanage’ from a professional family – and his discovery not only of an ‘elder brother’ in Grotowski, but of his two ‘grandfathers’, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. He extends the metaphor to suggest how these two branches of a theatrical family tree, apparently of quite different impulses and temperaments, shared a working language, however differently this translated into their theatre practice. He sums this up as a common concern with ‘showing how thoughts move’, and relates this in particular to the ways in which the theatre lost, preserved, and has slowly rediscovered the work of Meyerhold, and to how the ‘disconnected tradition’ of his work re-emerges in unexpected places. This takes Barba on a journey from the home where Meyerhold received his friends in Moscow, as lovingly restored by his granddaughter, to Mexico and Colombia, where Seki Sano brought to a new continent his own discoveries from the ‘theatre paradise’ he believed he had found in the Soviet Union, in which ‘the discoveries of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold were part of the same baggage’, thus passing, ‘through the rigour of the craft, the meaning of a theatre that lives through revolt and a feeling of not belonging’.

Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels. Victor Emeljanow is Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His full length works include Anton Chekhov: the Critical Heritage, Victorian Popular Dramatists, and, with Jim Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (University of Iowa Press, 2001), which was recently awarded the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize for 2002.

The exponential growth of ‘theoretical’ approaches to theatre in the last twenty years has given rise to a vast body of literature and a swag of highly influential ‘command metaphors’. In this article, Julian Meyrick describes and analyzes the rise of such theories, contrasting academic understanding of theatre with the more experiential problem-solving of the profession. He argues that sophisticated ‘theoretical’ approaches to the theatre too often preclude or traduce the thinking of artists themselves, presenting practical concerns as epiphenomenal or untutored. This, in turn, points to important short-circuits in some academic takes on theatre which need modifying if ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are once again to feed into each other in a meaningful way. Julian Meyrick Is currently an Associate Director and Literary Adviser at Melbourne Theatre Company, and an Honorary Associate with the Drama Program, La Trobe University. His production for the Melbourne Workers' Theatre, Who's Afraid of the Working Class? attracted numerous awards, and toured widely in Australia. He has published in the areas of arts policy, the theory/practice nexus, and post-1945 Australian theatre. His book on Sydney's Nimrod Theatre, See How It Runs: Nimrod and the New Wave was published by Currency Press in 2002.

Western consciousness of Sri Lanka tends to be limited to bracketing the secessionist ‘Tamil Tigers’ among the ‘terrorist threats’ facing the world community. In truth, tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of Sri Lanka go back two millennia, and Syed Jamil Ahmed argues here that the conflict is reflected in the myths of origin of both communities and the rituals through which they are still re-enacted. He believes that one of these, the ritual of Devol Māduā, offers a possible resolution to the problematic relationship between religious and moral law, or dharma, and the pragmatics of statecraft in Sri Lanka. After examining the historical context of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the myths of origin associated with the three key deities in the ritual, he offers an episode-by-episode description of the event, and goes on to suggest that the function of the ritual in Sinhalese–Buddhist society is revealing in terms of the dialectics of pacifism and violence that Buddhism faces in Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jātrā’ in NTQ 74, and his full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

As a rule, news from Nepal gets little or no prominence in the western media – but the regicide of 2001, in which Prince Dipendra allegedly mowed down his parents and then shot himself, was a notable exception. Two years earlier, Syed Jamil Ahmed witnessed Prince Dipendra's and his father King Birendra's participation in the festival of Indra Jātrā, held annually in the nation's capital city, Kathmandu. After an analysis of the myths underlying the festival, and of their modification over centuries to serve changing dynastic priorities, the author provides an account of the festival as a ‘first-person felt experience’, and then investigates how its contemporary actuality reflects and attempts to perpetuate an intricate network of social and political meanings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. He trained in theatre at the School of Drama in New Delhi, and in 2001–2 was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh. He has proceeded to examine the variety of Islamic theatre forms, their inherent features, and their relationship to the corrupting influence of western forms.

Performance artist Tim Miller has been making autobiographical work for more than twenty years. Dee Heddon explores Miller's recent show, Glory Box (2001), arguing that, both in his practice and his use of his own life stories, he is attempting not only to connect with but to energize his audiences, transforming them into activist spectators. One tactic Miller employs in Glory Box is futurity – performing an autobiography that he has not yet lived. This future is one that Miller compels us collectively to rewrite, inviting us to change his potential life and life-story in the process. Dee Heddon argues that Miller's commitment to and faith in the transformative potential of live performance enacts a resistance to those pejorative terms too easily thrown at autobiographical performance: Miller may work from his ‘self’, but his work is far from solipsistic, egotistic, or narcissistic. Dee Heddon makes and teaches autobiographical performance, and her writing has appeared in Performance Research, Studies in Theatre Production, Research in Drama Education, Reconstructions, and M/C. Her Devising Performances: Histories and Practices, co-authored with Jane Milling, is forthcoming from Palgrave.

Israeli institutional theatre has only just begun to toy with the idea of ‘feminist theatre’ and, despite a demonstrable increase in violence against women in Israel, with increased visibility in the mass media, the subject has yet to be confronted in mainstream theatres. However, women's creation has been longer at the frontier of theatre activities, and the issue of battered women has been a central theme of several community-based performances over the past two decades. In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem offers an overview of these plays – the first performed by professional actresses who had just graduated from university, and who were mostly Ashkenaziyot (of European origin); the two following produced by community amateur actresses who were Mizrahi (of Arabic origin) – women from a low social stratum who, although being acquainted with domestic violence, had wished to avoid being regarded as battered women; and the last performed by a group of amateur actresses who came from more heterogeneous backgrounds, but who were all being treated in one of the centres for prevention and treatment of domestic violence. The author argues that in the first performance the battered woman was articulated by another, distant woman; in the next two she was presented by a more closely, identifying relative; while only in the fourth production did she publicly represent herself by herself, articulating her own voice through the symbolic system of theatre. The author proceeds to analyze in detail the first and the last of these performances, which clearly present the process of passage from acting woman-as-object to acting woman-as-subject. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is a lecturer, researcher and practitioner in the Community Educational Unit of the Theatre Department at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, who trained and worked as an actress and community theatre animator/director for many years. Her writings in areas of play theory, and performance and cultural studies, and their relation to community theatre, educational drama, drama therapy, and feminist theatre, have been published in numerous periodicals in the USA, Europe, and Israel, and her article ‘Ethnicity, Class, and Gender’ is forthcoming in Theatre Research International.

In today's technologically complex and racially hybrid society, what is the meaning of ‘cultural memory’? Like performance, Ian Watson argues, culture ‘exists only in the doing’ – yet if our formative experiences are in that sense ‘rehearsals’ for life, the subsequent ‘performance’ is in a constant state of flux and renewal. Here, Ian Watson looks at the interface between theatrical and cultural training in American society, from the old apprenticeship system of the stock companies, through the Delsarte-based approach of the earliest conservatoires and the pervasiveness of Americanized Stanislavsky in the post-war period, towards a renewed concern with the techniques of voice and movement to meet the demands of both the classical and the contemporary experimental repertoires. In contrast to the deep cultural roots of much eastern theatrical training, perceptions of actor training in America are, he argues, as eclectic and diffuse as American society itself, and so (using Eugenio Barba's distinction) lean strongly towards creating a ‘professional’ rather than a ‘personal’ identity for the performer – one which ‘bears the signature of the hybrid narrative it springs from’. Ian Watson, who is an Advisory Editor of New Theatre Quarterly, teaches at Rutgers University–Newark, where he is the Acting Chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. He is author of Towards a Third Theatre: Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1993) and of Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer Training across Cultures (Routledge, 2001), and has also published numerous articles on theatre in scholarly journals.

Should we suffer boredom in the theatre so long as it can be properly theorized? Dare performance stand alone, without hermeneutical crutches? What are the practicalities of practice-based research? And should we be scared of scare quotes? These are some of the questions asked by Martin Welton, tongue not so much in cheek as brazenly challenging some of the new orthodoxies of theatre studies. Martin Welton is a lecturer in Performance in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests include perception and performance, theatre and performance theory, actor training systems, and the South Indian martial art kalarippayattu. He also works as a performer, most recently with Sound and Fury Theatre Company, Emilyn Claid, and with his own company Darwin's Beard.

Elizabeth Russo here explores the analogies between Brecht's spectator-centred approach to theatre and a student-centred approach to education, comparing the symbiosis achieved in his work between the ‘Magistral’ approach common to top-down education and the open-ended ‘Socratic’ dialogue. She suggests that even the lehrstücke, often assumed to be his most dogmatic pieces, in fact offer choices and question the spectator's intellect, and compares Brecht's techniques with the concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ in educational theory – the gap distance between a child's actual and potential level of development, and between his/her individual skills and functioning within a social group. Elizabeth Russo has worked with children in Chicago under the volunteer programme of the Inner-City Teaching Corps, and is currently teaching at St Mary of the Angels School in London. She is a history graduate of Villanova University, studied in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola University, Chicago, and has an MA in Theatre Education from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballads of the late 1950s and early 1960s, acknowledged by Derek Paget in NTQ 12 (November 1987) as a formative influence on the emergence of what he called ‘Verbatim Theatre’, have been given a new lease of life following their recent release by Topic Records; but his theatrical experiments in multi-media documentary, which he envisaged as a model for ‘engendering direct creativity in the common people’, remain largely unknown. The most ambitious of these – The Maker and the Tool, staged as part of the Centre 42 festivals of 1961–62 – is exemplary of the impulse to recreate a popular culture which preoccupied many of those involved in the Centre 42 venture. David Watt, who teaches Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, began researching these experiments with work on a case study of Banner Theatre of Actuality, the company Parker co-founded in 1973, for Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement since 1970, co-authored with Alan Filewod. This led to further research in the Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham Central Library, and the author is grateful to the Charles Parker Archive Trust and the staff of the Birmingham City Archives (particularly Fiona Tait) for the opportunity to explore its holdings and draw on them for this article.

In today's diverse and evolving world of performance there is a place for the reinvestigation of the archaic realm of shamanism, and the extent to which it relates to modern theatre practice. To what extent do the calling, initiation, trance, and performance states of the shaman resemble the experience of today's actors? Is there really a dichotomy between a theatre of greed and a theatre of need? Inspired by her own personal sense of the evolution of the actor from the role of the shaman, Rachel Karafistan here considers the work of contemporary, so-called ‘third theatres’ such as Odin Teatret, Teatr Biuro Podrozy, and Derevo in the light of shamanic precedent. Having initially studied Psychology at university, Rachel Karafistan worked as a freelance director, teacher, and actor in England for seven years while researching her doctoral study: Shamanic Dimensions within Theatre Practice Today: a Theoretical and Experiential Investigation, which she completed in 2001. She is currently working as an actress and teacher in Poland with Teatr Biuro Podrozy and her own company, COSmino.

In early twentieth-century England the general recognition among dramatists and theatre practitioners that the theatre had reached a crisis or turning point – that as an institution it no longer answered the social and moral requirements of a modern industrialized society – resulted in a profusion of books and articles which addressed alternative modes of theatrical production or proposed institutional restructuring. Simultaneously with these discussions of the social utility of the theatre as an institution, a broad debate about theatrical aesthetics was continuing under the influence of new European and avant-garde movements such as symbolism and expressionism. Examining the shift from the actor-manager system in conjunction with these campaigns, Cary DiPietro here considers the recurrence of Shakespeare in the theatrical tracts of the period, variously regarded as a cultural authority at the intersection of issues of class, new modes of mechanical reproduction, aesthetic value, and old versus new modes of theatrical production. He sees the making – and the wilful destruction – of the film of Beerbohm Tree's Henry VIII as paradigmatic of the ways in which the period tried to distinguish popular, mass forms from what was ‘authentically’ artistic. Cary DiPietro currently lectures at Kyoto University, Japan.