As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a City's Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.

In this article Otto G. Schindler provides an overview of research into the Castle Theatre at Český Krumlov, where theatrical entertainments are first recorded in the late seventeenth century, and adds some contributions of his own. After a short period of renewed activity in the rebuilt theatre inaugurated in 1768, benign neglect has preserved for us intact an authentic monument of late baroque theatre building. In the Castle Theatre, Hanswurst, traditionally the sole comic performer, formed part of a commedia-derived comic ensemble, and pantomimes regularly accompanied birthday celebrations until the late eighteenth century, when major travelling companies were visitors to the theatre, and opéra comique was also in vogue. Otto G. Schindler was University Assistant, Lecturer, and Head Librarian at the Drama Department of the University of Vienna, and has been a Research Fellow at the State University of New York. He was active in the Theatre Collection of the Austrian National Library and the Institute for Audience Research at the Austrian Academy of Science, where he is a member of its Commission for Cultural Studies and Theatre History. He has published extensively on Austrian and Central European theatre history with special reference to early modern theatre companies and the reception of commedia dell'arte. The festschrift Theatre am Hof und für das Volk (Vienna: Boehlau, 2002) was recently published in his honour.

The ten-minute play is burgeoning in the United States, yet it is a phenomenon which has received virtually no critical attention. Here, a contributing playwright places the ten-minute play – and its cousin, the ‘overnight’ play – within an historical and theoretical context in order to examine the aesthetic and political implications of the genre. Rick Mitchell's discussion thus ranges between the history of the one-act play, Walter Benjamin's essay on storytelling, Bertolt Brecht's notions of ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simple’) pleasures and epic acting, Filippo Marinetti's writings on the variety theatre, and Chekhov's ideas about the strengths of the short, nonsensical, vaudeville farce. Rick Mitchell also relates his own recent experience in creating a ten-minute comedy, Acadiana Sludge – written, rehearsed, and performed (off-book) in less than twenty-four hours – and the text of this play augments the article. Rick Mitchell's other plays include Brecht in L.A., Ventriloquist Sex, Urban Renewal, Potlatch, and The Composition of Herman Melville, recently published by Intellect Books. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he directs the Northridge Playwrights Workshop, and he has published numerous articles about performance, theory, and playwriting.

In 2001, when David Soul sued the Daily Mirror for printing a defamatory review of his West End show, The Dead Monkey, questions surfaced about the critic's rights and responsibilities under the law. There have been numerous accounts in recent years of the relationships between law and literature, and the general assumption is that critics can claim the defence of ‘fair comment’. However, very little work has been done on the history, rationale, and implications of that defence, or on the actions before Soul's in which aggrieved theatre people have attempted to bring critics to account. David Roberts evaluates individual cases from legal history in which the critic's rights have been tested, and considers what they have to tell us about the way our society conceptualizes critical activity. Bourdieu's history of taste is invoked, but modified to show how the law's concern with formalism in its own processes has endorsed a matching version of the critical process. David Roberts is Head of English at the University of Central England, Birmingham.

Since the post-war reorganization of education that began in 1949, the purpose and nature of German theatre training has perpetuated a division between performance and technical training, provided by vocational schools (or Hochschulen), while university programmes offer degrees in Theatre Science (Theaterwissenschaft), theory, or other academic areas. The course of studies at Justus Leibig Universität Giessen is one of the first to break away from this established model, offering a hybrid programme combining the study of theory and practice. Having featured a number of international guest artists as teachers, including Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, John Jessurun, and Heiner Goebbels, the programme continues to be a centre of innovation in the changing landscape of German theatre education. Steve Earnest is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University, San Bernardino. His published work includes The State Acting Academy of East Berlin (Mellen Press, 1999), and articles in Performer Training (Harwood Publishers, 2001), Theatre Journal, Western European Stages, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. He is also active in southern California professional theatre.

Reports in The Stage of an ‘American invasion in the theatre’ and the New Statesman writing of ‘our Americanized theatre’ expressed widely shared fears that transatlantic values were adversely affecting the British theatre in the wake of the First World War. In this article, Paul Marshall examines the strategies employed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office as it carried out its duties of censorship in dealing with plays from or about the United States. The Censor perceived it as his duty to defend public morals from elements that would threaten and challenge the values associated with ‘Englishness’, and, drawing on the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence now available in the British Library, Paul Marshall explores how the Lord Chamberlain of the time, Lord Cromer, his readers, and his advisory board viewed the threat of the American ‘invasion’ – their shared values, sometimes disputed verdicts, and the formal and informal influences that could be brought to bear upon them. Five ‘case studies’ look at their attitudes to particular plays about and from the USA. Paul Marshall presently teaches history at Bromley High School, Kent, having studied for an MA in Text and Performance Studies at King's College and RADA.

This article is based on discussions with artistic directors and administrators of British Theatre in Education companies about past and current practice and changing funding resources. Persephone Sextou reviews developments in TiE practice since its beginnings in the 1960s, focusing upon the situation in the 1990s following the enforcement of National Curriculum requirements, the redirection of government funding to partnerships in education, and the availability of funds from the National Lottery. She describes how the remaining TiE companies are struggling not to compromise their artistic autonomy, and considers the relevance of the British TiE experience in relation to the potential for the development of the medium in other countries. Persephone Sextou is an instructor in Drama and Theatre in Education at the University of Thessaly in Greece, and is researching the transference of British TiE to a Greek context for her doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her book on School Dramatization has been published in Greece.

The positive valuation of theatre as live performance, and therefore also its transience, is frequently accompanied by the urgent expression of the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ theatre reaches its most fervent expression (and hope of authority and permanence) with the live performance archive. Archive theory, however, now insists on the instability and uncertainty of the archive, which not only documents but also constructs its subject. In this article, Matthew Reason argues that, by tracing comparisons between archives and human memory, it is possible to establish a new formulation of the archive – as detritus, not completeness – that puts a value on mutability as a reflection of theatre's liveness. Matthew Reason is currently completing a PhD on representations of live performance at the University of Edinburgh. He has edited a special edition of the Edinburgh Review (ER106) on Theatre in Scotland, and has previously worked at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his responsibilities included maintaining the archive.

BETWEEN 14 and 28 June 2002 the Lyttelton Theatre hosted a series of five rehearsed readings: Jean-Paul Wenzels's Rising Blue (2000), translated by Lin Coghlan and directed by Deborah Bruce; Laurent Gaudé's Battle of Will (1999), translated by David Greig and directed by John Tiffany; Marie N'Diaye's Hilda (1999), translated by Sarah Woods and directed by Dalia Ibelhauptaite; Philippe Minyana's Habitats (2001), translated by Steve Waters and directed by Fiona Laird; and Serge Valletti's Le Pub! (1998), translated by Richard Bean and directed by Mick Gordon. Part of the National Theatre's innovative ‘Transformations’ season, the readings constituted the public interface of what the organizers viewed as a ‘new type of translation exchange’.

A conference organized by the CET (Centre d'Etudes de la Traduction) to be held at the University of Metz (UFR Lettres et Langues) on 19–20 March 2004.

Report on the ‘In-Yer-Face? British Drama in the 1990s’ conference at the University of the West of England, Bristol, 6–7 September 2002.

Report on the International Theatre Institute forum held at the Soho Theatre and Writers Centre Studio, London, on 25 February 2003.

RICHARD HORNBY does well to advocate freedom of interpretation for the actor in his NTQ article of November 2002, but he diminishes Jacques Derrida as a false friend of the actor in puzzling ways.

JANE WINEARLS, ‘the dancing don’ as one local newspaper described her, has died at the age of ninety-three. She was a pioneer in many ways through her work in the professional worlds of theatre and dance, and in her work in higher education.