In the casinos of Las Vegas the black-jack tables and roulette wheels stand silent from five to seven A.M. Slotmachines alone remain for the stragglers unconquered by night and fatigue. These slotmachines do not give their players even the illusion of control, for the game consists only of throwing in money and moving the metal arms. Fate is blind and completely encased in the mechanism. The player merely sets fate in motion, and fate in turn brings either a loss of the stake or its manifold increase. The slotmachines are closed structures: the player and the mechanism—no one and nothing beyond that. “Others” in this structure do not exist. No one stands between the player and fate. “God,” who arranges the mechanism, repairs it, takes out the money, is invisible. He doesn't exist, at least not for the player.

The genesis of the play reveals some of the differences between Barba's work and Grotowski's, as well as Barba's special use of the resources of his Jutland province. It was the resident literary advisor of the Odin Teatret, Christian Ludvigsen, the Danish translator of Ionesco and Beckett, who suggested that Barba treat the subject of Euripides’ Alcestis, the sacrifice of a woman who agrees to die in place of her husband, the King of Pherai in Thessaly.

Stage fright is a state of morbid anxiety disturbing the sense of poise. This, at least, is how it makes its appearance at a certain point; for, like all morbid states, stage fright proceeds through various phases. Thus I shall try to describe it longitudinally. Also, since not all anxiety states lay claim to the sense of poise, stage fright is a particular species of anxiety, and a psychological study of stage fright will involve more than an inquiry into the general nature of anxiety. We shall have to look into, for example, a psychology of poise. And as poise depends upon our anticipations of others’ receptions of how we are hoping to represent ourselves, we shall have occasion to account for feelings of personal fraudulence and the dread of exposure and to refer to a psychology of imposture.

Sören Brunen's background is in architecture, and he envisions a “Machine-Theatre” that would portray the development of situations through purely mechanical means. Figurer, performed by the Packett Troupe at the Pistol Teatern in Stockholm, represents an initial phase in the evolution toward such a performance.

In issue #17 of Théâtre et Université, the production is described as follows:

The appeal made to an audience by a theatre piece has always seemed to me primarily visceral. Even in periods of elevated verbal device and stringent academic rule, the spectator's real impulse was toward the flesh and blood. In an era when this impulse is obstructed by production techniques, habits of delivery, and domination by theme and character, a concrete, approachable personality still persists. Especially now, when we aren't in a context of observed tradition and literacy, we find this personality—a compound of the audience's desires for fiction, for fantasy situations, for the offertories of individual performers. It can control, gratify, outrage, and exhaust an audience in much the same way that any other publicly-met personality touches our private needs, our unacknowledged inhibitions, our unconscious animosities and loves. As long as its actors appear alive, the theatre can avoid the static existence of a thing and retain vitality.

This year, bids will be submitted for the construction and equipping of Britain's National Theatre. It is ironic that after sixtyfive years of planning and four major attempts to actualize this dream, that its reality will fall so short of meeting the needs of the present circumstances. Drama will be presented there in the evening to a restricted audience in a prestige building costing twenty-four million dollars.

Seating only two thousand people in its two theatres, and with a subscription system for reserving places, the new National Theatre will not be open to all citizens of the nation. “The first four rows of seating in each auditorium, which some might consider uncomfortably close to the stage, are spaced more closely than the seating in the main body of the auditorium so that they can be sold to younger theatregoers on the day of performance.” (National Theatre. Detailed Design Proposals, Nov. 1967.) So much for the building committee's attitude toward poorer spectators, but what about its rich patrons?