The spectators, thousands and thousands of them, begin arriving in the chill hours before the equinoctial dawn; a few torches cast huge shadows over the cavernous theatron as they move to their seats. Clutching woollen himations about them, they arrange the cushions that will soften the long sitting as well as insulate them from the night-chilled benches. They are hushed, almost reverential, speaking to each other in low tones. Not a people given to breakfasting, a few munch on olives and bread, while others tilt their wineskins for a dilute but still warming jolt of the grape. As the first streaks of light appear in the sky at the eastern-side of the theatre (near the Stage Right parodos), The Watchman appears on the roof, eerily lit by the flaming brazier he carries on. While the audience listens to an already familiar exposition they look to the southwest, awaiting the flare of a beacon fire on the nearby Pnyx that will signal the fall of Troy.

The archaeological digs at the sites of the Rose and Globe theatres have given us a fund of new information about the theatres, and not least about the composition of their central, open yards. Those of us who took part in the campaign to protect the Rose from the great caterpillar-tracked machines that loomed over it in May 1989 will remember the surprisingly pristine look of its mortar yard, smashed through to be sure by the concrete piles of the 1950s office block that had by then been removed, and damaged around its perimeters by Elizabethan erosion of one sort or another. Yet much of it still looked clean and smooth after its four centuries of watery slumber. One day it was thrown open to an invited audience of celebrities, and bystanders could watch as Dustin Hofman—then playing The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix—trod where the groundlings had stood long ago, or as Judi Dench—not yet a Dame—picked her way across the yard, her narrow heels apparently doing no damage at all.

My dear Mackenzie, the fact is—my plays are too liberal for the aristocratic illiberals of Ireland.… My plays breathe the noble sentiments of the influential classes of Ireland.… But I am going to a place where the feelings and the reality of liberty exist in their most glowing form—and not the form alone, but the embodied spirit. I am going to America.

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.

When Barney Simon's play Cincinatti was presented at the Market Theatre in 1979, it epitomized a watershed event in the development of theatre in South Africa, anticipating a new tend towards a tradition of a multi-racial theatre. In 1965 legislation had forced racial segregation in the theatre. Pleas for the official desegregation of races in the theatre had finally been successful in 1977 and Cincinatti, sporting one of the first multi-racial casts, was symbolic of a reaching-out amongst different racial, cultural and lingual groups in a highly polarized South African society. Cincinatti was chosen by Hauptfleisch and Steadman to represent Alternative theatre in their anthology (South African Theatre, Four Plays and an Introduction, 1984), thereby acknowledging a new theatrical tradition on the South African theatre scene.

The Arab, as presented in plays of the early days of settlement, is linked by his manual labour to the land of his birth. He might be primitive and his encounter with the chalutzim may be necessary to improve his situation and show him how the world has progressed, but he is also an example to be copied for his sheer work capability. He is seen as a powerful competitor with the Jewish work-force, due both to his ability to be content with little and to his forced acceptance of meagre wages. Towards the end of this period and for several decades afterwards, the Arab was pushed aside into the fringes of the labour market. Work that was previously thought by the Zionist pioneering ideology to be of utmost importance, was no longer considered as such. As occasionally the Arab image served as a reminder of an ideology of manual labour that no longer existed.

The Israeli playwright is a representative of the beliefs and opinions of a particular group in Israeli society; mainly that of the western intelligentsia. Almost all of the playwrights mentioned in this article are from the ranks of the Labour Movement and Zionist tradition. Their attitude regarding Jewish labour and towards the Arabs who do the ‘dirty work’, derives from a yearning for standards and values that had formerly stood at the centre of education and debate for many prominent sectors of Jewish society. From the early 1950s, and particularly after the 1967 war, the ideology of Jewish labour, especially manual labour, became one of mere slogans, symbols, songs and folk dances, or as subject for study matter, but no longer an active component in the life of the Israeli Jewish citizen.

From the beginning of the 1970s, but mainly towards the end of that period and continuing into the 1980s, the Israeli playwright saw the driving of the Arab work-force into despised jobs, under degrading conditions of exploitation, as a central cause for the unrest that led to the Palestinian uprising. The image of the exploited Arab was no longer an ideological, nostalgic reminder but, rather, a social time bomb that might explode at any time and fragment the Israeli social and economic structure. It is interesting to compare the reasoning given by the Jewish Israeli playwrights for the outbreak of the Intifada with an Arab-Israeli play staged in 1990 in Nazareth. In The Ninth Wave by Riad Massaraweh, although the playwright describes the labourers that line up daily in the Haifa ‘slave market’ as exploited, degraded and slave labourers, his main emphasis is on the Palestinian longing for national identity. Research too reveals that the nationalistic element and the state of the refugee camps are the most serious causes of the Intifada. Despite this, the Jewish Israeli playwright presents the economic factor as the important one. This discrepancy between the Israeli theatre and Palestinian reality, derives from the playwright's ignorance of, and lack of attempt to study the actuality of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as well as their ignorance of the conditions of daily life there. The playwright meets Palestinians in the local (Israeli) cafe or restaurant, on building sites and in other places where the Arabs work and where Jews are not willing to do so. He deals with the problems that bother him and with his target audience, and not necessarily with the problems that bother the Palestinians. However, the Jewish Israeli playwright nonetheless senses the indignity of their exploitation and the dangerous dependency of the Israeli economy on a hostile population, and he tries to express his reservations about this Israeli ‘work schedule’ when he takes refuge on occasion in ideals that no longer exist.