Acting style is notoriously difficult to recapture, and our knowledge of how Burbage or Betterton or even Irving performed is scant indeed. This is understandable: less so is the reluctance of contemporary critics to get to grips with the description and evaluation of present-day styles of acting. In part in response to the ‘masterclasses’ given recently on London Weekend Television by John Barton with actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Andrew Rissik argues that the present ‘Stratford voice’, in contrast to that of the 'sixties and early 'seventies, does not serve Shakespeare well, and is fast becoming a new kind of declamatory self-indulgence. Andrew Rissik himself taught and worked on Shakespeare at Oxford, before becoming a full-time writer whose work has been performed on BBC Radio and TV and on Thames Television.

Slowly, the focus of creative and critical interest in American theatre has shifted from Broadway ‘product’ to the work presented by the non-profit theatres of the regional centres – work which has not only continued and developed the native naturalistic tradition, but embraced the best of the world repertoire, past and present. Method acting, adapted from Stanislavski to produce a distinctive but limited school of interiorized performance, proved inadequate to meet the increased demands of this range of work; and in this essay John Harrop examines the process by which university and conservatory training has come to accept that ‘style’ is not a sort of applied veneer, but a matter of finding the appropriate response to the linguistic and physical requirements of any play. Presently Head of the Professional Training Programme for the BFA in Drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara, John Harrop is himself a professional actor on the regional theatre circuit. An advisory editor of NTQ, and a frequent contributor to the old Theatre Quarterly, he is also the author (with Robert Cohen) of Creative Play Direction and (with Sabin Epstein) of Acting with Style.

In the first part of this feature, published in NTQ 2, Richard C. Beacham described how the pioneer of modern stage lighting, Adolphe Appia, and the creator of eurhythmics, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, came to collaborate in 1906 – in the development of the Hellerau ‘garden-city’ project. Here, they planned to provide an opportunity for active artistic participation in a specially designed performance space. The author takes up the story with the beginning of classes at Hellerau in 1911, and preparations for the two festivals which followed – including the revelatory production of Gluck's Orpheus. The First World War brought the collaboration to an end – but not before it had put into practice for the first time many of the scenic and interpretive principles of modern staging. Richard C. Beacham published a study of Appia's earlier work in Opera Quarterly (Autumn 1983), and plans to complete the present NTQ feature with an assessment of ‘The Legacy of Hellerau’. His forthcoming full-length study of Appia will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Many dramatists have written of the world as a stage: less attention has been paid to the consequent effects upon the ‘leading players’ – the politicians who readily enough cast themselves as heroes, and consign others to the roles of villains or at best supernumeraries. Roger Howard argues that on the contemporary ‘world stage’ events all too often take the form of simulations, in which ordinary people must take their allotted parts – or face the coercion or punishment of the state. He looks also at theatre practitioners from the Japanese actor Zeami to Schiller to Heiner Müller who have, for better or worse, examined the nature of the ‘dramatic sense of life’. Roger Howard, who presently teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, is himself a widely performed playwright, currently working with Theatre Underground, and has written extensively on Chinese theatre and political playwriting, most recently as a contributor to Contradictory Theatres, for imminent publication from Theatre Action Press.

Time in Chekhov's plays passes between the acts – not as a functional necessity, but as part of an irresistible rhythm which fascinated the dramatist, and obsessed his characters. Time for Chekhov was neither a metaphysical concept nor a thematic convenience, but the shared perspective through which humankind reconciled its hopes and fears – or failed to do so. Jovan Hristic looks in detail at the treatment of time in Chekhov's major plays, and illuminates on the one hand its role in creating an almost classical sense of inevitability – and on the other at its ability to reduce the apparently momentous to the ironically trivial. This article is taken from his full-length study, Chekhov the Dramatist, already translated into French, and originally published in Belgrade. where he works as a leading theatre critic.

Disruption of plays by their audiences has not been an uncommon occurrence in theatre history, but the received wisdom has it that rioting more or less went out of fashion once the house lights could be lowered for the performance. But the combination in the theatre of the Weimar Republic of the politically radical and artistically experimental drama of inter-war Germany with the high political tensions of the times proved an explosive one. The frequent audience disturbances of the period were, however, less the spontaneous expression of genuine indignation than a carefully planned and orchestrated attempt to suppress radical art and opinion. In this article, James Jordan, a member of the Department of German at the University of Warwick, traces the course of theatrical disruption as a tactic of emergent Nazism – and the reactions to it of the theatres, the playwrights, and a too-often-myopic judiciary.

The critical attention paid to radio drama has dwindled in almost inverse proportion to a steady increase not only in quantity but, less expectedly, in quality – though Britain has become one of the very few countries where this entirely distinctive dramatic medium is still seriously practised. As Head of BBC Radio Drama from 1963 to 1976. Martin Esslin was instrumental in developing the form, and his article in TQ 3 in 1971. ‘The Mind as a Stage’, in which he summed up his own ‘aesthetic of radio’, provides the starting point for the present article: but its authors believe that the very strength of Esslin's own artistic beliefs and authority limited his understanding of the less ‘artistic’ output of radio drama, and that it is in this area that some of the most notable of recent advances have been made. Their article thus examines not only the development of radio drama since 1971, but the way in which its changing ‘codes’ have altered the relationship between play and listener: and it analyzes two distinctive uses of the medium – to create what they call ‘alternative histories’, and a sense of ‘fragmented space’. Frances Gray, herself a radio playwright, has recently published a study of John Arden in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series, and presently teaches at the University of Sheffield, from which Janet Bray has just received her M.Phil. degree for a study of radio drama in the 'seventies.

Peter Weiss, who died in 1982, achieved international recognition as a playwright relatively late in his life – at the age of almost fifty when, in 1964, the Marat-Sade received its premiere in West Germany and in London. Although these productions were followed by a Marxist interpretation in East Germany in the following year, it was Peter. Brook's version for the RSC, later filmed, which shaped most English-speaking theatregoers' perceptions of the play, as a culmination of Brook's exploration of ‘theatre of cruelty’. So what is the philosophy of the Marat-Sade? In this article, John McKenzie, who teaches in the Department of German at the University of Exeter, returns to the statements made by Weiss himself – which, though numerous, were mostly in ephemeral or untranslated sources – and traces the feelings of the playwright as these evolved from the political neutrality of what he called the ‘third standpoint’ to the overtly Marxist position of Weiss's later life.