The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.

Theatre historians are now reconsidering traditional attitudes towards ‘theatre riots’ of the past, in the light of the new perception of ‘mob’ activity pioneered by the social historian George Rudé. Here, Athenaide Dallett looks at two more recent audience revolts – the well-documented riots at the opening of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin in 1907, and the indignant response of Berkeley students in 1968 to the Living Theatre's presumption in Paradise Now, in lecturing them about a revolution already taking place on the streets. In both cases, she suggests, riots were provoked by a breach of the contract between performers and audience, taken as legitimating a revolutionary response by such social theorists as Locke and Rousseau. Athenaide Dallett, who recently gained her doctorate from Harvard, teaches at the University of Connecticut at Torrington, and is currently working on a study of the connections between political philosophy and theatre.

In this period of politically correct regard for cultural difference it is easy to overlook the unifying effect on human experience of modernity's cultural boundary-jumping. In the following essay Peter Musolf compares Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest with Yukio Mishima's 1954 kabuki play Iwashiuri Koi no Hikiami (The Sardine Seller), focusing on the belief these writers shared in the sovereignty of illusion over fact and their consequent conviction that life is to be lived as if it were a dramatic fiction. Taken together with Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask, the plays comprise a remarkable ironic commentary on the nature and construction of being in the modern world. Peter Musolf is a teacher and writer living in Yokohama. Gozira to wa nani ka, his book on the science fiction screen monster Godzilla in US-Japanese mass psychology, appeared earlier this year, and he is currently writing a play.

‘An actor is seen as if through crystals’, wrote Artaud in 1925, and Janne Risum here uses the analogy of the prism within which to discuss the range of inter-reflecting and interpenetrating analogies the theatre has borrowed from the other arts and from life in its attempts to define itself – analyzing also why it seems impelled to do so through the use of metaphor. Drawing upon the work of major theatre practitioners including Decroux, Stanislavsky, Craig, Meyerhold, Lecoq, Mnouchkine, and Barba, she explores terms which have sometimes been sharply redefined, sometimes allowed to remain indeterminate but allusive. She concludes that ‘in acting, many crystals are possible. There is an infinite number of ways to cut your own crystal, and some pieces of basic advice. There is only one condition: you have to cut one.’ Janne Risum teaches in the Institut for Dramaturgi at Aarhus University, Denmark, and is also an active participant in the International School for Theatre Anthropology. She has published widely in the fields of acting, theatre history, and women in theatre, and contributed ‘The Voice of Ophelia’, a study of the performance of Julia Varley in The Castle of Holstebro, to NTQ38 (May 1994).

Playscript development programmes have been a significant breeding ground for new American drama since the mid'sixties, and in 1986 the Chicano playwright and director José Cruz González started a playwright development workshop specifically for the Latino community. Here, Eugene van Erven provides a bipolar view of the current Latino theatre scene in southern California by documenting the tenth anniversary session of González' Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep, and at the same takes a wider look at grassroots community theatre initiatives in the Chicano neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Eugene van Erven teaches in the American Studies programme at Utrecht University. Author of The Playful Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Radical People's Theatre (Indiana UP, 1988), he also designs and produces intercultural theatre projects.

By the mid 'eighties, the Thatcher government's public funding restrictions had taken a firm hold, leading to a now familiar position of crisis theatre management. In 1985, under pressure from the profession, the Arts Council of Great Britain commissioned an independent enquiry, the first for sixteen years, to evaluate the needs of the publicly funded theatre and to determine funding priorities. Although the resulting Cork Enquiry was seen by many at the time as a cost-cutting exercise, eight months intensive research and evidence-taking led to a carefully constructed case for a funding increase against an estimated shortfall of up to £13.4 million – and also produced a broad vision of the nature of theatre in England. It is now ten years since the Cork Enquiry delivered its report, with the aim of ensuring the healthy development of an art form placed under severe financial constraint. Here lan Brown and Rob Brannen, Secretary and Assistant Secretary to the Enquiry, provide insight into the Enquiry's setting-up, its process, and formulation of recommendations. In the light of recent consultation exercises, they examine the nature and function of such reports alongside the long-term impact of the Cork Enquiry. lan Brown was Drama Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1986 to 1994, and is now Professor and Head of the Drama Department at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. Rob Brannen is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University, Bedford.