Disillusioned by what he sees as the inadequate state of the British theatre, Edward Bond has refused to have some of his more recent plays produced in this country, although they have been seen in productions on the Continent. This year's Avignon Festival will thus be focusing on his work, and later in 1994 the Berliner Ensemble will be staging Olly's Prison. In 1992, however, Bond worked – for the first time since the late 1980s – with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, resuming in workshop conditions his attempt to develop a distinctive acting style for his work. Commenting on the programme of workshops, and through subsequent interviews with Bond and some of the actors involved, Ian Stuart, who teaches in the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California, attempts to draw conclusions about Bond's current theatre methodology.

Bruce McConachie teaches in the Theatre Department at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He is one of the leading theatre historians in the United States, who has, as David Mayer put it in his review of McConachie's most recent book, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, ‘been examining, criticizing, and improving the practice of theatre historiography’ for many years. McConachie's re-examination of how history is researched, analyzed, and written has its origins in an article, ‘Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History’, which he published in Theatre Journal in 1985, criticizing scholars who limit their theatre histories to events in the theatre. He called for historians to realize that theatre is only one part of a much larger socio-cultural complex, and that it is the historian's job to analyze theatre in terms of that complex. this article was the point of departure for the following interview, which Ian Watson conducted with McConachie in Philadelphia in January 1993.

The death of Ibsen in 1906 prompted a number of appraisals of the dramatist by Marxist critics, notably Clara Zetkin, Henrietta Roland-Holst, and George Plekhanov. The most extended of these was Anatoly Lunacharsky's article, ‘Ibsen and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, published in three parts in Obrazovanie, St. Petersburg, Nos. 5–7 (June-August 1907). The central section, ‘Ibsen's Dramas’, is printed below. Born in the Ukraine in 1875, Lunacharsky became a Marxist in his teens and joined the Moscow Social Democrat group in 1899. Arrested for his political activities, he was exiled to Northern Russia, where he wrote his first theoretical treatise, An Essay in Positive Aesthetics. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but broke with Lenin after 1905, having identified himself with the so-called ‘God-seeking’ tendency. Following the fall of Tsarism in 1917 Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks, and after the October Revolution he was appointed to Lenin's first ‘Cabinet’ as Commissar for Enlightenment, a post embracing the arts and education. Exceptionally, he retained this position up until 1930, when he became one of the Soviet Union's two representatives to the League of Nations. He died in 1933, shortly before he was due to become Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lunacharsky's published output runs to some 1,500 articles, embracing philosophy, aesthetics, and theoretical and critical writings on all the arts. He also wrote a number of plays, including Faust and the City (1918) and Oliver Cromwell (1920). He was an intellectual of wide erudition and acute critical perception, balancing respect for the old and the traditional with encouragement for the new and the inconoclastic. As Commissar for Enlightenment, he did much to defend the early avant garde's freedom to experiment, making the Soviet Union a power-house of artistic innovation.

In 1978, Robert Brustein observed that Ibsen's The Master Builder subtly undermined the tenets of naturalism for which both the play and its author are usually remembered. Here, William W. Demastes suggests that, though lacking precise paradigms when they wrote the play and the critique, Ibsen and Brustein both approach the understanding of human interaction in ways that are currently explained through the ‘new’ scientific paradigm of chaos theory. This essay presents a general summary of chaos theory, applies it to The Master Builder, suggests ways in which Ibsen anticipates the postmodernists, and how, in turn, chaos theory can help in comprehending several paths that the theatre has followed since the inception of postmodernism. William W. Demastes is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, and is author of Beyond Naturalism: a New Realism in American Theatre (1988). This essay is an extension of his book, and is designed in part as in introduction to his next book-length study, on the confluence of scientific and dramatic thought in the twentieth century.

Metropolitan snobbery and the logistics of scale both militate against the success of comedians working in the regions. Yet, as Oliver Double here argues, the scene has been a lively one, often daring in its style and range alike – at least until the absorption of its big names into the London circuits by the agencies which increasingly control most of the bookings and much of the talent. Oliver Double, himself a working comic, describes the distinctive characteristics of regional alternative comedy, and the now very real dangers of stagnation, illustrating his argument from interviews with leading comics on the regional circuits – Nick Toczek, Stu Who?, Roger Monkhouse, Malcolm Bailey, Anvil Springsteen, Adam Caveleri, Kevin Seisay, Henry Normal, and John Simmit. Offering some hopes for the future, he points out the relatively low audience figures required to ensure a vigorous growth – if only emerging talent can be nurtured rather than condemned to still birth.

Over the past few years we have encouraged the simmering in these pages of a continuing debate about the relationship between the bibliographical and scholarly problems of editing Elizabethan texts, changing perceptions of ‘authority’, and the theatrical and political conceptions, old and new, which may affect all these. Brian Parker, in NTQ24 (1990), and Stanley Wells, in NTQ26 (1991), were early contributors, and in NTQ34 (1992) Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey took up the argument, specifically questioning the editorial principles of the recent Oxford Shakespeare. Here, Alan Posener takes up the debate, criticizing the methodology and terminology adopted by Holderness and Loughrey, and some of the conclusions to which these led. Alan Posener is a British expatriate living in Berlin who – after stints in radical left-wing politics and teaching – became a writer, specializing in popular biography. He is currently rewriting one of the standard German biographies of William Shakespeare.

In NTQ38 (May 1994) Nicolas Whybrow offered a brief account of the immediate threat facing theatre in education (TIE) in England and Wales. In the first of two articles in which he examines the general state of theatre produced for both the formal and the informal education sectors, he goes on to provide a more searching contextualization of some of the changes now taking place. Here, he analyzes the implications for TIE of the Education Reform Act of 1988, and the effect of Youth Service policies on theatre for youth work. Nicolas Whybrow recently completed a PhD based on the practices of Red Ladder, Blah Blah Blah, and Leeds TIE, and is about to take up a lecturing appointment at the Workshop Theatre (School of English), Leeds University.

In addition to being a theatre director, Vladimir Mirzoev is a novelist, poet, critic, and artist. Born in Moscow in 1957, he studied with Mark Mestechkin, a disciple of his teachers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Before he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in May 1989, Mirzoev was known in Russian theatre as an iconoclast and a leading figure of the avant garde. His productions of Voltaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Büchner, Strindberg, Claudel, Weiss, and Howard Barker became renowned for the plasticity of the actors' movement and the use of metaphor to convey meaning, and Russian critics hailed his extraordinary ability to sculpt his own distinctive theatrical language, blending the ironic and the grotesque. In NTQ32 (August 1992) we published an interview with Mirzoev conducted by Rita Much: here, Julie Adam takes up the story, with an assessment of the director's work with ‘Horizontal Eight’ in Toronto – notably the productions, of Gogol's The Inspector General, Wilde's Salome, Camus's Caligula, and Barker's The Possibilities.