The success of Katie Mitchell's production of The Mysteries for the Royal Shakespeare Company has again demonstrated the appeal of the plays for a modern audience. Most revivals trim and otherwise adapt the texts of the original, sprawling cycles: but Mitchell and her dramaturg, Edward Kemp, more calculatedly addressed the problems of updating not only the texts, but also the acting style and attitudes towards the dominant issues – notably those of gender representation. The original cycles often intriguingly juxtaposed religious faith and local politics in an assertion of civic pride which none the less also acknowledged the dominance of the established Church: and in the following article Katie Normington assesses the relevance of Mitchell's production for the secular, depoliticized society of the 'nineties. Katie Normington is a freelance fringe theatre director who is currently researching the role of women in the mystery plays and lecturing in drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

‘Kitchen-sink’ drama was a term used (in the main by its detractors) of the drama of the late 'fifties and 'sixties located outside the drawing-room milieu then preferred by conventional West End playwrights. It was always an inaccurate term, in that many of the plays so described neither took place in domestic kitchens nor – more to Marcia Blumberg's point – addressed the issue of the place's usual attendant: a woman. Recognizing the dominance of the kitchen as an icon, and of its related domestic chores as traditionally the tasks of women, two performance artists have recently, and in very different ways, explored the actuality of ‘Kitchen’ occupations and preoccupations. Bobby Baker's Kitchen Show (1991) used ‘found’ environments of actual kitchens, including her own, to produce ‘new and often subversive significations’, while in Kitchen Blues (1990) the South African dramatist Jeanne Goosen constructed a ‘complex feminist bricolage’ through the voices and actions of a quartet of women, embodying ‘the multiple intersections of gender in a shocking tragi-comic evocation of personal upheaval during a period of flux in South Africa’. Marcia Blumberg, herself a South African, has recently been teaching in Britain with the Open University.

Charles Marowitz worked extensively as a director in Britain from the late 'fifties through the 'seventies, and was one of the editors of the influential Encore magazine in the formative years of the ‘new wave’. His free-lance work included the co-direction with Peter Brook of the seminal ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season, and the premiere production of Joe Orton's Loot. Later, in partnership with Jim Haynes, a season at the London Traverse Theatre led to the creation of his own, more enduring Open Space Theatre in a basement in Tottenham Court Road – one of the identifying events of 1968 and its theatrical aftermath. Since returning to his native United States, Marowitz has worked out of Malibu, and continued his parallel role as writer – in which he has become best known for his sequence of ‘collage’ Shakespeares ranging from Hamlet to The Shrew, and also as a self-professed ‘counterfeit critic’ and theoretician of acting and directing. The following article also forms the final chapter of his latest book, The Other Way: an Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing, to be published by Applause Books later this year. It represents, also, a concise charting of his own voyage of discovery – of the role of the director, and of the recognition of the autonomy and ‘higher calling’ of the actor that this has involved.

The first issue of NTQ in February 1985 included a feature on the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre Company which traced the development of the group from its formation in Cornwall in 1971, through its development of a distinctive narrative-based performance style – strong in physicality, visual imagery, and knockabout humour – to its status as an internationally acclaimed company, based now in France but touring extensively in Europe. Geraldine Cousin, the compiler of that feature, provided an update in NTQ33 (February 1993), which focused on Footsbarn's work since 1985, culminating in the ‘Mir Caravan’ project, in which eight theatre groups toured to the Soviet Union and through Eastern and Western Europe. In May 1992, two members of the group, David Johnston and Margarete Biereye, left to establish a new theatre company in Germany – the Wandertheater Ton und Kirschen, now well established, with actors drawn from Germany, France, England, Morocco, Spain, Colombia, Poland, and Australia. Though based in a small German village, Ton und Kirschen has built up its reputation in a number of European countries, and in 1998 was awarded the prize for Performing Arts from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Ton und Kirschen is funded partly by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, and partly by the local district and the town of Potsdam, with a further portion of its income deriving from ticket sales and foreign tours. In December 1997 Margarete and David talked to Geraldine Cousin about their reasons for leaving Footsbarn, and their work with the new company. Geraldine Cousin is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, and is author of Churchill the Playwright (Methuen), King John in the ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (Manchester University Press), and Women in Dramatic Place and Time (Routledge). She has recently completed a book for Harwood which documents productions by Sphinx Theatre, Scarlet Theatre, and Foursight Theatre.

Tight Roaring Circle, a 1997 Artangel installation at the Roundhouse in London, was a collaboration between choreographers and a musician, as well as with the curators and the audience. Through the installation Dana Caspersen, William Forsythe, and Joel Ryan furthered their explorations into engendering, ordering, and composing movement. By obscuring each individual's contribution they also raised issues of authorship, disciplinary boundaries, and autonomy. Many of the issues provoked by the installation are also being pursued at the Ballett Frankfurt, where Caspersen is a dancer and choreographer, Forsythe is artistic director and choreographer, and for which Ryan often writes music. Having first studied philosophy, Steven Spier is a senior lecturer in architecture in the School of Urban Development and Policy at South Bank University. He has written an article on Forsythe's relationship to classical ballet for the Journal of Architecture, and a book that brings together an architect's and a novelist's work.

The potential and the problems of multicultural theatre have frequently been described and debated in this as in other theatre journals, but discussions of its value and viability have generally been in ethical terms – over how far it is possible for the West to ‘import’ or otherwise employ the theatrical traditions of other cultures without resort to an imperialist appropriation of what is found ‘consumable’, to the detriment of the culture thus despoiled. While not ignoring the moral arguments, John Russell Brown here deals also with the practical issues – notably, how far different kinds of theatre depend on being ‘site-specific’ not only in terms of the performers involved, but also in terms of audiences and their responses. He argues that, paradoxically, truly intercultural theatre is more often to be found where western influences from Hollywood films or pop music have become part of the lived experience of eastern cultures, or in western communities where (for example) British and West Indian or ‘Anglo’ and Latino-American traditions have become intertwined. He suggests that rather than trying to embrace the substance of ‘other’ traditions, western theatre might better benefit by exploring the conventions that modulate the relationship between actors and audience, or the approach of the actor to different kinds of ‘text’. He concludes: ‘By using overseas research to develop its own inheritance, a theatre might discover what it alone needs to create and encourage a more active and imaginative response from its local audience.’ A widely published writer on drama and theatre, John Russell Brown was first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and was subsequently an Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. Currently he is visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York.

Confronted with political opposition, an authoritarian regime predictably responds with force – but also with recognition of a knowable enemy. Confronted with anarchy and laughter, it can be caught wrong-footed – as happened in Poland in the aftermath of Martial Law, when a young surrealist, Waldemar Fydrych, self-designated ‘Major’, created what he called the Orange Alternative. In a series of published manifestoes and in the street happenings they proclaimed and recorded, the Orange Alternative tickled the soft underbelly of the Jaruzelski regime, and met with responses ranging from hostility to ostensible sympathy to simple bafflement. Juliusz Tyszka here records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit – who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew. Juliusz Tyszka is a past contributor on Polish theatre to NTQ, who teaches in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.

In this article, the first of a sequence on the ways in which women's bodies are recorded in performance documentation, Anna Cutler offers a new conception and systematic definition of three performance documentations – the ‘Proper’, the ‘Processual’ and the ‘Residual’. She argues against traditional and literary forms of documentation (the ‘Proper’) as a means by which women and women's bodies have been and continue to be excluded from performance records, and proceeds to discuss two theoretical types of body in performance: the ‘Inscribed’ (which represents an ideologically shaped, constructed, and censored body) and the ‘Potential’ (which represents the creative and ongoing moments of change made by the body in performance). She proposes the ‘Potential Body’ as a model for performance documentation, since, though difficult to translate into written forms, it offers a more effective communication of both the body and of live performance. Given the continuing prevalence of the written word as the primary mode of performance documentation, the author makes a case for écriture féminine to be appropriated as a writerly tool to document women's bodies and particularly the ‘Potential Body’ in performance. She concludes with a discussion of the theory and practice of Hélène Cixous' writing in relation to women's performance methodologies. The debate is taken up by Susan Melrose in the article following this. Anna Cutler is currently producing events for the Belfast Festival, while completing her doctoral research in the Department of Literary and Media Studies at the University of North London.

Taking up the arguments set out by Anna Cutler in the preceding article, Susan Melrose here cautions against what she sees as the dangers Cutler fails to take into account of nominalization as an inherently conservative process. She suggests that the reification of the term ‘the body’ carries its own dangers, unless its complexities – as suggested by the title of this article – are recognized and assimilated. Arguing that many of the problems identified by Cutler are as applicable to the male as to the female performer, Susan Melrose concludes that the primacy of the word in documentation processes, though contested by Anna Cutler, has none the less caused her to overlook existing, effective forms of performance documentation, perhaps because they originate from and primarily serve the interests of performers rather than academics. Susan Melrose is Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the MA course in Performance Studies. She is author of A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Macmillan, 1994), and a contributor to numerous journals and symposia in her field. Further contributions to the debate initiated in these articles are planned and invited.

The relationship between live theatre and the rapidly developing multimedia technologies has been ambiguous and uneasy, both in the practical and the academic arena. Many have argued that such technologies put the theatre and other live arts at risk, while others have seen them as a means of preserving the elusive traces of live performance, making current work accessible to future generations of artists and scholars. A few performance and production teams have entered the fray, deliberately pushing the technology to its limits to see how useful it may (or may not) be in dealing with the theatre. One such team – comprising Lizbeth Goodman, Tony Coe, and Huw Williams – forms the Open University BBC's Multimedia Shakespeare Research Project, and on 4 September 1997 they presented their work as the annual BFI Lecture at the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. What follows is an edited and updated transcript of the lecture – which was itself a ‘multimedia performance’ – intended to spark debate about the possibilities and limitations of using multimedia in creating and preserving ‘live’ theatre. Lizbeth Goodman is Lecturer in Literature at the Open University, where she chairs both the Shakespeare Multimedia Research Project and the new ‘Shakespeare: Text and Performance’ course. Tony Coe is Senior Producer at the OU/BBC, where Huw Williams was formerly attached to the Interactive Media Centre, before becoming Director of Createc for the National Film School, and subsequently Director of Broadcast Solutions, London. Together the team has created a range of multimedia CD-ROMs designed to test the limits and possibilities of new technologies for theatre and other live art forms – beginning with Shakespeare

When the ‘action’ at major news events is observed over days or weeks by television cameras, how far does the medium become, whether knowingly or not, a participant and shaper in the action it observes? How far does the action itself become, to some degree, a performance before the cameras? While not ignoring either the moral or practical implications of such questions, lan Watson sets out primarily to analyze the ‘frame’ of television news broadcasting, and to consider the events within that frame as elements of performance. He considers the six days of rioting in Los Angeles in 1992, sparked by the acquittal of police officers charged with the beating of Rodney King – itself caught on camera – as a case study, in which the often ignored role of the observer, whether the news anchor-man in the studio or the audience watching at home, comes in for corrective scrutiny. He concludes that in the ‘mediated present’ of the news event on television, the medium is indeed as much a producer as a reporter of an action which is pervasively shaped by its presence. An Advisory Editor and regular contributor to New Theatre Quarterly, lan Watson teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Rutgers, where he is Co-ordinator of the Theatre and Television Programs.

The appearance of a succession of controversial and attention-catching new plays on the British stage in the 'nineties has led to considerable public discussion – and not a little ostensible outrage. In ‘an interim report’, Aleks Sierz examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence – notably Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo, and Shopping and Fucking – by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock. After showing how Cool Britannia's manifestation on the national stage has provoked arguments for and against this ‘in-yer-face’ drama, he outlines some of the common themes – such as the crisis of masculinity and the postmodern sensibility – that characterize much contemporary new writing. He argues that while these young writers are certainly gifted and mature, only subsequent theatrical revivals of their work will show whether it has anything lasting to say. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune, and currently writing a book about ‘in-yer-face’ drama.

The first production at Britain's first true repertory theatre – the Gaiety, in Manchester – under Annie Horniman's management was of a Shakespeare play: William Poel's staging of Measure for Measure, analyzed in detail by Richard Foulkes in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Yet Miss Horniman's attitude both to Poel's experimental ‘Elizabethanism’ and to subsequent attempts at Shakespeare at the Gaiety remained ambivalent, and influenced by such personal tensions and disagreements as saw off Lewis Casson after his radical and political reading of Julius Caesar, in favour of safer stuff conceived as an alternative to Christmas pantomime. The author, Viv Gardner, teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Manchester: she is a former Book Reviews Editor of NTQ, and currently co-editor of the Women and Theatre papers. Here, she sets Shakespearean production at the Gaiety into the context of Miss Horniman and her colleagues' ambitions for the Gaiety and its intended role in Manchester's civic life.

This article considers ways in which contemporary feminist theatre-makers respond to Shakespeare by reviewing the performance and production histories of two recent theatre pieces – a new play by Bryony Lavery, and an innovative staging of Hamlet by Jane Prendergast. Drawing on interviews with participants and observation of rehearsals for Ophelia, Jane de Gay looks at the practical issues faced by performers and directors as they explored issues of gender in Shakespeare's plays and characters. She also builds on her own research interest in intertextuality to look at the issues which arise when women writers attempt to ‘rewrite’ Shakespeare, whether by adapting his plays for performance or by writing new texts which allude and respond to them. Jane de Gay is Researcher with the Open University ‘Gender, Politics, and Performance’ Research Project, with whose chair, Lizbeth Goodman, she has edited The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998). She was also a major contributor to Feminist Stages, edited by Goodman, a collection of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre, published by Harwood in 1996.

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.

As a mutually-illuminating contrast to the academic exploration in the previous article of the potential of CD-ROM as a means both of teaching a ‘classical’ playtext and of analyzing the multiple choices involved in its performance, the two following pieces explore the potential of the new technologies in the creation and documentation of live art. Focusing upon her performance Push the Boat Out, given as part of the Jezebel Season at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1995, Leslie Hill first outlines the thinking behind her use of the Internet and the Web – as yet more economic than CD-ROM – both for creating ‘live art’ and for rendering its conventionally ‘unprintable’ form as a ‘text’ with its own integrity. The scripted element of her performance follows. Leslie Hill is a writer and performer, currently a resident artist fellow at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, and a senior lecturer in the Theatre Department at Arizona State University. Along with Helen Paris, she is co-artistic director of the ‘curious.com’ multimedia performance company.

GOOD EVENING. Tonight I've been asked to talk to you about HTML – hypertext markup language – and its performative characteristics; its multimedia capacity; its non-linear structure; its interactive possibilities; its real-time relationship with its readers slash navigators slash audience; and its potential interest to writers cum artists cum performers.

Our sequence of features on the use of the new technology in the creation as well as the re-creation of live performance continues with a consideration of the implications of interactive CD-ROM – with special reference to its potential for liberating multimedia lesbian representation, and for other kinds of live performance which designedly subvert the norm. This article was sparked by Lois Weaver's solo performance of her own Faith and Dancing, which the author, Jan Goulden, saw at Jackson's Lane Theatre, London, on 9 August 1996: and extracts from Goulden's subsequent interview with Weaver intersperse her analysis of the nature and potential of multimedia in performance. Jan Goulden is a writer and teacher who lives in Wales and has taught with the Workers' Educational Association. She is currently writing a postgraduate thesis on ‘Myth and Variation: Lesbian Representation in American Fiction and Film’ with the Open University. Performing under the name Split Britches, Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw and Deborah Margolin have for the past fifteen years been at the vanguard of lesbian feminist theatre both in the US and in Britain. Their work, which addresses radical issues through its exploration of gender roles and desire in performance, is highly regarded in both theatrical and academic circles.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed his influential philosophy and physiology of movement from a background in engineering, and a concern to remedy a knee injury sustained in a game of soccer. Though he scorned psychoanalytical approaches to the remedying of poor or painful postures, he had great faith in the capacity of the body, through the brain, for self-correction and self-healing. Joanna Rotté met Feldenkrais shortly before his death in 1985, in his eightieth year, and talked to him during a nine-week course he was leading in his own methodology. Joanna Rotté now teaches Script Analysis and Voice and Movement at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. Her travel memoir Scene Change, a theatre diary from Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad, was published by Limelight in 1994, and her performance piece, Death of the Father, was produced in the spring of 1998 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

As a companion piece to the foregoing study of Ophelia and /, Hamlet, there follows a full appraisal of a project discussed in the previous issue (NTQ53) as part of our feature on the Open University/BBC experiments in ‘multimedia Shakespeare’. For King Lear: Text and Performance – one of the pilot CD-ROMS which were the end-products of the experiment – three teams of performers were commissioned, in collaboration with the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to create over a two-day period their own variations on the Heath Scene in Lear. The most innovative of these, in Teresa Dobson's judgement, was conceived and directed by the Canadian performance artist and writer Beau Coleman, who envisioned a female Lear – a woman who, having found success in a male-dominated world, comes to confront the nature of that power in the process of relinquishing it. Teresa Dobson, who teaches in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, witnessed and here records the development of the project, also assessing how far it succeeded in its intention to ‘raise questions about the gender and power relations in King Lear, as well as questions about what happens when Lear himself is cast against gender’.