In his dramatization of the genocide of Haiti's indigenous Indian population, Jean Metellus sets himself the task of reading the island's future in the archives of Haiti's graveyards. Without being didactic Métellus's Anacaona and Colomb, do have a teaching purpose. They retrace the history of the Indians who lived in Haiti (Ayti) before the arrival of the Conquistadors and their African slaves. In this retracing of history we have a political theatre which calls into question that which and those who allowed this atrocious massacre to take place, and which echoes the dilemmas facing post-Duvalier Haiti.

The fall of communism in Poland has meant that theatre is no longer a substitute for normal public and political life—the Denmark of Hamlet has ceased to be the necessary metaphor for our prison, and the attractions of a gloomy Prince, representing repressed Poland, have waned. There is now a burgeoning interest in Shakespearian comedy, shared by theatre people and their spectators.

Intercultural processes have become a major concern of European theatre people and critics since the 1970s. They serve to bolster the postmodern discourse marked by endlessly alterable and changing cultures and, therefore, by essentially elusive cultural identities. But the aggressive global expansion of audiovisually mediated performing culture, primarily American television, film, and video, is being viewed as a menace to received cultural identities. There are fears that European cultures are being submerged and disfigured by an ever increasing inundation of overpowering American cultural productions and may even disintegrate altogether.

Franck Fouché was born on 27 November 1915, in Saint-Marc, Haiti. His formative years were precisely the period of the first American occupation of the island. He received his baccalauréat from the Lycée Pétion in 1934. After studying literature at the Université d'Haïti, he returned to Saint-Marc as a professor of literature and director of the Lycée Sténio-Vincent in 1940. He began to publish poetry (‘Billet à Florel’, 1941) and founded a literary review, Horizon (1942). He wrote for two daily newspapers, Le National and Le Nouvelliste in 1944. He received a Licence en Droit from the Université d'Haïti in 1945. After serving as Editor of Le National (1953–4), he was appointed Cultural Attaché at the Haitian Embassy in Mexico City in 1957. Along with a number of Haitian intellectuals, he emigrated from the Duvalierist Haiti to Montreal in 1966. He taught in Chambly. At the Université du Québec à Montréal, he completed an M.A. thesis, Vodou et théâtre; pour un nouveau théâtre populaire (1976). Following an automobile accident, he died on 3 January 1978 in Montreal.

The tension between form and meaning pervades the entire life of the performer … How is routine life connected to that intensified union of form and meaning which constitutes performance?

During the last twenty years the number of community plays has grown enormously in Scandinavia and Great Britain. In Denmark, on average, some twenty new plays are produced annually. From the early 1970s to 1993, I have registered more than 300 Danish productions; these include about sixty of the 140 plays which celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of abolition of adscription in 1988. ‘Community plays’ are known by a number of different names. In Scandinavia they are called ‘lokalspil’, ‘egnsspil’, ‘bygdespel’, ‘krönikespel’, ‘arbetarspel’, and so on. It is important to distinguish ‘community theatre’ from ‘community play’. Community theatre is any kind of performance organized by ordinary people in a given area with or without support from theatre professionals. It may be totally amateur or it may include professional guest performances by theatre practitioners from outside the area.