Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre was formed in New York in 1963, and gained an international reputation for its unique combination of larger-than-life puppetry and celebratory pageantry. After leaving New York in 1970, Schumann finally settled on a thirty-acre site in Vermont in 1974, but Bread and Puppet has continued to travel far afield, and in the original Theatre Quarterly. No. 19 (1975). their Californian residency for the ‘anti-bicentennial’ celebration, A Monument for Ishi. was documented, along with practical material on the making of the puppets-and the bread. While Bread and Puppet continue to perform regularly in North America and Europe, much of their recent work, however, has centered on or been performed for Latin America – including the two projects in Nicaragua described in the following feature. In the opening part, Peter Schumann discusses with Rosa Luisa Márquez the company's 1985 production – The Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Archbishop Romero – and its place in their work. John Bell then provides an introduction to a later interview describing the production of the Nicaraguan Passion Play in 1987, accompanied by the text of the play itself. Rosa Luisa Márquez, who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Puerto Rico, and John Bell, who is completing his doctoral studies and teaching theatre history at Columbia University in New York, have also both been personally involved in the work of Bread and Puppet Theatre.

PETER SCHUMANN's Bread and Puppet Theatre began 25 years ago as a new way of making modern theatre, and as Schumann sees it, still is. As he recently stated, “there are two aspects to this newness: (1) the proposal for a much bigger, wider space for the arts to exist in than the space that the arts occupy now – a way for painting, music, sculpture, and language to exist together and in response to the questions of the time in which they live; and (2) the puppet theatre aspect: puppet theatre not as a special branch of theatre but as a challenge to theatre, as a concrete proposal for the overcoming of its shortcomings – a liberation from that fixed old schmaltz – a proposal for much bigger form, much more compositional freedom and adventure than an actors' theater can ever come up with.”

Although many disciplines have helpfully (and a few less helpfully) interacted with theatre studies over the past decade, progress has been notably slow in the discovery of a dialogue with sociology. Indeed, such progress as has been made has too often, argues Maria Shevtsova. resulted in perceptions and emphases which are not always sympathetic (or seemingly even relevant) to the interests of theatre workers. In this, the first of a three-part introduction to the sociology of theatre, Maria Shevtsova combines an objective analysis of progress to date with a study of the problems and misconceptions encountered along the way, and also proposes a possible methodology for correcting the present imbalance. In future instalments, she will look in particular at the ways in which theatre anthropology and theatre semiotics have helped and hindered this problematic relationship. Now teaching in the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, Maria Shevtsova trained in Paris before spending three years at the University of Connecticut. She has previously contributed to Modern Drama, Theatre International, and Theatre Papers, as well as to the original Theatre Quarterly and other journals.

Outside its ‘classic’ forms, little is known in the West about the theatre of Indonesia. The colonial ‘heritage’ proved largely sterile, and the more fruitful recent developments of the past few decades have been dominated by attempts to integrate the indigenous tradition with contemporary problems and needs. Eugène van Erven has spent several years exploring new theatrical movements and activities in the Pacific region, and earlier results of his studies appeared in NTQ 10 (1987), on the People's Theatre Network of the Philippines. Here, he introduces the work of the two leading theatre-of-liberation companies in Indonesia, Teater Arena and Teater Dinasti, and analyzes their contrasting approaches to the integration of ‘theatre-of-liberation’ techniques with distinctively Indonesian social, religious, and theatrical traditions. Eugène van Erven also contributed a study of recent political theatre in Spain to NTQ 13 (1988), and has recently taken up a post lecturing in English at the University of Utrecht.

David Allen's sequence of features for NTQ on modern British approaches to directing Chekhov began in No. 8 (1986) with a documentary study of Mike Alfreds's productions, and continued with a reconstruction of David Jones's production of Ivanov for the RSC in No. 15 (1988). Here, he explores the approach to Chekhov of Jonathan Miller (currently artistic director at the Old Vic), mainly through an analysis of Miller's production of Three Sisters, first seen at Guildford in April 1976, and subsequently transferred to the Cambridge Theatre, London, on 22 June of that year. This is complemented by original interview material with the director, and David Allen also draws on Miller's Chichester production of The Seagull in 1973, which was revived for Greenwich Theatre in January 1974. The analysis focuses especially on Miller's sense of the ways in which Chekhov perceived and dramatized human passions, his presentation of the nuances of personality, and of the changes wrought by passing time.

The theoretical writings of Eugenio Barba on the nature and disciplines of acting have been a feature of NTQ since its first issue. These writings emerge, of course, from Barba's work with Odin Teatret, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary from its base in Holstebro, Denmark – and also from his formative association with ISTA. the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Accordingly, when a leading authority recently described Barba, along with Brecht and Grotowski, as one of the three major European influences on contemporary Latin American theatre, he was paying tribute to active participation and cross-fertilization, rather than to textbook discipleship. In the following article, Ian Watson, whose study of ‘Catharsis and the Actor’ appeared in NTQ 16 (1988), looks in detail at the nature and the consequences of Barba's ‘Latin American connection’.

Snoo Wilson has remained one of the most distinctive of those playwrights who emerged from the ‘generation of 1968’ – but unlike his collaborators in the early Portable Theatre, he has never been at home on the big stages of the establishment theatres. Sadly, this has also tended to deny him his proper share of critical and, indeed, audience attention: his highly allusive yet also highly elusive style has thus remained a specialized taste, and many of his plays have been denied even the dignity of publication. Accordingly, we accompany the following article by Ada Coe, in which she examines one of the many threads which contribute to Snoo Wilson's work – his recurrent concern with the world of animals and its symbolism – with an ‘NTQ Checklist’ of Snoo Wilson's complete dramatic output compiled by NTQ Editor Simon Trussler. in collaboration with Malcolm Page of Simon Fraser University. British Columbia, and NTQ's assistant editor, Elaine Turner.