Whereas the director of a play in performance never ventures more than a provisional interpretation, content with its truth at a particular moment in time, literary critics have until relatively recently presented their judgements as definitive. Jan Kott, who has probably had greater influence over the living theatre than any other critic of his generation, is closer kin to the director in his acceptance that any written judgement of a play also stands open to redefinition. Thus, his first view of A Midsummer Night's Dream, offered in his seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, was reconsidered some fifteen years later in the title essay of The Bottom Translation. Now, in a third major essay on the play, Kott addresses the issue of ‘translation’ in relation to the practicalities of the Elizabethan theatre, and the likelihood that the mechanicals, doubling as the fairies, were played by boys brought in for the wedding celebration where it is thought to have been first performed. Jan Kott, who has been an advisory editor successively of Theatre Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly since 1971, has most recently published The Gender of Rosalind and The Memory of the Body: Essays on the Theatre and Death (Northwestern University Press, 1992). Next year NTQ plans to celebrate his eightieth birthday in a special issue, NTQ40, for which appropriate contributions are invited.

How do modern archeological discoveries mesh with and affect present views of ancient theatrical techniques – specifically, of the interrelationship between performers and audience? Looking especially at the ways in which the audience itself was able to interact through the construction of the areas devoted to its own accommodation and circulation, Leslie du S. Read here blends narrative comment and photographic illustration to create a picture of the essential sociability of ancient theatre spaces – an aspect usually ignored by scholars primarily concerned with dramaturgical techniques. Leslie du S. Read, who is presently Head of the Drama Department at the University of Exeter, has for a number of years been researching both visible and known remains of classical theatres, and writing on the social context of stagecraft. He has at present a collection of over 4,000 slides of some 300 theatres, and is in the final stage of completing a history and guide to ancient theatre sites. All photographs in the present article were also taken by the author.

In exploring the relationship between situationist theory and theatre in the period of the ‘counter-culture’ in Britain, the following article seeks to provide an account of the ‘spectacularization’ of political action through the language and forms of drama. The relatively neglected work of Raoul Vaneigem is examined for its treatment of theatricality as one of the organizing discourses of the spectacle, and the suggestion that ‘drama’ is a constant choreographic presence in the social world is explored alongside related ideas concerning the dramatization of everyday life in the work of Raymond Williams and Aida Hozic. Attempts to ‘disrupt the spectacle’ through political action during the period of the counter-culture are discussed in relation to this material. Graham White is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London, and has been Literary Manager of the Finborough Theatre since 1990.

In his earlier article, ‘Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre’, (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of ‘performative contradiction’ which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the ‘hidden agenda’ of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients – the ‘national’ fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale ‘reminiscence theatre’ group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's ‘parent’ company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.

By way of introduction to the interview which follows with Joan Lipkin, director and playwright of That Uppity Theatre in St Louis, Missouri, Lizbeth Goodman here provides a context for the discussion of what she calls ‘theatres of choice’ – plays, feminist or otherwise, which deal with the issue of reproductive rights, now being actively challenged in the United States and under threat elsewhere. She looks at the history of legislative change and reaction in the United States, and in particular at the Supreme Court decision in the ‘Webster case’, which represented a victory for the neo-conservative movement. Among theatrical responses to this were Lipkin's ‘pro-choice musical comedy’, He's Having Her Baby, in which gender role-reversal and comic stereotypes were employed in an attempt to reach audiences in St Louis – the city at the centre of the Webster controversy. Lizbeth Goodman, who lectures in literature for the Open University, has published a sequence of feminist theatre interviews in New Theatre Quarterly, and her ‘Feminst Theatre in Britain: a Survey and a Prospect’ appeared in NTQ33 (February 1993). She is the author of Contemporary Feminist Theatres (Routledge, 1993).

Joan Lipkin, playwright, poet, and theatre director, has won considerable critical acclaim – and some calculated abuse – for the political work of her company, That Uppity Theatre, in St Louis, Missouri. Her role-reversing pro-choice musical, He's Having Her Baby, provided the focal point for the preceding article, and one of her earliest pieces, Half-Time, about football in American life, performed in front of a bank vault, launched the city's alternative space movement. Her other better-known pieces include Some of My Best Friends Are …, Love and Work and Other Four-Letter Words, Will the Real Foster Parents Please Stand Up? and Small Domestic Acts. To support her theatre work over the years, Lipkin has worked in roles as various as waitress, art critic, journalist, and television producer: initially trained as a historian, she has also taught at university level for ten years. She is, in her own words, ‘always a rabble-rouser, that's been in the family history for a while’. Lizbeth Goodman interviewed Lipkin in Canada, during the ‘Breaking the Surface’ festival and conference at the University of Calgary in November 1991.

‘Theatre’, Eugenio Barba has said, ‘is a possibility of shaping revolt’. Barba touched upon this belief in NTQ16 (1988), and he professed it again with considerable passion at the conclusion of the seventh public session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in April 1992. Directed by Barba and hosted by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR), the ‘Brecon ISTA’ was held in two parts – Working on Performances East and West, a practical exploration at Christ College, Brecon, from 4 to 10 April, being followed by a conference on 10 and 11 April at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, on Fictive Bodies, Dilated Minds, Hidden Dances. In the following exploration of the particular possibilities which theatre anthropology creates for revolt, Nigel Stewart, Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, considers Barba's direction of work in progress at the Brecon ISTA in terms of Derrida's and Kristeva's theories of the sign. Integral to this is an analysis of the relation between bios and logos – the ‘pre-expressive’ work of the body and the meanings which that work can produce – which is relevant to body-based performance theory and practice in general.