Christmas pantomime, that peculiarly English form whose uncertain origins go back to the early eighteenth century, has evolved its own distinctive typology of cross-dressed characters, with a Principal Boy who is a girl, a Dame who is indisputably male, and even those humanoid visitors from the animal kingdom known as ‘skin parts’. David Mayer explored ‘The Sexuality of English Pantomime’ in the seminal ‘People's Theatre’ issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (TQ4, 1974), and twenty years on Peter Holland takes up the debate in the light of recent developments in sexual politics, critical approaches to gender – and, not least, the continuing and not always expected evolution of what remains a very live form indeed. Peter Holland is about to move from his present post as Judith E. Wilson Reader in Drama and Theatre in the Faculty of English at Cambridge to become the new Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. An earlier version of his present article was presented as a paper at the conference on ‘Eros e commedia sulla scena inglese’, at the Terza Università in Rome in December 1995.

Sexuality resides in much more than what is spoken or even enacted, and its stage representation will often work best when the minds of the spectators are collaboratively engaged in completing the desired response. John Russell Brown, founding Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and a former Associate Director of the National Theatre, here explores Shakespeare's arts of sexual obliquity, whether in silence, prevarication, or kindled imagination, and their relationship both with more direct forms of allusion and with an audience's response. John Russell Brown, currently Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, is author of numerous books on Shakespeare and modern drama, and editor of many Elizabethan and Jacobean texts – most recently a new edition of Shakespeare for Applause Books, New York.

Cara Gargano sees the plays of Maria Irene Fornes as reflecting ‘nucleate disorder in a system far from equilibrium’ – a theatrical response to the overturning by the new science of the Aristotelian as of the Newtonian paradigm. Comparing the wildly divergent critical interpretations of Fornes' Mud since its premiere in 1983, she suggests that in this overtly simple dramatization of a far from simple triangular relationship, Fornes ‘uses the theatrical space as her laboratory – a place to explore the interface between our society's construction of the world and our evolving artistic and scientific vision’. Cara Gargano is a writer, teacher, and choreographer who took her doctorate at the City University of New York, was on the faculty at the New York School of Ballet, and is presently Chair of the Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. She has written extensively on the Quebecoise playwright Marie Laberge, and her articles on performance, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory have been published in Modern Drama, L'Annuaire Théâtrale, and Dance and Research.

The thirty-year Eritrean struggle for independence – during which a small and poorly-armed guerrilla force eventually triumphed over a highly-equipped enemy, supported by foreign powers – is also the story of a social revolution in which the theatre played its part. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front not only employed theatre as a propaganda weapon, but also recognized its value as an agent for educating its people – concerning education and women's rights, and on the benefits of modern medicine and farming methods – and with victory came measures to stimulate the growth and development of theatre as part of Eritrean culture. Following Jane Plastow's contextual history of Eritrean theatre in our previous issue, Paul Warwick here makes the first attempt to reconstruct its undocumented role in the independence struggle, and the efforts of the rebels to create theatre for the first time in a rural context. A graduate of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, Paul Warwick made this the subject of his research when he visited Eritrea in the summer of 1995 as part of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project. Since his return he has collaborated on a translation of The Other War by Alemseged Tesfai, written during the independence struggle, and given a reading at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in December 1996: this is due for publication later this year in an anthology of African drama from Methuen. Paul Warwick is currently Artistic Director of the Unlimited Theatre Company based in Leeds.

The largely solo work of the Coventry-based performer Carran Waterfield is clearly part of a tradition of avant-garde performance and of so-called ‘third theatre’ in its refusal of a narrative line, and its multi-disciplinary, performer-centered orchestration of the elements of visual, aural, and dynamic expression. Yet Waterfield's performance pieces are also highly distinctive in their organic relationship both to her own life and to the life of the community in and for which she performs. Jo Trowsdale here suggests that the points of difference provide an unusual model in which elements of drama therapy, community art, and educational theatre find a fruitful interface with ‘third’ and avant-garde theatre forms. Jo Trowsdale lectures in drama at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, and is presently researching the role of artists in education, especially in the training of teachers.

In NTQ47 (August 1996), Sarah Werner argued that contemporary voice training did not provide a neutral set of tools to help actors perform classical texts, and that it was needful to reveal the cultural biases and underlying ideology of voice work in order to clarify a feminist understanding of acting and speaking Shakespeare. The three leading voice practitioners who came under Ms Werner's fire – Cicely Berry, Kristin Linklater, and Patsy Rodenburg – mounted a sturdy defence of their methods in NTQ49 (February 1997), to which Sarah Werner responded in the following issue. Now Jane Boston takes a fresh view of all sides in the argument, putting these into a broader historical context which embraces the culture of our own times as much as of Shakespeare's, and calls for an understanding and reconciliation of mutual misconceptions between the academy and the conservatoire. Jane Boston was a founding member of the feminist Siren Theatre in the ‘eighties, and has subsequently taught at the National Youth Theatre, the Poor School, and at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she was Head of Voice for the BA in Acting, which she helped to create. She now combines a pedagogical and practical role at Central as supervisor and trainer on the Postgraduate Diploma in Voice Studies, and has recently presented papers on acting and stress at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized – in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications include Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (with Tony Coult, 1983) and the Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention (1992).

The functioning of human consciousness in interpreting and staging a theatrical performance is, as Gordon Armstrong argues in this article, among the most highly selective and adaptive operations known to physical science. According to this view, the theatre, as a substrate of consciousness, was part of the package that defined modern man as a reflective species: whereas for the first four million years of human existence man was silent about a probable inner life, the dawn of empathy some 200,000 years ago saw a neural explosion – the enlargement of the angular gyrus in the left hemisphere of the brain, unlocking a new kind of reflective consciousness. In isolation, this aberrant neurological connection proved so advantageous for hunting and for communication that members of a tribe who possessed this aberration prospered: and adaptation to the ice ages that began 200,000 years ago was a motivating factor in stimulating the emergence of what we can recognize as art. Gordon Armstrong is immediate past Secretary of the American Society for Theatre Research, and Review Editor for Theatre Research International. He has taught at UCLA, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Rhode Island, and has designed and directed productions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. His full-length works include the revised Golden Ages of the Theatre and Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, and Jack Yeats: Images and Words.