NTQ has given considerable coverage to forms of popular theatre for conscientization and development in the so-called Third World. By contrast with such community-oriented, audience-involving activities, is there a function for conventional ‘literary’ drama, on the western model, which can probably only reach relatively comfortable and literate middle-class audiences? Tunde Lakoju examines two such plays – I Will Marry When I Want by the Kenyan playwright Ngugi Wa Thiongo (London: Heinemann, 1982), and The Trials of Brother Jero by the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka (Oxford University Press, 1964) – in terms of their success in measuring up to the needs they identify: and he considers, too, how those ‘needs’ may be variously assessed by theoretical and practical criteria. Tunde Lakoju is Senior Lecturer at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in his native Nigeria, having been awarded his doctoral degree from the University of Wales. His own play, The Last Saturday, has been broadcast in the BBC's African Theatre series.

The reception of most manifestations of Russian art and culture in Poland is linked inextricably with the political situation, and official and popular attitudes are often widely divergent. From the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to Warsaw in 1908, when most Poles boycotted the performances, through enthusiasm tempered by ignorance in the inter-war period, to the 'Stalinization' of Stanislavsky as official mediator of socialist realism in the late 'forties, Polish attitudes to the 'method' which was Stanislavsky's legacy are here examined by Juliusz Tyszka. Today, he concludes, Poles have largely consigned Stanislavsky to the lumber-room of history – though there are a few cautionary voices who urge his continuing relevance.

In the summer of 1988 two events focused British attention on the great Polish scenographer Józef Szajna: he participated in an ambitious seminar at the Young Vic on the legacy of the absurd, and in a BBC documentary on the art produced by holocaust victims and survivors. After the war, Szajna emerged as a central figure for Polish theatre and then for the international avant-garde. He became a stage designer, sculptor, director, environmental artist, manager, scenarist and teacher. In the 1970s, Szajna created his famous series of dramatic ‘open theatre’ spectacles inspired by the lives and art of Witkiewicz, Dante, Cervantes, Mayakovsky - and Szajna. For Józef Szajna's biography has been extraordinary, harrowing, and iconic. His work has questioned the functions of theatre after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In his Warsaw flat-cum-studio and at the Studio Theatre, he surveyed forty years of work for New Theatre Quarterly, in conversation with the playwright Tomasz Lubienski - from a more literary theatrical tradition - and with Tony Howard, who here compiles a collage portrait of his career. The translations are by Barbara Plebanek.

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.

In NTQ 14. Graham Holderness welcomed the Swan at Stratford as the home, at once new and old, of a ‘radical energy’ opposed to the ‘ossified establishment’ in the main house. Here Peter Womack, concentrating on John Caird's 1987 production of The New Inn, suggests a different and more suspicious interpretation of the building and its uses. By a sort of historical coincidence, the conservative nostalgia of Jonson's play reveals the close links between the Swan project and that distinctively 1980s construction of the national past – the heritage industry. Peter Womack, who lectures in English at the University of East Anglia, is the author of a book on Ben Jonson in the ‘Rereading Literature’ series. This article is based on a paper given to a conference on the politics of early seventeenth-century drama, Oxford, June 1988.

Howard Barker was the last playwright to be interviewed in the original Theatre Quarterly – in TQ40 (1981) – and a subsequent interview was included in NTQ8 (1986). Yet he has also been accused of encouraging a credo of ‘engagement but confusion’ which serves the cult of Thatcherism which it claims to oppose: and certainly he is unique among his generation of British dramatists in having achieved both a large cult following, and a considerable body of opposition to his theoretical position. Robert Shaughnessy, who teaches in the Roehampton Institute, here analyzes not so much Barker's work as the Barker phenomenon – the process by which a self-effacing writer has been packaged into a personality, to the extent that, with the creation of The Wrestling School, he even has a theatre company devoted exclusively to the production of his work. Shaughnessy concludes that – as Barker perhaps fore-shadows in The Last Supper – it may now be necessary for the cult-figure to ‘die’ if the writer is to survive and flourish.

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.

The ‘theatre of the world’, or Theatrum Mundi, offered a pervasive emblematic view of the relationship between God, as playwright and audience, and his terrestrial creation. Although this became peculiarly appropriate during the Renaissance period, views of the theatre as microcosmic of the larger world have persisted – whether in the consciously wrought imagery of modern sociology or the unconscious colloquial useage of theatrical terms to describe everyday behaviour. In the article which follows, David E. R. George suggests that the ‘view’ of the subatomic world presented by quantum theory makes for a paradigm which is no less compelling, according to which the sense of theatrical ‘potentiality’ which characterizen much contemporary experimental theatre is illuminated and paralleled by the refusal of scientific certainty that quantum theory confronts and accommodates. David George. whose ‘Letter to a Poor Actor’ appeared in NTQ 8 (1986), taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Gottingen, Malaysia, and Peking before taking up his present post at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His books include studies of Ibsen. German tragic theory, and Indian ritual dance–drama.

The original Theatre Quarterly devoted a large portion of one issue-TQ28 (1977—78) to the theatre of South Africa. It is, of course, important to relate new developments in the theatre of that troubled nation to the context of its changing political situation – considering, for example, how far a reflection of the realities of the urban black experience is now more typical than the ‘acceptable’ face represented by the once-popular ‘tribal musicals’. Here. David Graver and Loren Kruger contrast two approaches to the theatre of anti-apartheid. The internationally known (and now relatively stable) Market Theatre of Johannesburg, they argue, today largely reaches an educated, liberal, and elite audience, and sustains what is essentially a European literary tradition: but other plays written and directed by blacks — notably since the Soweto uprising of 1976 — have developed a more appropriately African style. Often, these, have emerged from the theatre companies within the black townships, such as the Bachaki Theatre Company - whose Top Down is here the focus of analysis. David Graver is currently Mellon Fellow in Drama at Stanford University: his articles have appeared in Theatre Journal and in NTQ, and he is now completing a book on the theory and practice of the avant-garde. Loren Kruger teaches in the University of Chicago, has published in Theatre Journal and the Brecht Yearbook, and is working on a study of theatres with national aspirations in Europe and the USA.

In connection with the Eugene O'Neill centenary in 1988 Ingmar Bergman directed Long Day's Journey into Night at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where this play (like A Touch of the Poet and Hughie), also had its world premiere. While the director of the 1956 production, Bengt Ekerot, settled for a realistic approach. Bergman's pruned version, widely acclaimed both inside and outside Sweden, is existentially stylized. Here Egil Türnqvist discusses especially the visual aspects of the production, partly on the basis of information from the scenographer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. Egil Törnqvist received his doctorate from Uppsala University in 1969, and since then has been Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include A Drama of Souls: Studies in O'Neill's Super-Naturalistic Technique (1968). Strindberg och Bergman: Spöksonaten – drama och iscensättning (1973), Strindbergian Drama: Themes and Structure (1982), and (with Barry Jacobs) Strindberg's Miss Julie: a Play and Its Transpositions (1988). He contributed a production study of Bergman's production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, No. 11 (1973).

In the first part of this three-part series. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacement of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. Here, she examines in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which have an existing sociological literature – looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters from Duvignaud onwards and (perhaps more pertinently) backwards, to Gramsci and Brecht. She then considers approaches to dramatic texts and genres, especially as exemplified in the explication of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. Finally, she explores the implications and assumptions of the relatively new discipline of ‘theatrical anthropology’, in which theatre is taken to be the prototype of society. 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.

In the first part of this series, published in NTQ17. Maria Shevtsova discussed the misconceptions and misplacements of emphases which have pervaded sociological approaches to theatre, and proposed her own methodology of study. In Part Two, published in NTQ18. she examined in fuller detail two aspects of her taxonomy which had an existing sociological literature—looking first at dramatic theory, as perceived by its sociological interpreters, and then considering approaches to dramatic texts and genres. From the assessment of the relatively new discipline of theatre anthropology which concluded Part Two. she now turns to examine sociological approaches to the act of performance itself, analyzing in particular the various attempts by semioticians to provide an appropriately comprehensive vocabulary for its description, and measuring these against the pioneering work of Mikhail Bakhtin. She concludes her study with some practical examples of productions which illuminate the sociology of performance. 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.

Pasolini was an extremely unorthodox dramatist. A cult figure in the ‘sixties for his controversial art films, he cultivated notoriety as a rebel who challenged (and was persistently persecuted by) Italy's cultural and political establishment. ‘This hid the fact that, as well as being a successful film-maker, he was an innovative novelist and consummate poet, a tireless essayist, and a provocateur in cultural and social matters, as well as an expert critic and compiler of dialect poetry – a cultural entrepreneur in the fullest sense. The year he wrote the bulk of his theatre, 1966, marked the beginning of his last phase: self-consciously, he assumed both cultural and sexual heterodoxy as an act of defiance against the ‘horrendous universe’ of neo-capitalist Italy and the intolerance of its consumerist values. In Britain, he has been almost entirely neglected except as a film-maker, and much of his work – the entire corpus of theatre and most of his essays – has still to be translated into English. This checklist by Russell Williams will thus hopefully serve as an introduction to the work of an entirely original and provocative playwright. It is followed by a more extended study by Paolo Puppa of perhaps Pasolini's best-known piece for the theatre, Affabulazione.

IN 1966 PASOLINI was confined to bed with an ulcer. While he steadily lost blood, he was reading Plato's Dialogues and going over his translations of The Oresteia and Plautus' Braggart Soldier. This is the picture given by his hagiographers, and those were the classical works that inspired the series of six texts, which he wrote in sporadic bursts of creativity during those years.