This article continues NTQ's explorations, commenced in NTQ18 (1989) and NTQ23 (1990), of the interactions between theatrical performance and emerging views of nature coming out of the ‘new sciences’. Here, Michael Vanden Heuvel argues that analogies between quantum science and performance are productive mainly in reference to work which investigates the nature of perception, and which foregrounds the spectator's awareness of the ‘event-ness’ of theatrical performance. Models drawn from the new science of ‘chaotics’, on the other hand, appear more applicable to performances which seek to move beyond phenomenology into the sphere of cultural discourse. He offers as an example of this ‘post-quantum’ theatre the work of the renowned New York collective the Wooster Group, whose performances create a dialogics between order and disorder which acts to map dynamic interactions between hegemony and difference in American culture. Michael Vanden Heuvel is Assistant Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Arizona State University. His Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theatre and the Dramatic Text was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1991, and he has written articles and reviews for Theatre Journal and Contemporary Literature.

Following the departure of the Roy Hart Theatre for France in 1974, and the death of Hart in a car accident shortly afterwards, his pioneering work in exploring the theatrical potential of the human voice has tended to be neglected in the English-speaking world. In the following article, Paul Newham demonstrates that, despite Hart's undoubted importance in the application of his methods of vocal self-discovery to performance, those methods were firmly rooted not only in aspects of Freud's theory of abreaction and Jung's belief in the multi-aspected or ‘polyvalent personality’, but more specifically in the practical therapeutic work on the human voice conducted by Alfred Wolfsohn, first in Germany before the war, then in Britain from Wolfsohn's exile in 1938 until his death in 1962. The author, Paul Newham, is founder and director of the International Association for Voice Movement Therapy in London, and has worked therapeutically with a wide range of clients, including performing artists. His book The Singing Cure: an Introduction to Voice Movement Therapy, will be published by Random House in March.

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.

The idea of merging western and Indian performing traditions through the performance of King Lear by a Kathakali company promised to be a viable experiment in intercultural practice – yet it proved entirely alien to Indian audiences initiated in Kathakali, and baffling when brought before the cosmopolitan throngs of the Edinburgh Festival. Here, Suresh Awasthi, former chairman of the National School of Drama in Delhi, analyzes the misconceptions which, in his view, fatally flawed the production – setting it within the context of its parent performance tradition, which permits development and change within a framework of basic thematic stability, but is unable to appropriate new texts. When, as in this case, the attempt is made, what results is a mistranslation of performance codes between two cultures. In the course of his argument, Suresh Awasthi provides a useful summary and analysis of traditional Kathakali conventions, and in conclusion describes some productions from the ‘classical avant-garde’ which have successfully explored an intercultural approach without detriment to either of the traditions involved.

This paper explores some of the many factors which affect the way in which the critical response to a production is made manifest. Using the reception of Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale and Our Country's Good as case studies, Susan Carlson contrasts the enthusiastic response to the first production of the latter play at the Royal Court, where its supposed celebration of the redemptive effects of theatricality were widely acclaimed, with the subjection of the former to the ‘atavistic guilts of male theatre reviewers’. Examining the reception of later productions – and even the West End transfer – of Our Country's Good, she proceeds to show how different theatres, companies, and senses of cultural, sexual, and national identity shaped ever-changing attitudes towards what was presumed to be the same play. Susan Carlson, whose article ‘Comic Collisions: Convention, Rage, and Order’ appeared in NTQ12 (November 1987), is Professor of English at lowa State University, and the author of Women of Grace: James's Plays and the Comedy of Manners (1985) and Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is now working on issues of performance and collaboration in contemporary theatre, and writing about the work of the Omaha Magic Theatre and the playwriting of Karim Alrawi.

This article continues the debate initiated by Brian Parker, who in NTQ24 (1990) offered a critique of the new Oxford Shakespeare, and one of its editors, Stanley Wells, who responded in NTQ 26 (1991) with a defence of his departure from traditional practices of textual conflation. Here, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey suggest that, on a closer examination, there is evidence that editorial intervention and conflation have been regularly employed in the Oxford edition: and in arguing against all such attempts to reconstruct ‘authoritative’ texts, they propose that, in their inevitable absence, the originals present the closest we are likely to approach to recreating the collaborative theatrical practice of Shakespeare's time. In illustrating the effects of editorial intervention from a close comparative examination of particular passages, they suggest, for example, that the stage directions make a shovel a likelier object of Hamlet's graveside contemplation than Yorick's skull. Graham Holderness, newly-appointed Professor and Dean of Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire, and Bryan Loughrey, Research Director at Roehampton Institute, have recently begun, through the Centre for Textual Studies, a programme of publishing accessible reprints of the important early editions, of which the first three have now appeared from Harvester Wheatsheaf.

‘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.

Despite widespread interest in the subject, there has been no previous attempt to collect comprehensive information concerning the history and present working conditions of feminist theatre companies in Britain: and so, with the exception of a very few assessments of particular companies, all too often what passes for critical analysis has had to depend on partial or merely anecdotal evidence. As part of her research for her book, Contemporary Feminist Theatres, forthcoming from Routledge in March, Lizbeth Goodman sent out between 1987 and 1990 a detailed questionnaire to 223 companies and organizations identified as having relevant concerns – whether in terms of company membership, production methods, policy aims, or targeted audience. With a response from 98 of these in hand, she assembled a detailed data-base from which the following article derives – describing the methods and aims of the survey itself, the nature of the response, and the needs in specific areas it revealed, both for the companies themselves and for the future assessment of their work. Lizbeth Goodman, currently a Lecturer in Literature for the Open University, has previously compiled a sequence of ‘Feminist Theatre Interviews’ for NTQ, and most recently contributed an overview of the state of contemporary Bulgarian theatre to NTQ32 (November 1992).

The paratheatrical form here described as ‘Invisible Theatre’ has been little investigated by the English-speaking academic world, beyond a nod in the direction of the work of Augusto Boal. In the following article, Martin Maria Kohtes suggests that the silent interlacing of art and life in ‘Invisible Theatre’ has historical and theoretical implications which extend beyond the specifics of ‘theatre for the oppressed’ or ‘guerrilla theatre’, to call into question our understanding of what constitutes the act of theatre itself. In tracing the history of the concept back to the Weimar Republic, Kohtes develops a hypothesis to explain the visibility of ‘Invisible Theatre’ at specific historic moments – and in so doing he hopes also to illuminate for a wider audience some of the ideas and research methods of German Theaterwissenschaft. Martin Maria Kohtes, who presently lives and works in Berlin and Cologne, studied Theatre Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His study of Guerilla Theater: Theorie und Praxis des amerikanischen Strassentheaters was published by Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen, in 1990.