John McGrath spurned the easy road to television fame that seemed open to him early in his career, but remained concerned throughout his life to develop the creative potential of the medium, and to exploit what made it distinctive from the forms of film and theatre in which he was also engaged. Unlike many of his contemporaries, McGrath's work was thus underpinned by a strong sense of the differing qualities of the performing media, and nowhere is this more evident than in Blood Red Roses, which began its life as a stage play for 7:84 Scotland in 1980, was adapted into a three-part television serial for Channel 4 in 1985, and re-edited for the version directed by McGrath for Freeway Films. In exploring the differing sensibilities and structures of the different versions, Stephen Lacey draws on ideas – notably the concept of realism – as formulated by George Lukács largely in relation to yet another genre, that of the novel, in which he often found himself in conflict with the ideas of Bertolt Brecht. Stephen Lacey is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-director of a major AHRB-funded research project, ‘Cultures of British TV Drama: 1960–82’.

Following her survey of site-specific performance companies and their understanding of their work and its circumscriptions in NTQ70, Fiona Wilkie here proposes that places as such can be characterized in terms of differing sets of rules in dialogue with one another. She examines one place in particular in order to suggest some principles for approaching site-specific performance. Various spatial experiences – visual, physical, and mythical – are read through a range of attempts to theorize our relationships with space (including Foucault's heterotopia and de Certeau's pedestrian tactics). Moving away from more mundane examples of site ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’, Fiona Wilkie expands the notion of spatial rules to develop two related concepts – the repertoire and the inner rule – that offer complex ways of imagining and articulating the rule-bound site. Finally, she suggests that site-specific performance meanings emerge out of a process of negotiation between three sets of rules: those of the site, the performance, and the spectators. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD thesis (provisionally entitled Constructing Meaning/Performing Place: Site-Specific Performance in Contemporary Britain) at the University of Surrey, from which article is drawn.

In NTQ62, Joanna Ostrowska reported on Grotowski's last visit to his native Poland before his death in 1999. Here, Paul Allain assesses the Grotowksi inheritance in Pontedera, Italy, which had been the base for Grotowski's research since 1986 – specifically, on the second Generazioni International Theatre Festival, held there in June 2001. Paul Allain's doctoral research on the Gardzienice company took him to Poland during the years of ferment around the fall of Communism. He is presently Senior Lecturer in Drama in the University of Kent, and was co-editor of the recent Cambridge Companion to Chekhov.

In this essay, Allen J. Kuharski discusses Jan Kott as an exiled Polish writer best known for his essays on Shakespeare's plays, and compares and contrasts his writings with those of a variety of other Polish émigré writers, notably Witold Gombrowicz. He argues that Kott's most important contribution was ultimately as a performance theorist, in the traditions of Wyspiański and Brecht, rather than as a traditional critic or scholar, and in consequence he reached a wider readership in English and other languages than any other Polish writer. His choice of Shakespeare as a subject belied the full depth and complexity of the Polish sources (often experiential) for his readings of the plays – sources not always acknowledged in his work. Kuharski uses Kott's own syncretic, archetypal methods to interpret his life and work, explaining his position as an exiled writer via Shakespearean characters such as Duke Senior in As You Like It and Prospero in The Tempest – and, closest to the experience of the émigré, the cross-dressing Rosalind, compelled to belie herself in order to express herself. Tracing the evolution of Kott's complex existential self-definition in various phases of his life and writing, Kuharski concludes that the key to Kott's various authorial personae is the influence of the inter-war Polish writer and critic Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński. Allen J. Kuharski, Associate Editor for Theatre Journal, is the Director of the Theatre Studies Program at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, and has published extensively on Gombrowicz, Kott, and other aspects of contemporary Polish and American theatre in the US, UK, Poland, France, and the Netherlands. His translation and stage adaptation of Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke has been performed in various countries, winning a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001.

Taking a wide-ranging look at the aesthetics and economics of theatre on both sides of the Atlantic, and highlighting the increasing interest in learning about theatre in the educational sphere at a time when institutional theatre appears to be floundering, John Russell Brown here draws on his own visits over the past decade to traditional and contemporary theatres in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia to suggest how new approaches to and locations for theatre might build on forms which continue to draw audiences worldwide. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999. His articles on Asian theatres and their influence in Europe and America have appeared in recent years in New Theatre Quarterly and several Indian journals. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995) and has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’ and ‘Theatre Concepts’ series, both for Routledge. This article is based upon his inaugural lecture at Middlesex University, where he is currently Visiting Professor.

Surveying the intellectual passions and pursuits of a lifetime in his memoir Errata: an Examined Life (1997), George Steiner commented that ‘such was the response to The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. and to Alec McCowen's overwhelming interpretation on stage of the dominant figure that I could have made of the novel or novella my foremost business’. Adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed at the Mermaid by John Dexter in 1982, The Portage is the only example of Steiner's fiction to have been dramatized for the stage. Through the character of A. H., Steiner – Britain's foremost scholar, critic, and polemicist on the Shoah and European thought in a ‘posthuman’ era – proposes the metaphysical idea of ‘negative transcendence’ as necessary to any attempt to understand Jewish fate during the Holocaust, a perspective unique amongst dramatic representations seen in Britain. The play itself has not been produced on the professional stage in the following twenty years, and critics and commentators continue to be perplexed by Steiner's decision to present his arguments in such a fashion. Nick White argues that while the novel's weaknesses were mercilessly exposed by the ‘translation’ of Steiner's novel into the dramatic idiom of stage naturalism, it was the subsequent controversy which exposed as fundamentally flawed Steiner's attempt (through recourse to the ideas and language of his own critical writing) to construct a composite, ‘inter-textual’ identity for the character A. H. He goes on to show that the initial confusion became polarized around conflicting interpretations of Steiner's intentions: were the arguments advanced by A. H. to be understood as an accurate rendering, or a misinterpretation – by the master manipulator of language, A. H. – of Steiner's published theses about the compulsions upon which Jewish fate depended during the Holocaust?

Surveys are used to define an audience in a quantifiable way. Awareness of the typical gender, age, and income of their patrons, along with their rating of a theatre's facilities, help theatre producers to address an audience's needs. However, producers seldom explore the audience response to a specific performance – something that is difficult to quantify. Thus, the audience's interaction with the performance – whether with particular actors, the space configuration, or with fellow spectators – is neglected in favour of such demographics as age, income, and occupation. Christopher Olsen suggests that surveys handed out to audience members might benefit from a more qualitative approach based on semiotic analysis. He asked sixty professional theatres in the USA – ranging from major repertory institutions to small theatres targeting specific audiences – to send examples of recent audience surveys they have conducted. Using the surveys (of which the most extensive is reproduced in full), as a guide, he tabulates the most common questions asked, and offers examples of further survey questions guided by semiotic principles. Chris Olsen is currently an adjunct professor at Montgomery College and Shenandoah University in the Washington, DC, area. Having written his dissertation on the Arts Lab phenomenon in Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he is now working on a book about the second wave of the Off-Off-Broadway movement in New York.

John McGrath died from leukaemia in January 2002, having put the final touches to his last book, Naked Thoughts That Roam About: Reflections on Theatre, 1958–2001, edited by Nadine Holdsworth (Nick Hern Books, 2002). The following article forms the conclusion to this collection of essays, lectures, interviews, theatre reviews, 7:84 company documents, programme notes, letters, and poems, for which McGrath provides a contextualizing commentary. Like the other pieces in the book, it testifies to McGrath's faith in theatre's ability to contribute to humanity through its engagement with people, communities, and political processes – a commitment he maintained and developed to the end of his life. In ‘Theatre and Democracy’ he drew on the work of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis to frame his hopes for theatre in the twenty-first century – a theatre which would operate in public dialectical debate with the society from which it evolves, and, by asking hard questions about the social processes that construct that society, provide a voice for oppositional opinion and the marginalized. The essay was reworked from a keynote address to the ‘European Theatre, Justice, and Morality’ conference held at the University of London in June 1999, and in its earlier form appeared in the conference proceedings, published as Morality and Justice: the Challenge of European Theatre, edited by Edward Batley and David Bradby (Rodopi, 2001).

Maxwell Anderson's plays have been overshadowed in the American and world theatre, alike by the canonical post-war writers of the succeeding generation and by writers such as Clifford Odets and Thornton Wilder of his own, who are felt to be more representative of the prevailing mood. Russell DiNapoli argues that it was Anderson's very atypicality which merits his reconsideration. As a playwright, he steadfastly kept to his own ideological course while influenced at the same time by the changing fashions which made for success on Broadway – the resulting creative tensions having both positive and negative effects on his contemporary as on his posthumous reputation. A New Yorker, Russell DiNapoli took his Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his doctorate in Philology at the Universidad de Valencia, Spain, where he is currently a member of the Department of English and German. He has written and directed several plays in Valencia, where he has lived since 1977, the most recent being a Spanish adaptation of the Prologue in Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo.

Who is producing site-specific performance in Britain? Who sees it? Where do these performances occur, or, more particularly, ‘take place’? What tools are used to construct a performance of place? Why is the site-specific mode chosen? And, crucially, how is it variously defined? Drawing on a survey of British practitioners conducted between November 2000 and December 2001, Fiona Wilkie sets out to explore these questions. While pointing to the wide variety of practices that might be delineated by the term ‘site-specific’, she analyzes the implications of such generalizations as can be made – about the types of performance site chosen, the effects of funding policy on the character of work being made, the possibilities for identifying a ‘site-specific’ audience, and the debates surrounding the terminology itself. Fiona Wilkie is currently completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, on which this article is based, which aims to develop a theoretical model for site-specific performance, with particular reference to the spectatorial role.

Does the prevailing approach to performing Shakespeare, which increasingly reflects nothing more than directorial quirks consuming more cash than creative energy, threaten to cast us adrift from the plays? Those who think so have been strengthened in their belief by a surprisingly inexpensive venture operating in Bristol since the year 2000, under the title ‘Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’. This company have been working in an industrial setting with a minimal production and publicity budget but intense dedication to close textual reading, and have been quick to attract national attention with their pared-down presentations. Professor Emeritus George Brandt, who describes the origins and aims of this group, has been observing the local theatrical scene since 1951, when he joined the Drama Department of the University of Bristol. In his 35 years on its staff, during which he served as its Head of Department over a number of years, he shaped much of its policy, creating among other things the first practical postgraduate film course at a British university. George Brandt edited British Television Drama (1981) and British Television Drama in the 1980s (1993) for Cambridge University Press. His German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848 (1993), with Professor Hogendoorn, was part of the CUP series ‘Theatre in Europe’. His Modern Theories of Drama was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Bristol.

The avant-garde Japanese company Ban'yu Inryoku was formed following the death in 1983 of the inspirational writer and director Shuji Terayama, who has subsequently become a cult figure. This article explores his influence – both limiting and liberating – on the production by one of the founders of the company, his disciple J. A. Seazer, of an experimental musical version of King Lear, as Ria O. Douglas Kerr places the production – seen in England during the Japan Festival of 1991 – within the context of evolving attitudes towards the avant-garde theatrical movement in Japan during the late 'sixties, notably as modified by the national trauma of the gas attack in Tokyo of 1995. Adapting Shakespeare was a break with the Terayama tradition of presenting only works collectively created by the ensemble – and it also made their work more accessible to the intercultural festival circuit. Explicated by the printed synopsis which forms a ‘map’ of the play for its audiences, the production also used Brechtian signboards to signal the titles of scenes, while being predicated also on the ‘representation of the inner and the outer experience’ which was Artaud's perception of Balinese performance. Lear himself was in this sense the entranced dancer, depending on the guidance of his supporters. Douglas Kerr, who explores here the tensions between the cultural elements employed and between the ideological pulls for conservatism and for social change, is currently an advanced PhD student at Stanford University in American Literature. His interests include Performance Poetics and Buddhism in contemporary American poetry.

Challenging contemporary orthodoxies, notably Derrida's perception of the actor as an ‘interpretive slave’, Richard Hornby here suggests that so far from exerting a tyranny, the fixed text provides a lifeline which the actor, having grasped, then makes his or her own. If a tyranny exists, it is that of the auteur-director who denies the actor the creative freedom that can be claimed from the text on the page. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of six books and over a hundred articles on theatre, the most recent being The End of Acting, published by Applause Books in 1992, and Mad about Theatre, a collection of his theatre reviews published by Applause in 1996. His well-known Script into Performance has gone through many editions, most recently in 1996, and his latest work, Theatre in Crisis, is due out next year. This essay is an adaptation of a paper he delivered in Amsterdam for the ‘Theatre and Cultural Memory’ conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research, held in July 2002.

The twelfth session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) held in Bielefeld, Germany, in August 2000, set out to explore, under the title ‘Action, Structure, Coherence’, the relationship between the actor and text – and specifically between actors trained in the Odin and other physically-rooted traditions and texts of the supposedly ‘classical’, text-based theatre of western Europe. David Korish here reports on three encounters between different pairs of actors and their texts, and their several means of developing a dynamic physical score appropriate to the text concerned. The co-founder and director of Teatro Abya Yala, an independent theatre company based in San José, Costa Rica, David Korish is also a member of the faculty of the School of Dramatic Arts of the National University of Costa Rica.

The Market Theatre of Johannesburg opened in 1976, the year of the Soweto Uprising – the beginning of the end for the oppressive apartheid regime. Founded by Barney Simon, Mannie Manim, and a group of white actors, the theatre's policy, in line with the advice to white liberals from the Black Consciousness Movement, was to raise the awareness of its mainly white audiences about the oppression of apartheid and their own social, political, and economic privileges. The theatre went on through the late 'seventies and 'eighties to attract international acclaim for productions developed in collaboration with black artists that reflected the struggle against the incumbent regime, including such classics as The Island, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and Woza Albert! How has the Market fared with the emergence of the new South Africa in the 'nineties? Has it built on the past? Has it reflected the changes? What is happening at the theatre today? Actress, writer, and director Hilary Burns went to Johannesburg in November 2000 to find out. She worked in various departments of the theatre, attended productions, and interviewed theatre artists and members of the audience. This article will form part of her book, The Cultural Precinct, inspired by this experience to explore how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society.

Keir Elam's observation in 1980 that ‘the theatrical text is defined and perceived above all in spatial terms’ reflected a growing attention to the significance of spatial organization and utilization in creative and perceptive processes in the theatre. In the last twenty years space has found its long-deserved status as a prominent feature of the theatrical experience and a key element in theatre studies. In this article Kinneret Noy focuses on a unique spatial component shared by two theatrical traditions – the Greek and the Japanese. By comparing and contrasting the function of the eisodos in the Greek theatre with that of the hashigakari in the Japanese Noh, she offers a fresh look at both forms. The spatial relation between the passageway and the main ‘stage’ create what Mitsuo Inoue terms a ‘movement space’. Noy borrows this term from Japanese architecture to point the connection between theatrical space and dramatic techniques. After discussing the main characteristics of a ‘movement space’ in the theatre she deals with the differences that exist between Noh and Greek theatres' spatial qualities, suggesting some connections between developments in the theatres and social and political changes. A graduate from the University of Pittsburgh (1997), Kinneret Noy studied with the Noh master Takabayshi Shinji in Kyoto, and currently teaches in the Theatre Department and East Asian Department of Haifa University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.