In 1947, Carlo Anti published Teatri Greci Arcaici da Minosse a Pericle. In this book, he formulated what one reviewer termed ‘the dogma of the originally rectangular orchestra’. This directly contradicted over a century of research which had concluded that Greek performance areas began with a completely circular dancing place and gradually changed to an arrangement which used a partial circle backed by a scene house. Over a hundred part-circular orchestras, lastingly embalmed in stone, attest to the accuracy of at least part of this curvilinear hypothesis. All of these stone remains, however, are from the mid-fourth century or later; nothing remains of the wooden theatres in which the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed.

In the professional sense Jewish theatre does not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. Its establishment was the consequence of two hundred years of socio-economic processes which revolutionized the structure of Jewish society. These processes had a crucial influence on the various languages used by the Jews and eventually determined which ones would be spoken on Jewish stages.

Ellen Terry's letters to Amey Stansfield were written between 1892 the first and several later ones cannot be precisely dated because the envelopes are missing – and 31 August 1907, a period covering the last decade of her association with Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre and also the peak years of her correspondence with Bernard Shaw, who called her ‘one of the greatest letter-writers who ever lived’. There are thirtythree of them, and although sometimes a long interval elapses between letters – only one for each of the years 1902 and 1907, and none at all for 1895, 1896, 1898, 1900, 1901 and 1904 – the inference need not be drawn that the collection is incomplete, for Amey carefully preserved them. Her own letters to Ellen Terry have not survived.

Despite the tendency for Victorian performers to be credited with increasing respectability and middle-class status and for actors to receive the highest official commendations, the popular association between actresses and prostitutes and belief in actresses' inappropriate sexual conduct endured throughout the nineteenth century. In the United States, religious fundamentalism accounts for much of the prejudice, but in Great Britain, where puritanical influences were not as influential on the theatre, other factors helped to preserve the derogatory view of actresses. In certain times and places actresses did have real links with the oldest of all ‘women's professions’, but the notion that the dual identity of Roman dancers or the exploits of some Restoration performers justify the popular association between actresses and prostitutes in the Victorian era is patently insufficient. The notion persisted throughout the nineteenth century because Victorians recognized that acting and whoring were the occupations of self-sufficient women who plied their trades in public places, and because Victorians believed that actresses' male colleagues and patrons inevitably complicated transient lifestyles, economic insecurity, and night hours with sexual activity. In the spirit of Gilbert and Gubar's axiom that experience generates metaphor and metaphor creates experience, the actress and the prostitute were both objects of desire whose company was purchased through commercial exchange. While patrons bought the right to see them, to project their fantasies on them, and to denigrate and misrepresent their sexuality, both groups of women found it necessary constantly to sue for men's attention and tolerate the false imagery. Their similarities were reinforced by coexistence in neighbourhoods and work places where they excited and placated the playgoer's lust in an eternal loop, twisted like a Mobius strip into the appearance of a single surface.

The late fifteenth century and the whole of the sixteenth century were dark years for the Jewish people, and the Jews of Italy did not escape the grim fate of their brothers. Old decrees were resuscitated and reinforced by a succession of newly-passed harsh measures. Expulsion, forced wearing of the humiliating Jewish badge, censorship of books, the burning of the Talmud and pogroms inspired and led by zealous Christians, were daily occurrences. It is during those tragic years that an astonishing phenomenon emerges on the Italian scene: Jews engage in the performing arts with passion and play an important role in the development of spectacles and shows. They do so in defiance of internal opposition; the fierce objection of Rabbis, ever since Talmudic times, to any form of theatrical entertainment, had never abated.

The scena per angolo, a phrase coined by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena in his 1711 publication, L' archittetura civile, is the consummate expression of high baroque scenography. Per angolo designs for stage sets typically show corners of palatial interiors or courtyards through the use of multiple vanishing points [Fig. 14]. Secondary diagonals which radiate off the major oblique lines defining the space lead the eye, as well as the understanding, into an implied infinity beyond the frame of the proscenium and mirror the early eighteenth century's fascination with, and indeed insistence upon, boundless space. Even theatrical designs whose main vanishing points are on the centre line rely heavily on multiple minor vanishing points to provide the essential dynamic diagonal thrust beyond the implied boundary of the proscenium.

The theatrical memoirs published by actresses in the nineteenth century were generally written by women who had achieved recognition in their profession and had, therefore, acquired a place in society. Comparatively little is known about the jobbing actress who never achieved distinction in London, but who eked out an existence in the provinces, either with one of the better companies in Bath, Bristol or Edinburgh, on a theatrical ‘circuit’, or with one of the troupes of travelling players who rarely performed in theatre buildings, but in barns, village halls, inns and, occasionally, in private houses. At the bottom of the pile came the performers in fairground booths and penny theatres.

In 1616 Christopher Beeston converted a cockpit in Drury Lane into a playhouse known as the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane. It was the second enclosed and private theatre in Jacobean London, Blackfriars being the first. With the exception of the Cockpit in Court, this theatre not only survived the vicissitudes of the Interregnum, continuing to operate covertly and sporadically, but also it emerged at the Restoration already adapted with some limited capacity for mounting productions decorated with changeable scenery. Yet in spite of their historical importance what is known about the architecture of this and the other private theatres, the Blackfriars and the Salisbury Court, remains essentially speculative. Because of the lack of specific internal and external graphic evidence, reconstructions of these theatres have been made from deductions drawn from close readings of play texts. With regard to the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, Leslie Hotson laid the foundations for basic research into its reconstruction when, in The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, he wrote up his discovery of documents in the Public Record Office that dealt obliquely with the site on which the theatre was built. However, he was reluctant to accept the contemporary evidence afforded him by Hollar in his View of West London, 1657, [Fig. 26],

Unfortunately we have no graphic information as to the shape and appearance of the Cockpit Theatre, I fully expected to find a clear representation of it in Hollar's Bird's-eye View of West Central London, drawn in 1657, but I was disappointed; unless indeed we are to take a three-gabled structure, which stands where the Cockpit should be, for the theatre.

The following comparison between the Yiddish ‘Shund’ play Dos Yudishe Hertz by Joseph Lateiner and August von Katzebue's most popular melodrama Menschenhass und Reue aims to throw light on a very significant aspect of the Yiddish ‘Shund’ Theatre. I believe that the conclusions of this comparison show how Yiddish ‘Shund’ playwrights tried to answer their audience expectations and how they manipulated their audience by trying to evoke a certain kind of response.

In 1976 a drawing, today at the Bibliothèque Nationale, by the French artist, Pierre Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) was published in Theatre Research International. The picture is signed and dated: ‘P. A. Wille filius del 1767’ and depicts a performance in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, at that time called the Théâtre Italien or the Comédie Italienne. But the drawing has not yet been analysed, nor has the artist's motif been identified. [Plate I]

Most of Great Britain's active women dramatists have found crucial support and encouragement for their work from communities of women in the theatre. Off stage, during the process of planning, writing, and rehearsing, collaborations have changed the standard theatrical work pattern and modified the way women writers conceive of drama. On stage, the products – the plays – reflect their communal generation in their focus on groups. In short, the collaborations, collectives, and groups which have encouraged and advanced women's theatrical work account for its particular verve. And while the position of women's theatre communities is now aesthetically and politically much more complicated than it was in the early 70s, playwright Sue Townsend can still proclaim, albeit more optimistically than most, that collaboration with a group ‘is the only way to work’.

In Why We Need Broadway, the American scholar and critic Stanley Kaufmann depicts the theatre auditorium as the last remaining public meeting place for the lonely souls who together constitute Western society, a place where the concept of a public still exists, a place which attracts individuals who have paid out of their own pockets for a ticket which entitles them to share a personal experience with the strangers seated beside them in the dark, and with whom, for one evening, they become a community – or at least the closest thing to a community possible in the Western city of today.

Fifty years ago, the renowned American humorist, Don Marquis, creator of the ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ stories, sat in the dining room of the Players Club and contemplated a playbill: ‘Mr. Bogumil Dawison will appear at the Winter Garden as Othello. Mr. Edwin Booth will play Iago.’ Who was Bogumil Dawison, he wonders? Why did his name appear at the top of the bill above Booth's? Perhaps he had a European reputation like Salvini or Coquelin, but if so why had Marquis never heard of him? He could not have been a Nobody, Marquis concludes, otherwise Booth would never have acted with him. Marquis thinks that perhaps he should find out all he can about Dawison, but then decides that he'll have another brandy instead: ‘Damn Bogumil Dawison! Maybe he was a bad actor, he mooned around and drank himself to death, because the wind was cold and wet … a ridiculous person undoubtedly, and I don't want to know his ghost.’

Christopher Hampton's play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, based on the novel by Laclos, was first produced at The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1985. It was immediately acclaimed, and after its transfer early in 1986 to The Pit at the Royal Shakespeare Company's London centre, the Barbican, both play and performers won several awards, including four for Best Play. In October 1986, with only a few changes of performer, the production further transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End. At the time of writing the Ambassadors production, recast, has opened to enthusiastic reviews, while the original production has achieved transfer to New York. Hampton's triumphant success in dramatizing Laclos's novel deserves the closest attention.

From a contemporary Israeli perspective there is a clearly discernable connection between the concrete expressions of the national theatrical culture and some of the most comprehensive and fundamental ideological assumptions of this society. These assumptions are primarily based on its Jewish culture and religion and the national movement of Zionism as it has developed ideologically as well as practically during the last century, in particular through the establishment of the state of Israel. This article will examine the expression of some of these ideological trends and developments in the Hebrew and Israeli theatrical culture from the early 19208 until the mid-1970s.

On the Hebrew Stage, Greek and Roman drama was never a first priority, The Habima Theatre, from its inception in 1917 to the present day, staged only six classical productions (out of more than four hundred), the Cameri Theatre – four, the Haifa Municipal Theatre – five, the Ohel theatre, in all of its forty-four years of activity (1925–69), although it staged 163 plays, never found the need or drive to produce a Greek or a Roman drama, and the young Beer-Sheba Theatre, the last addition to Israel's theatrical establishment, although daring and innovative, has yet to venture into the classical world. The reasons are not far to seek, and there are weighty local reasons in addition to the general cultural factors, which have contributed to the scarcity of classical drama productions. Hellenism and Hellenization, according to the view held even today by some educated and secular Israelis, are not neutral entities. The terms themselves are polemic, connote cultural assimilation, and stand for departure from national Jewish values and the forfeit of cultural originality and independence. From the times of the Hebrew Enlightenment movement, however, classical languages and culture became an integral part of the curriculum of Jewish studies even in religious institutions of higher learning, such as the Bar-Ilan University. On the other hand, as a reaction to the classical culture becoming an embodiment of secular, anti-clerical Zionist renaissance, the extreme Orthodox establishment in contemporary Israel has continued to treat it as a dangerous desecration and even extended the derogatory use of the term ‘Hellenization’ to cover the entire Western cultural influence. As a result until today classical literature has only a marginal place in the high-schools' curriculum, it is not an immediate, and certainly not the most important source from which Hebrew writers and playwrights draw their inspiration, and even well educated spectators have at best only a very superficial knowledge of the classical heritage. The few classical plays produced on the Hebrew stage were chosen at random, chiefly because leading or popular directors insisted on directing a certain play, or because a play, which achieved success in Europe, was transplanted lock, stock and barrel to Israel, sometimes together with its director.