Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is remembered today as a great character actor, as a personality, and as a wit: but as a producer he is seldom considered an important or even a positive influence on the course of Shakespearean interpretation in the twentieth century. Focusing on Tree's 1904 production of The Tempest, Brian Pearce argues that Tree was in fact an original and inventive director. Contrasting the faint praise or contempt of theatre historians with the adoption of many of Tree's ideas in later literary criticism of The Tempest, Pearce also suggests that the acceptance of the right of contemporary experimental directors to act in effect as ‘scenic artists’ sits oddly with attitudes to Tree's work, in which he fulfilled precisely such a role. Brian Pearce completed his PhD at the University of London in 1992, and since returning to South Africa has worked as a theatre director. He is a member of the board of directors of the Durban Theatre Workshop Company, and also teaches drama at Technikon Natal.

The last few decades of the twentieth century have seen the rise of a significant and powerful media culture. We now live in an age in which those media forces associated with visual entertainment – film, theatre, and television – have come increasingly to circulate among and interact with each other. Given the consequently porous nature of media boundaries, how should viewership and its effect on subjectivity be theorized today? Does the concept of the ‘spectatorial gaze’, as developed by critics in film and extended to theatre and television, actually work, given the plurality of the media culture? Elizabeth Klaver argues in the following essay that the ‘ways of looking’ currently available to viewers break down the isolated gaze of mastery – with or without its sexual-political connotations – and offer instead the potential and sometimes the actuality of performative interaction. Elizabeth Klaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As part of her current work on the media culture, she has recently published in the field of television and contemporary drama, and has also published articles on Beckett and Ionesco.

This article explores the much-debated question of the political impact or potential of theatre from a new angle. Accepting frankly the limitations of a medium which seldom reaches more than four per cent of the population, Temple Hauptfleisch looks instead at the contingent ways in which influence works – creating ‘images’ of authors, performers, venues, companies, and even of specific occasions which work upon audiences and non-audiences alike. The ideas explored in this article were first proposed in a paper read at a colloquium on ‘The Semiotics of Political Transition’, held at the Port Elizabeth Campus of Vista University in August, 1992: although most of the author's examples are thus from the theatre world of South Africa, the major thrust of his argument holds equally well for any contemporary westernized, media-dominated society. Temple Hauptfleisch is Associate Professor of Drama and Head of Theatre Research at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is co-editor of the South African Theatre Journal and has published widely on the history and theory of South African theatre.

For British dramatists nurtured in and by the hopes for socialism which characterized the 'sixties and the 'seventies, the Thatcherite period – with the eclipse of a fatally flawed communist system as its international dimension – demanded not only new thinking, but at least the consideration of a new dramaturgy. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., here explores the ways in which one of the most consistently committed of contemporary writers, Trevor Griffiths, confronts in Hope in the Year Two, his play about the death of the French Revolutionary Danton, the dilemma not only of the revolutionary hero, but of the dramatist confronted with attacks upon the concept of history itself, whether from the gurus of post-modernism or of the New Right. Stanton B. Garner, Jr., teaches modern drama in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He is the author of The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (1989) and Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (1994). His current research interests include post-Cold War British drama.

Best known in his own times as an encyclopedist, the eighteenth-century French writer, philosopher, dramatist, and critic Denis Diderot (1713–84) was to emerge a century later, though his Paradoxe sur le comédien, as a posthumous protagonist in the debate launched in Britain in William Archer's Masks or Faces? (1888). That debate – on the role of feeling and instinct versus craft and technique in acting – has been taken up and sustained by many theorists and practitioners in the succeeding century. In the following article, however, Graham Ley is more concerned with Diderot's wider role as theatrical theorist, suggesting that he offers – as also in his defence of pantomime, his proposal for the ‘serious genre’ which anticipated realism, and his advocacy of scenographic reform – not a unified vision of the nature of theatre but an enduring sense, precisely, of its paradoxical and ironic qualities. Graham Ley has just joined the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter, having previously taught in London and New Zealand. He is currently completing a book on theatrical theory, on which he has previously also published in NTQ, most recently on ‘The Role of Metaphor in Brook's The Empty Space’ (NTQ35, 1993). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

Girish Karnad is not only India's leading playwright, and a practitioner across the performing arts in all that nation's media, but the first contemporary Indian writer to have achieved a major production in a regional American theatre – Naga-Mandala, seen at the Guthrie Theatre in July 1993. The following interview was recorded on the occasion of that production, and ranges widely not only over Karnad's own work and its circumstances, but the situation and problems of the Indian theatre today, and its ambivalent relationship alike to its classical and its colonial past, and to the contemporary problems of its society. The interviewer, Aparna Dharwadker, is Assistant Professor of Drama and Eighteenth-Century British Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Drama, and The Sourcebook of Post-Colonial English Literatures and Cultural Theory (Greenwood, 1995). She has also published collaborative translations of modern Hindi poetry in major anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), and is currently completing a book-length study of the politics of comic and historical forms in late seventeenth-century drama.

In the following article Fiona Buckland describes how the leading British experimental dance company, DV8 Physical Theatre, was formed out of a disillusionment with its own dance medium, and how DV8 now works towards a reinvestment of creative need in stage performance. The first part reviews the company's work, methodology, and content to date, while the second offers a detailed analysis and explication of their award-winning and provocative Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), which expresses the paradox of gay male cruising as a need for security and desire for risk, both in terms of content and as an exhilarating contact-release form. The article explores the dynamism and theatricality of a style in which the body is both subject and mode of performance, and also the media, critical, and audience response DV8 performances have evoked. The author, Fiona Buckland, received her MA in Film and Theatre from the University of Sheffield in 1993, after which she worked there and at Sheffield College as a part-time lecturer in movement and choreography. She has also held workshops in Loughborough, Sheffield, and New York, and is currently the recipient of a Fulbright award on the doctoral programme in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

ALL LEFT-WING cultural practitioners and theoreticians have, at one time or another, been accused of Stalinism. Indeed, in many cases, this charge has to be taken on board, particularly after the collapse of existing state socialism. During the first few decades of this century most cultural activities, schools, and theories in many ways defined themselves within the context of existing or imaginary and utopian marxisms.