In the first issue of New Theatre Quarterly (February 1985), David Williams presented a conspective overview of the work of Peter Brook at the International Centre for Theatre Research in Paris. More recently, in NTQ26 (May 1991), Paul B. Cohen analyzed Brook's evolving views on the interaction between performers and audience – the worlds of the imagination and the everyday. Here, Peter Brook himself, in conversation with Jean Kalman, discusses with a characteristically eclectic range of references and comparisons the idea of the theatrical ‘event’ and how it is generated, touching in passing on subjects as diverse as the construction and deconstruction of linear narrative and the significance and nature of improvisation. The interviewer, Jean Kalman, is a lighting designer who has collaborated with Peter Brook on many of his productions in recent years, including The Cherry Orchard, The Mahabharata, Woza Albert! and The Tempest.

The place of Cole Porter – the centenary of whose birth fell last June – within the tradition of the American musical has been well documented and fully discussed. Usually, however, this is at the expense of his earliest work, first as an exponent of Gilbertian pastiche, later as a dilettante ex-legionnaire in France – and then, as he grew aware of his own potential as a professional, in his work for the London theatre in the 1920s and early 1930s. Much of this was for revues mounted by the legendary impresario C. B. Cochran, though in 1933 the production of Nymph Errant proved to be his first and last original, full scale book musical for Britain, shortly before Porter's decision to move his home as well as his ambitions to Broadway. James Moore is a Cambridge-based writer, whose current work in progress includes a book on the British–American musical theatre and a full-length biography of Cochran's great rival, André Chariot – with whom Cole Porter finally collaborated in 1934, contributing ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ to the topical revue Hi Diddle Diddle.

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).

Ever since the creation of the first Departments of Drama in British universities soon after the Second World War, the most problematic aspect of assessing student work has been in the practical area – in the disciplines of acting and directing, and the design and execution of set, costume, lighting, and sound. Can acting genius be measured on the same scale as honest effort showing worthwhile progress? How far should any assessment reward individual effort and accomplishment, and how far the student's contribution to the collaborative effort which is the finished production? Should there even be a ‘finished production’ – and if so, how far should audience response and the chemistry of a particular performance affect a tutor's knowledge of the process involved? Indeed, are there criteria which can make any one or two tutors’ individual impressions more than merely impressionistic? The following paper by Val Taylor, who teaches in the Drama Department at Roehampton Institute, tackles this last area in particular. While it began as an internal discussion document, it seemed to us to raise relevant issues so fully and succinctly as to deserve wider dissemination, not only among colleagues in British universities, but among all those called upon to measure developing theatrical skills.

Declarations that the ‘Fabulous Invalid’ on Broadway is, at last, terminally ill tend to be subject to the law of diminishing returns – or to claims that wolf has been cried once too often. Yet environmental symptoms are now added to a chronic economic condition, as the ‘theatre district’ loses its distinctive character in a pincer movement between large-scale speculative developments and the sadly familiar signs of inner-city decay. In an earlier article, in NTQ22 (May 1990), Glenn Loney, a widely published theatre writer and teacher, clarified, with special concern for a British readership, the many ‘Factors in the Broadway Equation’. Here, he takes a closer look at the productions of the season just past, with its glut of musicals, from the lavish to the just plain lousy, economic ‘single-person shows’ – and the sometimes more challenging products of the Off-Broadway and not-for-profit sectors. He concludes that civic subsidy, even for the commercial theatre, is now the only way of saving the Invalid's lingering life.

In an article in NTQ 29 (February 1992), Steve Nicholson looked at how the Russian Revolution was portrayed in the 1920s by the Conservative theatre establishment. Usually it is the Left that is accused of simplistic theatrical agitation: but in this, the second of two articles about the right-wing political theatre of the 1920s, the author shows how plays about industrial conflict and strikes within Britain demonstrated a level of crude Conservative propaganda that has tended to go unremarked. This article has been researched largely through unpublished manuscripts in the Lord Chamberlain's collection of plays in the British Library, and derives from the author's broader study of the portrayal of Communism in the British theatre between 1917 and 1945. Steve Nicholson is currently Lecturer in Drama at the Workshop Theatre of the University of Leeds.

Shakespeare's plays have long been subject to deconstruction and reconstruction – some would argue, since the moment the words left his pen and entered the arena of theatrical intervention; some, more conservatively, dating the process to the attempts during the Restoration to rewrite him according to new tastes and old ‘rules’. More recently, of course, the long search for an almost platonic ideal of ‘authority’ has been giving way not only before new ideas of what this constitutes in theatrical terms, but through conscious attempts to subvert a play's meaning – not necessarily as ‘intended’ by Shakespeare, but as received in the prevailing culture. Feminist directors and critics have of course been prominent in this process – but the following study of the role of the witches in Macbeth is distinctive not so much for applying twentieth-century ideologies to Renaisssance plays, but for its exploration of the ‘problem’ of the witches in the light of conventions which, still current in Shakespeare's times, are hard to recover in the practical theatre of our own. The author, Lorraine Helms, is currently Mellon Fellow in Theatre Arts at Cornell University. She has published several articles on renaissance drama, and is working on studies of gender and performance in both contemporary and historical interpretations of Shakespeare.

When we published Barbara Day's introduction to modern theatre in Czechoslovakia in NTQ7 (1986), we could little imagine that by the turn of the decade we would be carrying regular reports from Eastern Europe on the effects of the disintegration of the Soviet empire upon the theatres and theatre people of the former satellite states. In NTQ27 (1991), we included an overview of recent developments in the Polish theatre – following this up in NTQ28 with a detailed feature on the work of a single company in the new era, Gardzienice. Here, we similarly complement Premsyl Rut's report in NTQ27 on ‘The State of the New Czech Theatre’ with a study of the work of one of the directors who, like so many people in the arts, served as a herald to the ‘velvet revolution’ – Blaho Uhlár, whose career began, in the difficult years after the Soviet invasion of 1968, with the Theatre for Children and Youth, and whose most recently completed production with the Divadle Alexandra Duchnovic company, Nono, visited the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff during the city's festival last October.