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’.

It has long been the received wisdom that television drama has become increasingly ‘filmic’ in orientation, moving away from the ‘theatrical’ as its point of aesthetic reference. This development, which is associated with the rejection of the studio in favour of location shooting – made possible by the increased use of new technology in the 1960s – and with the adoption of cinematic as opposed to theatrical genres, is generally regarded as a sign that the medium has come into its own. By examining a key ‘moment of change’ in the history of television drama, the BBC ‘Wednesday Play’ series of 1964 to 1970, this article asks what was lost in the movement out of the studio and into the streets, and questions the notion that the transition from ‘theatre’ to ‘film’, in the wake of Ken Loach and Tony Garnett's experiments in all-film production, was without tension or contradiction. The discussion explores issues of dramatic space as well as of socio-cultural context, expectation, and audience, and incorporates detailed analyses of Nell Dunn's Up the Junction (1965) and David Mercer's Let's Murder Vivaldi (1968). Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh is the Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the HEFCE-funded project, ‘The BBC Wednesday Plays and Post-War British Drama’, now in its third year at the University of Reading. Her publications include Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (Macmillan, 1998), and papers in Screen, The British Journal of Canadian Studies, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and Media, Culture, and Society. Stephen Lacey is a lecturer in Film and Drama at the University of Reading, where he is co-director of the ‘BBC Wednesday Plays’ project. His publications include British Realist Theatre: the New Wave and its Contexts (Routledge, 1995) and articles in New Theatre Quarterly and Studies in Theatre Production.

Liquid media with differing carbon concentrations and carbon-to-nitrogen ratios were tested for production of desiccation tolerant blastospores of Paecilomyces fumosoroseus. While all media tested supported sporulation in submerged culture, high blastospore concentrations (5·8 × 108 spores ml−1) were produced in media containing 80 g glucose l−1 and 13·2 g Casamino acids l−1 (MS medium) and a significantly higher percentage (79%) of these blastospores survived air drying. Media containing glucose concentrations greater than 20 g l−1 and Casamino acid concentrations between 13·2 and 40 g l−1 supported maximal production of desiccation tolerant blastospores. All 23 isolates of P. fumosoroseus grown in MS media produced high concentrations of desiccation tolerant blastospores. When stored at 4 °C, more than 60% of the lyophilized blastospores produced in MS medium were still viable after 7 months storage while less than 25% of the air-dried blastospores survived after 90 d storage. Standard whitefly bioassays were performed to compare air-dried blastospores of P. fumosoroseus ARSEF 4491 with solid substrate-produced conidia of Beauveria bassiana ARSEF 252. Air-dried blastospores of P. fumosoroseus gave LD50S of 60 and 113 blastospores mm−3 for the silverleaf whitefly (Bemisia argentifolii) in two separate bioassays with potency ratios (LD50 B. bassiana/LD50 P. fumosoroseus) of 3·9 and 3·8, respectively. These results have demonstrated that high concentrations of blastospores of P. fumosoroseus can be rapidly produced in liquid culture, remain viable following drying, and infect and kill silverleaf whitefly.

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.

In the early issues of New Theatre Quarterly, David Hornbrook initiated a debate on the role and techniques of drama-in-education to which several other notable practitioners subsequently contributed. Since then, the continuing need to defend the very existence of drama within a curriculum-oriented system has perhaps disinclined drama-in-education workers from a theoretical exploration of their methods and purposes. But the argument that the subject should be concerned with theatre practice has, suggest Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland, overlooked the reality that drama-in-education, in important and fundamental ways, already reflects at its own level certain kinds of innovative theatre practice – and they illustrate their arguments from the work of Brecht, Boal, and Paulo Freire, comparing the models they offer with a drama-in-education project as realized by a class of twelve-year-olds in a typical comprehensive. The article concludes with the authors' own analysis of the approaches to character and to dramatic structure employed, and how these reflect a ‘radical theatre practice’ with which practitioners in present-day ‘mainstream’ theatre might profitably engage.