Acting style is arguably the most elusive of the theatre's always ephemeral traces – not least because each generation, while proclaiming its own actors to be more ‘natural’ than their predecessors, has tended in its criticism, as in actors' memoirs, to take style as a ‘given’. Anecdotage and plot synopsis have accordingly taken precedence over analysis of how performers actually worked and appeared on stage – let alone prepared their performances. Here, Simon Trussler introduces a project being launched at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Reader in Drama, to utilize the immense storage capacity of the CD-ROM both to record the evidence, verbal and pictorial, that has come down to us from the past, and to assess its relevance to present approaches to acting and to the playing of the classical repertoire. Specifically, the project aims to explore the ways in which the national identity – the quality of ‘Englishness’ – has been both reflected in and influenced by the ways in which it has been rendered on stage. In the succeeding article, Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues its consideration raises in relation to the Goldsmiths project. Simon Trussler was one of the founding editors of the original Theatre Quarterly in 1971, and has been co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since its inception. The most recent of his many books on theatre and drama, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, was runner-up for the 1994 George Freedley Award of the Theatre Libraries Association, being cited as ‘an outstanding contribution to the literature of the theatre’.

Here Nesta Jones outlines the history and development of the English acting tradition, and some of the issues any such consideration raises in relation to the research project introduced in the previous article by Simon Trussler. Nesta Jones is Reader in Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was for many years Head of Drama, and now directs the innovative MA programme in Theatre Arts. She is also artistic director of the NXT company, and has most recently published File on Synge (Methuen, 1994).

The contemporary staging of Women's bodies raises both practical and theoretical issues, and in both text-based theatre and performance art women theatre artists are currently engaging these challenges in inventive ways. Drawing upon the inland expanses and ontological freedoms of the American Midwest, the women at the Omaha Magic Theatre have recently premiered two collaboratively written plays, Body Leaks and Sound Fields, which use image, action, technology, and text to engage issues of gender, identity, sexuality, and the material body. In these issues, the spectator is prohibited from making direct relations between body and self, and must instead come to terms with a web of relationships which include the self, the physical body, the community, and the environment. Susan Carlson, a professor of English at lowa State University, has written two books on theatrical comedy, most recently Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (1991). She is currently working on the contemporary performance of Aphra Behn's plays, and is writing a book on the connections between productions of Shakespeare at the turn of the twentieth century and early suffrage theatre.

Almost in its death throes at the turn of the present century, sensational melodrama threw up a curious mutation at the hands of the prolific playwrights and managers, the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville. In numerous of their plays performed in the decade or so before the First World War, the ‘New Woman’, whose rights and rebellions were simultaneously the focus of debate in so-called ‘problem’ plays, took on a new and threatening aspect – as the eponymously ‘dangerous’ central character of The Worst Woman in London, A Disgrace to Her Sex, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, and a score or so of similar titles. In the following article Elaine Aston and lan Clarke explore the nature of these ‘strong’ female roles, both as acting vehicles and as embodiments of male fears and fantasies, in a theatre which existed in large part to serve such needs and which, through such characters, at once fictionalized and affirmed the fears of ‘respectable’ society about the moral stature of the actress. The authors both teach in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, where lan Clarke is Director of Drama, having previously published his own study of Edwardian Drama in 1989.

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).

Frank Wedekind's theatre art is usually approached through his dramatic writing: but the argument of this article is that the clearest understanding of the dramatist's career is to be gained through an encounter with his work as a performer. The stage was for Wedekind always a deeply personal and reflexive arena: as he once wrote, ‘the critics have often reproached me that my dramas are about myself. I would like to show that it's worth the trouble to bring myself onto the stage.’ In the following article, David Kuhns seeks to demonstrate the complicated nature of ‘performance’ as the term is applied to Wedekind – for his controversial plays and essays, scandalous satirical poems, cabaret appearances, and acting for the legitimate stage were all eclipsed by the notorious public persona which they constituted. This persona, Kuhns argues, became, even for Wedekind himself, inseparable from his self-perceived identity: it was both the real subject of his dramatic art and the essential character he performed. In short, Wedekind's career from beginning to end pursued a performative autobiographical dialectic of self-inscription and self-revision. The author, David Kuhns, teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory at Washington University in St. Louis.

This article is the latest contribution to a continuing debate on the editing of Shakespeare in relation to new conceptions of authorship and authority and to the developing contribution of performance studies. Introduced by Brian Parker in NTQ24 (1990), it has subsequently drawn submissions from Stanley Wells in NTQ26 (1991), Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey in NTQ 34 (1992) and, most recently, Alan Posener in NTQ39 (1994). Here, Andrew Spong challenges criticisms which Holderness and Loughrey's ‘Shakespearean Originals’ project has received, and suggests that the sort of methodological and theoretical fallacies which its editors have been accused of displaying can be no less readily evidenced from the positions adopted by their critics. Andrew Spong is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Textual and Contextual Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include the challenge of historical materialism to postmodernism and the sociology of the Elizabethan theatre.

AN ALTERNATIVE theatre movement emerged in Poland in the mid 1950s, following the post-Stalinist thaw. Its creators invented and applied new means of communication between actor and spectator thanks to their radical opposition to the mainstream state repertory theatres. This resulted not only in the internationally known achievements of Grotowski and Kantor, but also in the creation of thousands of independent student and amateur groups of great artistic and social importance. The new political and economic order in Poland has liberated these alternative theatres from their political duties and charged them with the even more difficult task of helping and supporting the search for new means of social communication.

The single television station serving Papua New Guinea transmits between ten and twelve hours a day of programmes that – apart from the new and a musical slot sponsored by Coca Cola – lack and significant national interest. Yet an eight-episode television drama, Warriors in Transit – conceived, written, shot, and performed entirely on location by local artists and talents, and with the potential to develop into a long-running series – has for three years remained unseen, despite several good reviews and sneak previews. The assertion of the Tv executives that Papua New Guineans do not want to watch their own programmes, and the inability of the production, alike bear witness to a problem typical of the develpment of television in the Third World, as traditional national cultures ineluctably give way befor the easy attractions of homogenized imports – a problem that can only be tackled by affirmative action on the part of governments whose best intentions too often conflict with financial constraints. The author, Joseph Chika Anyanwu, teaches in the Facutly of Creative Arts of the University of Papua New Guinea, and first presented the present paper at the 1994 conference of the Australasian Drama Studies Federation.