The first issue of NTQ in February 1985 included a feature on the Footsbarn Travelling Theatre Company which traced the development of the group from its formation in Cornwall in 1971, through its development of a distinctive narrative-based performance style – strong in physicality, visual imagery, and knockabout humour – to its status as an internationally acclaimed company, based now in France but touring extensively in Europe. Geraldine Cousin, the compiler of that feature, provided an update in NTQ33 (February 1993), which focused on Footsbarn's work since 1985, culminating in the ‘Mir Caravan’ project, in which eight theatre groups toured to the Soviet Union and through Eastern and Western Europe. In May 1992, two members of the group, David Johnston and Margarete Biereye, left to establish a new theatre company in Germany – the Wandertheater Ton und Kirschen, now well established, with actors drawn from Germany, France, England, Morocco, Spain, Colombia, Poland, and Australia. Though based in a small German village, Ton und Kirschen has built up its reputation in a number of European countries, and in 1998 was awarded the prize for Performing Arts from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Ton und Kirschen is funded partly by the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, and partly by the local district and the town of Potsdam, with a further portion of its income deriving from ticket sales and foreign tours. In December 1997 Margarete and David talked to Geraldine Cousin about their reasons for leaving Footsbarn, and their work with the new company. Geraldine Cousin is Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, and is author of Churchill the Playwright (Methuen), King John in the ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ series (Manchester University Press), and Women in Dramatic Place and Time (Routledge). She has recently completed a book for Harwood which documents productions by Sphinx Theatre, Scarlet Theatre, and Foursight Theatre.

Confronted with political opposition, an authoritarian regime predictably responds with force – but also with recognition of a knowable enemy. Confronted with anarchy and laughter, it can be caught wrong-footed – as happened in Poland in the aftermath of Martial Law, when a young surrealist, Waldemar Fydrych, self-designated ‘Major’, created what he called the Orange Alternative. In a series of published manifestoes and in the street happenings they proclaimed and recorded, the Orange Alternative tickled the soft underbelly of the Jaruzelski regime, and met with responses ranging from hostility to ostensible sympathy to simple bafflement. Juliusz Tyszka here records the progress of a movement and its moving spirit – who, disillusioned with democracy when it came, exiled himself to Paris to invent alternatives anew. Juliusz Tyszka is a past contributor on Polish theatre to NTQ, who teaches in the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan.

The appearance of a succession of controversial and attention-catching new plays on the British stage in the 'nineties has led to considerable public discussion – and not a little ostensible outrage. In ‘an interim report’, Aleks Sierz examines the rash of plays about sex, drugs, and violence – notably Trainspotting, Blasted, Mojo, and Shopping and Fucking – by twenty-something authors, and asks whether they have anything in common beyond a flamboyant theatricality and the desire to shock. After showing how Cool Britannia's manifestation on the national stage has provoked arguments for and against this ‘in-yer-face’ drama, he outlines some of the common themes – such as the crisis of masculinity and the postmodern sensibility – that characterize much contemporary new writing. He argues that while these young writers are certainly gifted and mature, only subsequent theatrical revivals of their work will show whether it has anything lasting to say. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune, and currently writing a book about ‘in-yer-face’ drama.

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.

Moshe Feldenkrais developed his influential philosophy and physiology of movement from a background in engineering, and a concern to remedy a knee injury sustained in a game of soccer. Though he scorned psychoanalytical approaches to the remedying of poor or painful postures, he had great faith in the capacity of the body, through the brain, for self-correction and self-healing. Joanna Rotté met Feldenkrais shortly before his death in 1985, in his eightieth year, and talked to him during a nine-week course he was leading in his own methodology. Joanna Rotté now teaches Script Analysis and Voice and Movement at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia. Her travel memoir Scene Change, a theatre diary from Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad, was published by Limelight in 1994, and her performance piece, Death of the Father, was produced in the spring of 1998 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

An acknowledged feature of the late nineteenth-century reinvigoration of theatre is the frequency with which new styles of writing – and, more often, innovative themes – affronted the public, both in print and performance. Yet the turbulent initial audience reactions to taboo- and ground-breaking plays have often been represented as self-evident confrontations between progressive creative artists and philistine theatregoers. By closely examining one apparently typical case of resistance to the new drama – the uproar at the 1889 premiere in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann's Before Sunrise – Neil Blackadder demonstrates the complex relationship between production and reception in the early modern theatre. He considers the behaviour of one offended spectator in particular, along with the response of the independent theatre society which staged the production, and a court's verdict on the validity of his protests. Beyond marking an important turning-point in the history of German theatre, the premiere of Before Sunrise encapsulates several key facets of the modern theatre during a period when its practitioners were becoming more bold and experimental, while changing norms of conduct were, paradoxically, rendering audiences more restrained. Neil Blackadder is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Drama at Duke University, curently visiting at Knox College. He is writing a book on modern theatre scandals.

The case of Hong Kong – acquired by the British under treaty, and restored to Chinese sovereignty in what some perceived as merely a shift from colonial to neo-colonial rule – always seemed a special case in the debate over post-colonialism. In NTQ53 (February 1998) Frank Bren looked primarily from an artistic and administrative viewpoint at the connections between film and theatre in the former colony: in the article which follows, Yun Tong Luk explores the social and cultural significance of two influential local productions, staged almost a decade apart – one, We're Hong Kong, shortly after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, the other; Tales of the Walled City, coinciding with the moment of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese rule. He points out the uniqueness of post-colonial experience in the territory, and examines the ambivalent attitudes of the Hong Kong people before and after the change of sovereignty.

When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known as Manora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play, At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.