Well into his eighth decade, Eric Bentley now regards himself as primarily a playwright, having redefined the agenda of serious criticism during the early post-war years, pioneered the understanding, translation, and production of Brecht in the West, and for long combined academic work at Columbia with producing the best kind of regular theatre reviews. Apart from several collections of that ‘occasional’ writing, and anthologies of plays in translation which have helped to extend the range of the English-language repertoire, he has produced several full-length studies of seminal importance – from his early re-evaluation of Shaw and, in The Playwright as Thinker, of other major modern dramatists, to the more theoretical but invariably stimulating ‘rethink’ of dramatic genres in The Life of the Drama. More recently, he has devoted his time to active playwriting, and it was during a production of his Lord Alfred's Lover in Miami that the director and self-proclaimed ‘counterfeit critic’ Charles Marowitz persuaded him to discuss the present state of both the active theatre in the West – and of the condition of the critical trade he had once pursued.

Disillusioned by what he sees as the inadequate state of the British theatre, Edward Bond has refused to have some of his more recent plays produced in this country, although they have been seen in productions on the Continent. This year's Avignon Festival will thus be focusing on his work, and later in 1994 the Berliner Ensemble will be staging Olly's Prison. In 1992, however, Bond worked – for the first time since the late 1980s – with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, resuming in workshop conditions his attempt to develop a distinctive acting style for his work. Commenting on the programme of workshops, and through subsequent interviews with Bond and some of the actors involved, Ian Stuart, who teaches in the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California, attempts to draw conclusions about Bond's current theatre methodology.

In NTQ 30 (1992) Dorothy Knowles provided a description and explication of the recent work of the visionary French director Armand Gatti. For what he calls his ‘plural writing’ projects, Gatti has increasingly come to recruit 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 developing a performance within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre are entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. Here, he speaks for himself, describing both the inspiration and the evolution of his work in a style which characteristically combines pragmatism with lyricism. The article derives from a series of interviews conducted in 1991 by Hélène Châtelain – an actress who has worked with Gatti since 1966 – and first published in Le Monde Diplomatique for February 1992. The translator for NTQ, Wesley Hutchinson, wrote his doctoral thesis on Gatti at Trinity College, Dublin, and now lectures in the English Department of the University of Paris, Nanterre.

American vaudeville welcomed a host of important stage actors into its midst during the generation between the mid-1890s and the end of the First World War, and in 1912, following appearances in British music halls, Sarah Bernhardt became vaudeville's centrepiece in its own war with the legitimate theatre for audience and status. By way of exchange, she received the highest salary ever paid to a ‘headlined’ vaudeville act, while performing a repertoire from which she was able to exclude the sort of light entertainment which had previously typified the medium. Both vaudeville and Bernhardt profited, in very different ways, from this wedding of high culture to low – and in the process a cultural standing seems to have attached itself to exhibitions of pain which legitimised the lot of the morally deviant women she both portrayed and exemplified. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the ways in which the great actress thus maintained a demand for her services well after the eclipse of her legendary beauty and matchless movement.

IN THE BACKS of my mother's wartime diaries are long lists of the dates of letters written to and received from my reluctant soldier father, all neatly numbered to accord with some arcane requirement of the military mail. The letters have not survived: but the diaries, though little more than appointments books, were gathered into decennial sets and secured by long-perished rubber- bands. Trying to reconstruct a little of my early childhood from the names and places of those barebones jottings, I have often wondered why the diaries were felt to be so sacrosanct, while letters which exchanged emotions, shared feelings about war, Went uncherished and unkept. Of course, when the war came to an end, so did the letters.

Despite the importance of Italian Futurism to the modernist movement in Europe during the early inter-war period, it has suffered a bad press – initially because of its association with the emergent fascist movement, and more recently because of the feminist concern with apparently misogynistic elements in the writing of the acknowledged leader of the movement, F. T. Marinetti. However, Günter Berghaus argues that this is to ignore not only the roots of Marinetti's own anti-feminism – in contempt for the very aspects of subservient womanhood now condemned by feminists themselves – but also the support that Futurism enjoyed from a number of women artists in Italy at the time. Certainly, the early career of the actress Fulvia Giuliani affirms both her strong endorsement for and participation in the movement, and her contempt for women who passively accepted the roles assigned to them by the patriarchy. Günter Berghaus, who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, here outlines Giuliani's role in the Futurist movement and documents it from previously unpublished sources.

Bruce McConachie teaches in the Theatre Department at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He is one of the leading theatre historians in the United States, who has, as David Mayer put it in his review of McConachie's most recent book, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, ‘been examining, criticizing, and improving the practice of theatre historiography’ for many years. McConachie's re-examination of how history is researched, analyzed, and written has its origins in an article, ‘Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History’, which he published in Theatre Journal in 1985, criticizing scholars who limit their theatre histories to events in the theatre. He called for historians to realize that theatre is only one part of a much larger socio-cultural complex, and that it is the historian's job to analyze theatre in terms of that complex. this article was the point of departure for the following interview, which Ian Watson conducted with McConachie in Philadelphia in January 1993.

The death of Ibsen in 1906 prompted a number of appraisals of the dramatist by Marxist critics, notably Clara Zetkin, Henrietta Roland-Holst, and George Plekhanov. The most extended of these was Anatoly Lunacharsky's article, ‘Ibsen and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, published in three parts in Obrazovanie, St. Petersburg, Nos. 5–7 (June-August 1907). The central section, ‘Ibsen's Dramas’, is printed below. Born in the Ukraine in 1875, Lunacharsky became a Marxist in his teens and joined the Moscow Social Democrat group in 1899. Arrested for his political activities, he was exiled to Northern Russia, where he wrote his first theoretical treatise, An Essay in Positive Aesthetics. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but broke with Lenin after 1905, having identified himself with the so-called ‘God-seeking’ tendency. Following the fall of Tsarism in 1917 Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks, and after the October Revolution he was appointed to Lenin's first ‘Cabinet’ as Commissar for Enlightenment, a post embracing the arts and education. Exceptionally, he retained this position up until 1930, when he became one of the Soviet Union's two representatives to the League of Nations. He died in 1933, shortly before he was due to become Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lunacharsky's published output runs to some 1,500 articles, embracing philosophy, aesthetics, and theoretical and critical writings on all the arts. He also wrote a number of plays, including Faust and the City (1918) and Oliver Cromwell (1920). He was an intellectual of wide erudition and acute critical perception, balancing respect for the old and the traditional with encouragement for the new and the inconoclastic. As Commissar for Enlightenment, he did much to defend the early avant garde's freedom to experiment, making the Soviet Union a power-house of artistic innovation.

Arthur Ballet was a dramaturg in America before the English-language theatre really knew that such a theatrical functionary had long been leading a curious backstairs life in the theatres of central Europe. He directed and taught theatre at the University of Minneapolis for many years until, in 1961, he became Director there of the grandly-entitled Office for Advanced Drama Research – in which capacity he not only gave unstintingly of time and advice to hundreds of aspirant playwrights, but guided their work towards likely outlets, and selected and edited no fewer than thirteen volumes of new work in the Playwrights for Tomorrow series. He was also a regular dramaturg for the O'Neill Playwrights' Conference, and later served in that role at the Guthrie Theatre. During the Carter years Arthur Ballet was director of the theatre programme for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975 he became an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly, as he has been of NTQ from our first issue. What follows is an after-dinner speech made to an association whose very existence would have seemed an improbability just a few decades ago – the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, to whom he here addresses some words of practical advice and cautionary wisdom.

This is the text – appropriately, a ‘performance text’ – of the inaugural lecture delivered at Royal Holloway College, University of London, on 9 March 1993, by Jacky Bratton, following her appointment as Professor of Theatre and Cultural History. Although she holds her chair at a former women's college, Jacky Bratton reflects that the introduction of co-education in such institutions has in practice left them as male-dominated as the rest. Ironically, this continued marginalizing of women in academic life reflects the common view of theatre studies as itself a marginal discipline – almost as suspect as Jacky Bratton's own specialist concern with its more popular aspects. Looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized within theatre history, she challenges in particular the received wisdom that the alleged ‘decline of the drama’ in the nineteenth century was reversed by a striving for respectability usually traced to the rattle of cups-and-saucers on box sets, and apotheosized in Irving's knighthood: instead, she reflects upon the radical impulses of earlier nineteenth-century theatre, and at the ways in which the gender of three women who worked within it influenced their theatrical careers, their social standing, and their own attitudes towards both.

The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning ‘high art’ poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five-day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits.

We continue our occasional series on the actuality and the ideology of lesbian performance with a study of Apple Island, a performance space in Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the productions of this ‘women's cultural and art space’ could, suggests Stacy Wolf, be categorized as performance art: she looks at these in the context of other modes and definitions of cultural production, and at the ‘complex interplay of identity and knowledge’ which constructs Apple Island's potential spectators. Looking at both positive negative critiques of its work, she concludes that the activity through which its refusal of political and performative divisions is best exemplified is the weekly class-cumperformance of country western line dancing, and suggests through folkloric analogy how this helps to define or redefine the meaning of cultural feminism. Stacy Wolf is a doctoral candidate in Theatre and Drama and a lecturer in Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has also published articles in Theatre Studies, Women and Performance, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

COLLEAGUES far more erudite than I can define those qualities of intelligence and percipience that make Jan Kott such a formidable scholar. I want to concentrate exclusively on the personality of the man, as it is that to which I was first drawn when I met him in Edinburgh in 1962.

In 1978, Robert Brustein observed that Ibsen's The Master Builder subtly undermined the tenets of naturalism for which both the play and its author are usually remembered. Here, William W. Demastes suggests that, though lacking precise paradigms when they wrote the play and the critique, Ibsen and Brustein both approach the understanding of human interaction in ways that are currently explained through the ‘new’ scientific paradigm of chaos theory. This essay presents a general summary of chaos theory, applies it to The Master Builder, suggests ways in which Ibsen anticipates the postmodernists, and how, in turn, chaos theory can help in comprehending several paths that the theatre has followed since the inception of postmodernism. William W. Demastes is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, and is author of Beyond Naturalism: a New Realism in American Theatre (1988). This essay is an extension of his book, and is designed in part as in introduction to his next book-length study, on the confluence of scientific and dramatic thought in the twentieth century.

IT IS A STRANGE and little-known fact that even scholars and critics can be characterized in terms of changing light bulbs. A classicist can change a light bulb, but the old one was essentially better. The modernist may change a light bulb, but only after the house has been completely rewired. In their respective contexts, most structuralists are able to change a light bulb, provided, since these processes are always two-way, that the light bulb doesn't change them first. But when Jan Kott changes a light bulb, he has the unfortunate knack of switching on the whole Christmas tree.

Overwhelmingly, the British reputation of George Gershwin is as a ‘serious’ composer: but this is liable to obscure not only the contributions he and his brother Ira made to the popular music theatre in Britain, but also, conversely, the British influences upon this seemingly all-American pair. George was profoundly influenced by that pre-eminent American Anglophile of his time, Jerome Kern, while British influences upon the semi-scholarly Ira extended far beyond W. S. Gilbert and P. G. Wodehouse. After ‘Swanee’ swept Britain in 1920, and George had honed his art and craft by writing the score for the West End revue, The Rainbow (1923), came the musical comedy, Primrose (1924) – its score his first to be published, and including some of his earliest orchestrations. A prototype of the frivolous comedies of the era, Primrose marked the first time the brothers were billed together as the Gershwins, since Ira had earlier written as ‘Arthur Francis’: it was also the immediate precursor of their first great Broadway hit, Lady, Be Good! Finally, in 1928, Ira collaborated, without George, on the London show That's a Good Girl – though Damsel in Distress, the brothers' last film musical, was a valedictory to the British-American musical comedy of the era. James Moore's earlier transatlantic study, of Cole Porter in Britain, appeared in NTQ30 (1992), and his Radio Two programme on the revue producer André Charlot was broadcast in October 1993.

Metropolitan snobbery and the logistics of scale both militate against the success of comedians working in the regions. Yet, as Oliver Double here argues, the scene has been a lively one, often daring in its style and range alike – at least until the absorption of its big names into the London circuits by the agencies which increasingly control most of the bookings and much of the talent. Oliver Double, himself a working comic, describes the distinctive characteristics of regional alternative comedy, and the now very real dangers of stagnation, illustrating his argument from interviews with leading comics on the regional circuits – Nick Toczek, Stu Who?, Roger Monkhouse, Malcolm Bailey, Anvil Springsteen, Adam Caveleri, Kevin Seisay, Henry Normal, and John Simmit. Offering some hopes for the future, he points out the relatively low audience figures required to ensure a vigorous growth – if only emerging talent can be nurtured rather than condemned to still birth.

Although included among the comedies in the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Measure for Measure long found itself disapproved on grounds of moral impropriety, and was restored to critical favour only to enjoy the dubious dignity of becoming a ‘problem’ play – which left open the question of whether the ‘problem’ was Shakespeare's, as man or craftsman, his society's, or perhaps even our own. In the theatre, too, the pendulum has swung from the easy contempt of the recent ‘permissive’ past for the value placed by Isabella upon her virginity to the renewed respect of feminist critics for her right to control her own body. Still, her silence in response to the Duke's marriage proposal permits actors and directors to make their own climactic meaning. Jan Kott's essay on the play, ‘Head for Maidenhead, Maidenhead for Head’, first appeared in the old Theatre Quarterly, and was subsequently reprinted in his The Gender of Rosalind. Here, Kott reconsiders the play, in discussion with Charles Marowitz, who has himself directed Measure for Measure, and also written about it in his Recycling Shakespeare (1991).