It is with deep regret that we record the death following a stroke of our friend and colleague Clive Barker on 17 March 2005.

Hanns Johst's play Schlageter is generally regarded as the most successful piece of Nazi theatre. Following its first performance in the early months of the Third Reich, it dominated German theatrical life throughout 1933 and 1934. This has traditionally been regarded as evidence of the essential conformity of the Third Reich's stage; yet since no other play achieved a similar prominence in the period, Gerwin Strobl finds that line of argument unconvincing, arguing that the success of Schlageter was due to its clever manipulation of its audience's emotions. The play was perfectly suited to the mood of many German theatregoers in 1933, betraying in its plot and characterization considerable psychological insight and a ruthless determination to exploit that insight for Nazi purposes. As such, Schlageter was the prime example of the Third Reich's ‘theatre of inner experience’, the ultimate aim of whose practitioners was to get German audiences to abandon reason and accept the irrational vision of history underlying the Nazis' ideological project. Gerwin Strobl is Lecturer in Modern German History at Cardiff University, specializing in popular perceptions and propaganda. He is the author of Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2000), has published on Shakespeare in the Third Reich in History Today (May 1997) and the Journal of Contemporary History (July 1999), and is currently writing a study of Nazi theatre.

Clive Barker made an exceptional contribution to British theatre studies and its international standing. No one else of his generation travelled the extraordinary distance from a conventional stage-management course to become a world leader in actor training workshops, as well as an editor and scholar of distinction. He was a pioneer in bridging the uneasy divide between the professional theatre and its serious study in British universities.

Recognizing analogies between the assumptions about theatricality found in the classic Sanskrit treatise on acting, the Natyasastra, and those of the Elizabethan theatre, John Russell Brown suggests that the concept of rasa as the determining emotion of a performance is similar to that of the Elizabethan ‘humour’, or prevailing passion, as defined by Ben Jonson. Here he describes his work exploring what happens when actors draw on their own life experiences to imagine and assume the basic rasa of the character they are going to present, based on experiments in London with New Fortune Theatre; in Bremen with actors of the Bremer Shakespeare Company; and in New Delhi with actors of the National School of Drama. Using actors both young and experienced, familiar and unfamiliar with ensemble playing, and well or poorly acquainted with the concepts involved, he suggests that the results merit further exploration of a technique which could empower actors to bring Shakespeare's plays to new kinds of life. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999, and his Shakespeare Dancing: a Theatrical Study of the Plays by Palgrave Macmillan in 2004. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995), and for Routledge has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’, ‘Theatre Concepts’, and forthcoming ‘Theatres of the World’ series.

Whilst Stanislavsky spent much of his energy trying to simplify the processes of acting and avoiding a (pseudo-) scientific terminology for his acting system, he was nevertheless caught up in Stalin's appropriation of hard science after the Russian Revolution, to be paired with other ‘founding fathers’ of Soviet materialism, including Ivan Pavlov, in the creation of a powerful political orthodoxy. Here, Jonathan Pitches focuses on two of Stanislavsky's key contemporaries, Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, both of whom had worked with the founder of the System at different periods in their career, to pinpoint a significant shift, or turning point, in the development of twentieth-century Russian actor training. Drawing on Fritjof Capra's history of systemic thinking, the article argues that a radical shift of thinking took place in actor training in the 1920s and 1930s, which prefigures the global paradigm crisis Capra has identified at the turn of the last century. Jonathan Pitches is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge, 2003). This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the IFTR 2004 Conference in St Petersburg. Its argument derives from his forthcoming book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition (Routledge, 2005).

Dario Fo has developed his own brand of epic theatre by adapting principles and techniques from various forms of popular performance and the oral tradition. He stays detached from the role he plays by frequently shifting in and out of character and by calling attention to the performance as such. This, argues Antonio Scuderi, allows him to emphasize the interpretive frame – the ‘messages’ he establishes in his prologue. His most recent play, The Two-Headed Anomaly, is thus at one level a farcical romp; but a closer look reveals an intricate metatheatrical structure that allows Dario Fo and his fellow-performer Franca Rame to deliver their political satire. Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and with Joseph Farrell edited Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal (2003) and Modern Language Review (2004).

Clive somehow was always there. One of the first plays I ever saw in London, in my first year at UCL—from the vertiginous upper circle at the Royal Court, on Friday 13 January 1961, a tattered diary tells me,—was his production of Shelagh Delaney's The Lion in Love. Then, just a month or so later, he directed a revival of Brendan Behan's The Hostage, which I saw twice, the second time having persuaded a couple of friends who had stayed on in the sixth form that this was the best way of rounding off their day in town. We sang ‘The bells of hell go ting-aling-a-ling’ on the tube afterwards with the same gusto as on a previous visit we had giggled over our variations on Alan Bennett's sermon from Beyond the Fringe.

In this essay Adrienne Scullion explores the representation of war – and in particular of the Second World War – in contemporary theatre for children, considering how the narrative and performative conventions of drama communicate ideas about the conflict to young audiences. She argues that a taxonomy identified in relation to juvenile war literature – discourses of testimony and documentary, propaganda and escapism, myth and metaphor – resonates just as significantly in drama. This proposition is investigated in readings of three recent plays – Stephen Greenhorn's King Matt (TAG, 2001), David Greig's Dr Korczak's Example (TAG, 2001), and Nicola McCartney's Lifeboat (Catherine Wheels, 2002). She proposes that all three plays make different use of the conventions of telling war stories and those of theatrical performance to represent and describe war and, thereby, to explore contemporary values and expressions of citizenship – a declared goal of public policy-making in the UK. Adrienne Scullion teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Clive Barker, co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly since the journal was relaunched under its new title in 1985, died following a stroke on 17 March 2005, at the age of seventy-three. We plan to include a full commemoration of his life in a subsequent issue, and will welcome contributions—either directly relating to Clive's life and work in the theatre, or addressing issues close to his heart. Meanwhile, some briefer tributes are offered here—a survey of his life and achievements by Baz Kershaw, and personal recollections from his friend and archivist Dick McCaw and from fellow-editor Simon Trussler.

In pantomime the Dame and comics, and to a lesser extent the immortals, are positioned between the world of the audience and the world of the story, interacting with both, forming a link between the two, and constantly altering the distance thus created between audience and performance. This position allows these characters to exist both within and without the story, to comment on the story, and reflexively to draw attention to the theatricality of the pantomime event. In this article, Millie Taylor concludes that reflexivity and framing allow the pantomime to represent itself as unique, original, anarchic, and fun, and that these devices are significant in the identification of British pantomime as distinct from other types of performance. Millie Taylor worked for many years as a freelance musical director in repertory and commercial theatre and in pantomime. She is now Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Music Theatre at the University of Winchester. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Conference on Arts and Humanities in Hawaii (2005), and an extended version will appear in her forthcoming book on British pantomime. Her research has received financial support from the British Academy.

Brian Woolland is the author of a major study of Peter Barnes's work, Dark Attractions: the Theatre of Peter Barnes, published by Methuen in the autumn of 2004 – too late to take more than brief note of the playwright's death in July. The following critical retrospective serves, then, both as a valedictory postscript to the author's full-length study and as a critical afterword to the personal tributes paid to Peter Barnes by Alan Rickman, Charles Marowitz, and Elaine Turner in NTQ80. Brian Woolland is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Reading. His research interests are in Renaissance theatre in performance, modern European theatre, and theatre in education. He also works as a playwright and as a theatre director.

In this article, Katie Normington outlines the increasing interest in Meyerhold's work and assesses previous applications of his methods to contemporary production work. She goes on to consider how working as movement director for Red Shift Theatre Company's adaptation of Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, enabled research into the application of Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics. Rehearsals for Bartleby combined actor-training and text rehearsals so that the Stanislavskian-trained actors gained ownership of biomechanical principles and could apply aspects to their independent exploration. This article analyzes the results of the work, and concludes that Meyerholdian techniques developed a physical architecture for the performance which, even during an arduous tour, maintained the clear shape and rhythm of the production. The use of principles such as rakurs, often neglected within present-day experimentation, proved to be essential in providing actors with a sense of composition and an awareness of their bodies in space. However, aspects such as facial expression and emotional excitability require further investigation. Katie Normington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

If performance rituals are memories in action, what happens to them when a people no longer need to remember – or it is deemed politically undesirable for them to do so? In the following article, Syed Jamil Ahmed explores the annual performance in the Sikkimese monastery of Pemayangtse, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, of the ritual of Pang Lhabsol (‘Worship of the Witness Deity’), and specifically of the Pangtoed 'Cham, performed on the final, eighth day in homage and gratitude to the mountain. He examines the complex web of political changes over many centuries which have affected the purpose and enactment of the ritual, and finally offers a detailed account of a single day's performance, in 1999, when the ritual was losing some of its dignity and many of its former trappings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jatra’ in NTQ74, and on ‘The Ritual of Devol Medua: Problematizing Dharma in the Ethnic Conflicts of Sri Lanka’ in NTQ76. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.

I picture Clive Barker surrounded by plastic bags of all colours, shapes, and sizes, each one crammed with pieces of paper. This was the encyclopedia of world theatre that he carried about with him: there were facts, anecdotes, commentaries on plays, playwrights, theatre forms, theatre companies, theatre movements—and more stories than you could tell in a thousand and one nights.

In this article, Ioana Szeman makes a case for combining micro- and macro-analyses of power relations in Theatre of the Oppressed and other community theatre work, and for borrowing methods from anthropology and performance studies – including fieldwork – in both the planning and implementation stages. It focuses on Alternative, a project carried out in a Romanian orphanage in 1997, which illustrated the dangers of treating Theatre of the Oppressed as a technique to be passed down to the marginalized. Contrary to Augusto Boal's belief that, in Theatre of the Oppressed, ‘it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution’, in Alternative the organizers emphasized the end-product to the detriment of the process, envisioning ‘oppression’ as a static concept and the ‘oppressed’ as lacking agency. Ioana Szeman offers a sobering reminder that community theatre work sometimes may be more about the organizers' needs to find solutions than about the concerns of people in the community. In order to avoid that, she suggests that the oppressed need to be envisioned as people with agency, and local perspectives have to go hand in hand with concerns about larger power networks in a culturally sensitive application of the methods. The binary of the oppressed and oppressor becomes especially irrelevant, she argues, where totalitarianism, as in Romania, has left a legacy of nested hierarchies of power, and where a wider critique of systemic power is therefore necessary. Having gained her PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University with a dissertation on performance, marginality, ethnicity, and nationalism in Romania, Ioana Szeman has recently taken up a lecturing post at Roehampton University. She has also published in Theatre Research International.

The recent plays of Martin McDonagh have fascinated and repelled critics for nearly a decade. His idiosyncratic blend of rural Irish mythology and ‘in-yer-face’ aggression has both caused consternation and won high praise, but the motivations and inspirations of McDonagh's work have not been widely discussed. Here, Catherine Rees addresses some of the common critical assaults on one of his most contentious plays, The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), and seeks to rescue the playwright from misunderstanding and heavy-handed critical treatment. She also aims to clarify some of the issues surrounding this politically charged and controversial work, and discusses it within the wider context of British and Irish drama. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the ‘Contemporary Irish Literature: Diverse Voices’ conference at the University of Central Lancaster in April 2003. Rees has presented on various aspects of McDonagh's work at a joint American Conference for Irish Studies and British Association of Irish Studies conference, and is currently working on a PhD about his plays at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in today's Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

Traditionally, class has been an important category of identity in discussions of political theatre. However, in recent years the concept has fallen out of favour, partly because of changes in the forces and relations of capitalist production. The conventional Marxist use of the term, which defined an individual's class position in relation to the position they occupied in the capitalist production process, seemed anachronistic in an era of globalization. Moreover, the rise of identity politics, queer theory, feminism, and post-colonialism have proffered alternative categories of identity that have displaced class as the primary marker of self. Glenn D'Cruz reconsiders the role of class in the cultural life of Australia by examining the recent work of Melbourne Workers Theatre, a theatre company devoted to promoting class-consciousness, in relation to John Frow's more recent re-conceptualization of class. He looks specifically at two of the company's plays, the award-winning Who's Afraid of the Working Class? and The Waiting Room, with reference to Frow's work on class, arguing that these productions articulate a more complex and sophisticated understanding of class and its relation to politics of race and gender today. Glenn D'Cruz teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia.

In 2003, Graeme Miller was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a sitespecific artwork for its oral history collection. Miller responded by creating Linked, a performance which bears witness to the disastrous impact the M11 link road has had on his local neighbourhood since its construction in the 1990s. Helped by a team of researchers, Miller interviewed local citizens and road protesters and broadcast their testimonies from twenty transmitters that line the route of the link road. In order to activate the work, the participant borrows a headset from a local library and is invited to follow the link road from Hackney to Wanstead, a distance of roughly four miles. This article explores the politics of Linked from a number of different theoretical perspectives: contemporary ethnography, everyday life studies, urban theory, and Situationism. The objective is to show that Linked offers an alternative paradigm for political performance – a paradigm which also necessitates an idiosyncratic and subjective form of writing. The article is followed by an interview in which Miller speaks about the processes involved in making Linked. Carl Lavery teaches performance and theatre at Loughborough University.

In this article, Silvija Jestrovic introduces the notion of spatial inter-performativity to discuss theatre's relationship to actual political and cultural spaces. Focusing on the Berlin of the 1920s in performances of Brecht and Piscator, then on a street procession of the Générik Vapeur troupe that took place in Belgrade in 1994, she examines how theatrical and political spaces refer to and transform one another. Silvija Jestrovic was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, and has recently taken up an appointment in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Avant-Garde and the City.