The work of Edward Bond has featured regularly both in NTQ and the earlier Theatre Quarterly, from the interview and casebook published in TQ5 (1972) following the production of his version of Lear to Ian Stuart's study in NTQ39 (1994) of the concept of ‘Theatre Events’, as developed during Bond's workshops with Royal Shakespeare Company actors in 1992. A few months before his RSC production of his new play In the Company of Men last autumn, Edward Bond talked with Ulrich Köppen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Mainz, about the relevance of Theatre Events to the debate over modernism and postmodernism, in which Bond has also actively participated – not only through his dramatic works but in prefatory statements and published letters – and the ways in which such ideas illuminate and underpin his plays.

Poh Sim Plowright recently spent six weeks in Quanzhou, in the Fujian Province of China, watching the puppeteers, actors, and audiences of her native Fujian theatre tradition. Here she was able to observe at first hand the principle of inversion that, she believes, underlies all Chinese theatre: and in the following article she argues that this principle is clearly illustrated by the string puppet and human theatres of Quanzhou, whose origins can be traced to the official ‘Pear Garden Theatre’ set up in the eighth century by the Tang Emperor, Ming Huang. Theatre in this part of South China is, Plowright suggests, living testimony to the continuing basis of Chinese theatre in the practice of ancestor worship, through which most performances become sacrificial offerings – a connection she believes Brecht to have missed in his celebrated confrontation with Chinese acting techniques in Moscow in 1935. Poh Sim Plowright is Lecturer in Oriental Drama and Director of the Noh Centre in the Department of Drama, Theatre, and Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of a book on the Noh, and also of several plays and features on theatrical subjects for BBC Radio Three.

Irving Wardle has spent his working life as a theatre reviewer – for thirty-seven years after 1959 passing what he estimates to have been an average of four nights a week, excluding holidays, sitting in theatres, and turning out notices to meet overnight or weekly deadlines – successively as deputy to Kenneth Tynan on The Observer, from 1963 as long-serving critic for The Times, and subsequently for the Independent on Sunday until he retired from the profession in 1995. The following retrospect was originally conceived as a talk for the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, where it was delivered in July 1996. While a good deal of the history of British theatre through which Irving Wardle moved will be familiar to NTQ readers of the same generation, he brings to that common experience an uncommon perspective – and here confesses frankly to failures of judgement and misgivings, as well as snaring some of the underlying motivations and turning points of his career.

As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.

Eritrea is a newly independent country whose performing arts history, based on the music and dance of her nine ethnic groups, is only just beginning to be systematically researched. Western-influenced drama was introduced to the country by the Italians in the early twentieth century, but Eritreans only began to use this form of theatre in the 1940s. The three-part series here inaugurated is the first attempt to piece together the history of Eritrean drama, beginning below with an outline of its history from the 1940s to national independence in 1991. The author explores the highly political role drama played from the outset in Eritrea's struggle towards independence and the effort to mould this alien performance form into a public voice at least for urban Eritreans. Later articles will look at the cultural troupes of the Eritrean liberation forces and at post-independence work on developing community-based theatre. The research took place as part of the continuing Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project, which is involved with practical theatre development as well as theatre research. Although this opening article is written by Jane Plastow, she wishes to stress that it is the upshot of a collaborative research exercise, for which Elias Lucas and Jonathan Stephanus were research trainees. Most of the information used here is the result of interviews they conducted and of translations of articles in Tigrinya or Amharic which they located. Training in interview techniques and collaboration over translation of material into English was conducted by the project research assistant, Paul Warwick. Jane Plastow is the director of the Eritrea Community Based Theatre Project and a lecturer at Leeds University. She initiated the project at the invitation of the Eritrean government, after working in theatre for some years in a number of African countries, notably Ethiopia. She supervised the research for this project, and used her experience of African theatre and of the politics and history of the region to draw the available material into its present state as a preliminary history of Eritrean drama.

Lea Anderson is one of the leading choreographers to have emerged over the past decade, her most characteristic work having been with the all-female group she co-founded, the Cholmondeleys, and its all-male counterpart, the Featherstonehaughs. This article explores the distinctively intertextual elements in Lea Anderson's work – elements which, the authors suggest, make it at once accessible, distinctive, and distinctively postmodern. Sherril Dodds addressed the relationships between postmodernism and popular culture in Anderson's work, with particular focus on the television image and the dance image, in her MA dissertation for the Department of Dance Studies at the University of Surrey, where she is currently a research student. Her co-author, Janet Adshead-Lansdale, is Head of Department at Surrey, and has also edited Dance Analysis: Theory and Practice (1988) and co-edited Dance History: an Introduction (1994).

When is a theatre event not a theatre event? Where, in the shifting relationships between (and even the shifting definitions of) actor and audience in modern and postmodern performance, is a useful line to be drawn – if only for purposes of analysis and discussion? How adequate are such traditional concepts as the ‘suspension of disbelief’, when the distinction between the ‘realities’ of the theatre and of the everyday begin to merge or dissolve? Ian Watson, an advisory editor of NTQ who teaches in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, New Jersey, here explores how the issue is affected by the differing pre-interpretive perspectives of performers and spectators. In this light he describes three recent theatre events – the Broadway production of Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter's London production of Circe and Bravo, and an instance of Augusto Boal's ‘Invisible Theatre’ – to suggest that it is in these perceptual variations that the clue to understanding theatrical reality may lie.

For most western theatre people, accustomed to the festival as an institutionalized annual ritual, the notion of a theatre festival as a celebration of true, holiday festivity – as signifying freedom from institutionalized ritual – comes alive more often in the pages of Bakhtin than on the stages of Edinburgh or other ‘festive’ cities. Yet Juliusz Tyszka, surveying no fewer than a hundred and fifty festivals that have sprung up or renewed themselves in his native Poland during the post-Cold War ‘period of transition’, finds that, while their economic success has been surprising in a straitened economy, the social causes which have ensured this success have to do with changed notions of communality and sociality. The festivals signify, he suggests, a rediscovery that joining together in celebration need not be an imposition of church or state, but can be a means of renewal for the national psyche after a long period of suppression. The following article has the quality rather of a heartfelt polemic – and, through lavish illustration, a celebration of the multiplicity of performance styles – than the academic analysis to which NTQ more usually subjects the new theatres of eastern Europe. It is none the less significant as a theatre document for our times.