Poland's Teatr Osmego Dnia – the Theatre of the Eighth Day – has survived for 22 years, with essentially the same personnel since the early seventies, and with a constant commitment to social engagement. The group – which has never included trained actors, because, according to director Lech Raczak, any graduate of a Polish theatre school, ‘cannot act with his whole self’ – was a major voice of protest for the Polish student generation of 1968. Despite constant harassment and frequent arrests, it continues both to inspire and record the work of young oppositional theatres, although in 1985 it was forced to split when six members toured western Europe whilst four others, denied their passports, played in Polish churches. What follows is a collage of two interviews conducted that autumn – in London with Tadeusz Janiszewski, Adam Borowski, and Leszek Sczaniecki, and in Poznan with Lech Raczak and Marcin Keszycki. They discuss the importance of Grotowski for their generation: their working method, based on group improvisation; the function of poetry in physical theatre; their major productions; and the day-to-day survival strategies of a collective dedicated to exploring the expressive and political potential of the actor. The interviews were assembled by Tony Howard, a playwright who also teaches English in the University of Warwick, and who expresses his thanks to the many people who made this feature possible – especially Nick Gardiner, the ‘European’ group's manager, and the translators. Ewa Elandt and Ewa Kraskowska.

Richard Schechner is presently working towards a production of his The Prometheus Project, planned to open at the Performing Garage in New York before the appearance of this issue. Simultaneously, he is trying to come to terms with his own failures of communication with his eighty-year-old father. Personal preoccupations, theatrical work-in-progress, and performance theory mesh together in what amounts to the overview offered here of an avant-grade confronted by the prospect of global genocide – and, more specifically. Schechner offers an explanation of the tone of parody which seems increasingly to have characterized performance work. Richard Schechner took The Drama Review from its origins as a small academic journal to a lively forum for theatrical debate during his editorship from 1962 to 1969, by which time he was already directing the Performance Group, whose opening production was the controversial Dionysus in 69. He has been a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University since 1967, and resumed the editorship of TDR in 1985.

In spite of the international acclaim for its spectacular productions of the early 'seventies, the Théâtre du Soleil has generally received less than adequate attention in English-language theatre journals. The original series of Theatre Quarterly included a lengthy interview with its leading member, Ariane Mnouchkine, focused upon its then-current production, L'Age d'or, in TQ18 (1975), and we now bring the story up to date – first, with a survey of the company's earlier work and its distinctive qualities by Adrian Kiernander, who recently spent a year with the Théâtre du Soleil on a French government scholarship, between working as a freelance director and his present position teaching theatre studies in the University of Queensland. Two complementary studies of the company's most recent production follow. In the first, Adrian Kiernander places The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, within the context of his preceding analysis. In the second, David Graver, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and presently a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall, Cambridge, describes and assesses the nature and qualities of the script by Hélène Cixous, as realized in the production.

Ekkehard Schall, born in 1930, has been a member of the Berliner Ensemble since 1952, and is now among its leading players. He has also directed for the company, having first undertaken the production of Brecht's version of Edward II in 1974. During a visit to London in 1981. when he gave a one-man performance at Riverside Studios, he also visited Rose Bruford College, where, with his wife and fellow-player Barbara Brecht-Schall, he talked with staff and students of the school. During the discussion, chaired by Beth Chatten, he explained the practical application of concepts relating to Brechtian acting, and also described his own approach to such major roles as the Brecht-Shakespeare Coriolanus, which he first created for the Ensemble in 1964.

Among the least expected (and least examined) aspects of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico was its ‘export’ of a neo-medieval form of religious drama. The devastation wrought by the conquistadores upon an ancient civilization should not, however, blind us to the extreme cruelty involved in Aztec forms of worship; and in the following article, Robert Potter both outlines the ‘dramatic’ qualities of such sacrificial spectacles, and shows how the Spaniards, in their attempts to convert the Aztecs to Christianity, employed their own forms of ‘sacrificial drama’ for the purpose – utilizing, for example. The Sacrifice of Abraham for their didactic ends, while also assimilating some elements from the supplanted cultural forms. Robert Potter, who teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art in the University of California, Santa Barbara, is author of The English Morality Play (1975), and of many articles on medieval and renaissance drama. He prepared the present paper for the colloquium of the Societe Internationale pour I'Etude du Théâtre Médiéval at Perpignan in July 1986.

For the western observer, ‘liberation theology’ can appear an unexpected mixture of orthodox religious belief and revolutionary political thinking. When Karl Gaspar, a lay Catholic who had been working with the poor on the island of Mindanao, was detained in 1983 under a Philippine law permitting arbitrary political detention, the mixture took theatrical form, in the creation of a passion play with a Christ conceived as labour-organizer. Karl Gaspar, who was released in February 1985, describes how liturgical drama took shape in a prison camp, in an account which appears by courtesy of Other Side magazine.

On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic came into being, and on the same day the Berliner Ensemble was founded. The fortieth anniversary celebrations, held in October 1984, thus coincided with the anniversary celebrations of the world-famous theatre company, the jewel in the crown of the new state. To commemorate that anniversary. NTQ has assembled a panoramic montage that traces the development of the Berliner Ensemble from its beginnings to the present day.

One theatre company alone in France, since the end of Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire, continues to make us consider the relationships between theatre and life, the place of theatre in society, its ability to modify the order of things in some way. It is the Théâtre du Soleil, guided by Ariane Mnouchkine.

THE SEARCH for a contemporary popular theatre which has occupied the Théâtre du Soleil almost since its foundation 22 years ago has led the company at various times into innovations in both subject matter and performance style. Their latest production, The Terrible but Unfinished History of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Combodia, breaks new ground in both areas.

In the final issue of the original series of Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981), R. G. Davis described his experiences directing the plays of Dario Fo in Canada and the USA, focusing mainly on his work with We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! Here, he looks not only at his own but at the half-dozen other productions of Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist which have so far been presented in North America – and finds himself, in retrospect, critical of his own work, as well as that of others. He concludes that it is impossible to attempt Fo's plays properly without at least an understanding of the political point of view he sums up as ‘anarcho-communist’ – a point of view which must communicate through the leading players. A regular contributor to the present and its predecessor journal, R. G. Davis, who founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the sixties, is presently teaching at San Francisco State University, reviewing for the magazine of the California Confederation of the Arts (by whose kind permission the following article is reprinted), and is now engaged in staging his own adaptation of llya Ehrenburg's The Life of an Automobile, as an ‘imagistic theatre’ production.

HELENECIXOUS's epic wittily and reverentially echoes elements of Shakespeare's history plays, but while Cixous maintains much of the formal patterns of interpersonal conflict and confrontation established by Shakespeare, she has a keen sense of how the tragic contradictions of the modern world differ from those of Renaissance England. Where Shakespeare's characters embody the collision between feudal, family-centred interests, the centralizing, rationalizing tendencies of absolute monarchy, and the anarchic displacements of the rapidly developing, individual-oriented entrepreneurial spirit, Cixous's characters embody the irreconcilable extremes of first-, second-, and third-world ideologies – multi-national capitalism, communist absolutism, and the indigenous cultural rhythms of an ancient, agrarian civilization.

Following his analysis in NTQ 4 of the origins and effects of the ‘philosophy’ of drama-in-education which prevails in most schools. David Hornbrook here complements his critique with specific proposals for a positive future approach – building upon existing teaching strengths, but also giving the subject a greater curricular authority in the present educational climate, while correcting the ‘romantic fallacies’ from which current practice is too often derived. David Hornbrook has himself taught drama in a large comprehensive school, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the City of Bath College of Further Education, and Special Lecturer in Drama in the University of Bristol.

The public nature of their work should seemingly have ensured that children employed in the Victorian theatre enjoyed better conditions than their brothers and sisters, so often suffering on one of those treadmills at which the virtuous Victorians set their offspring to work. Yet little is known of the actuality of their experiences, and the present article represents a pioneering investigation into the area. Drawing on the researches of contemporary social reformers as well as on the reminiscences of the children themselves and of their employers and colleagues, Tracy C. Davis, who teaches in the Department of Drama at Queen's University, Kingston, Canad, presents an intriguing picture of exploitation mixed with adulation, and a pervasive muddle of defensive indifference, gradually brought within the bounds of well-intentioned legislation.

‘Deadly British productions of Chekhov remain all too common.’ Or so suggests David Allen, who finds in the Chekhov productions of Mike Alfreds a refreshing recognition of the distinctively ‘Russian’ qualities of the plays, and an ability to render these in terms of the choices available to British actors. Mike Alfreds founded the Shared Experience company in 1975, and in Theatre Quarterly No. 39 (1981). Clive Barker interviewed him and members of the company on the processes of collective creation through which most of their productions then evolved: the present feature thus in part reflects Alfreds's own developing interest in working on ‘fixed’ scripts, both with Shared Experience, for whom he directed Three Sisters earlier this year, and in his work as guest director of The Cherry Orchard, first for Oxford Playhouse in 1982, and subsequently for the National Theatre at the Cottesloe, in 1985. In the following interview, Mike Alfreds's own perceptions of his work are intercut with author David Allen's observations during rehearsals, and the subsequent reactions of the critics.

The early issues of the original Theatre Quarterly carried extensive coverage of the work of Edward Bond – a conscious editorial emphasis, which it became less important to maintain as Bond's work acquired its present international recognition and a corresponding share of critical attention. Yet the very distinctiveness of Bond's dramaturgy demands a no less distinctive approach from its critics – notably, a recognition and evaluation of the many non-literary strands of the ‘text’ as performed, especially when under the author's own direction. Pete Mathers, who teaches in the Film and Drama Division of Bulmershe College, here attempts to assess one of Bond's most recent plays, Summer, in close relationship to its original production by Bond himself, at the National's Cottesloe Theatre in 1982, examining every element through which its audiences experienced that production – including the poster and programme, as well as the more clearly crucial ingredients of design, performance, and the ‘gests’ through which they interconnect.

Although a good deal of his work was seen in London and New York, the name of Max Reinhardt remains for most English-speaking theatre students all-too-vaguely associated with those innovations which helped to give a new importance to the ‘totality’ of the relationship between actors, audience, stage lighting and design, movement and music, in the earlier part of this century. Even less is known here about one of Reinhardt's leading collaborators. Ernst Stern – the longest-serving, most versatile, and most professional of his designers. Yet Stern settled in England in 1933, and left his papers to the Victoria and Albert Museum, upon whose resources Hugh Rorrison has drawn in assembling this view of Stern's contribution to Reinhardt's theatre in particular, and to twentieth-Century scenography in general. Hugh Rorrison, who was a regular contributor to the original series of Theatre Quarterly, teaches in the Department of German of the University of Leeds.

As a philosophy which is in effect a way of life. Zen has offered insights into most aspects of human activity from the martial arts to motorcycle maintenance. Here, Adrian Cairns, associate principal of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, analyzes the ways in which, despite their widely different origins, development, and purposes, the tenets of an eastern philosophy actually mesh with the principles common to most western styles of acting.

The critical concept of ‘montage’ has been familiar in film studies ever since Eisenstein. But the fixed focus and apparently continuous flow of live theatrical performance seemingly makes it an inappropriate tool for dramatic analysis. Franco Ruffini argues, however, that actors and audiences find their own ways of ‘selecting’ from and emphasizing aspects of the full theatrical vocabulary and its many means of expression, which make live performance no less subject to creative self-assembly and juxtaposition than film. Ruffini develops the distinction between ‘horizontal’ montage in time, and ‘vertical’ montage as a sort of cross-section of performance; and examines ways in which the ‘audience's performance’ can, both fruitfully and otherwise, differ from the ‘director's performance’. Franco Ruffini is Professor of Theatre Semiotics in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Bologna.

Of the generation of playwrights who began to write around 1968. Howard Barker came more belatedly than some to full critical recognition, but has emerged in recent years as a major voice in all the available dramatic media: thus, among his most recent work, Scenes from an Execution was for radio and The Blow for television, while The Castle was premiered by the RSC at The Pit in November 1985 – and last spring he contributed an updated final act of his own when adapting Middleton's Women Beware Women for production at the Royal Court. Malcolm Hay and Simon Trussler interviewed Howard Barker on his earlier work in Theatre Quarterly No.40 (1981), and now Finlay Donesky discusses with the dramatist the more recent development of his writing, as of the thinking about society and his own craft which underpins it. The interview was conducted in July 1985 while Donesky was in England on a fellowship from the University of Michigan, where he is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the plays of Barker, Brenton, and Hare.

Our understanding of the idea of a ‘people's theatre’ in France derives mainly from Romain Rolland's seminal essay of that title, published at the turn of the century – from which excerpts were translated in TQ23 of our first series, together with other material on the subject going back to around 1870. Yet the French writer George Sand had evolved, more in practice than in theory, a very different approach at a considerably earlier date – and, notably in her play Old Man Go-It-Alone, she presented the working class as a ‘hero’ in its own collective right, as opposed to Romain's preference for portraying the heroic individualism of revolutionary leaders. Gay Manifold looks closely at this play within the context of Sand's life, career, and framework of beliefs. A theatre director, dramaturg, and writer, who is currently Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at California State University, Los Angeles, Gay Manifold has published a full-length study of George Sand's Theatre Career, just available from UMI Research Press, Michigan.

In 1980 Wilfred Harrison was invited to Poland to direct Shakespeare's Othello, of which the Polish playwright Bohdan Drozdowski had prepared a translation. The following account. taken from the diary Harrison kept of rehearsals at the Wilama Horzycy Theatre in Tourn, decribes the encounter between an experienced British director and his Polish company from the first reading on 29 January to the opening night on 2 March, reveating some intriguing differences between two cultures andtwo conceptions of theatrical converntion. Wilfred Harrison was director for thirteen years of the Octagon Theatre, Botton, having earlier been founding-director of the moblie Century Theatre. Now a freeiance, he was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 1974, and has continued to travel Widely: his Othello earned him the Amicus Poloniae award in 1981, and also an invitation to direct in Bulgaria, where the production tourned.