In short, the drama is in ours, and in most civilized countries, an engine possessing the most powerful effect on the manners of society.

Thus the idea of theatre is political … it must make possible the enactment of an actual political world in the midst of painful and complex transformations within and between politics.

The spectators, thousands and thousands of them, begin arriving in the chill hours before the equinoctial dawn; a few torches cast huge shadows over the cavernous theatron as they move to their seats. Clutching woollen himations about them, they arrange the cushions that will soften the long sitting as well as insulate them from the night-chilled benches. They are hushed, almost reverential, speaking to each other in low tones. Not a people given to breakfasting, a few munch on olives and bread, while others tilt their wineskins for a dilute but still warming jolt of the grape. As the first streaks of light appear in the sky at the eastern-side of the theatre (near the Stage Right parodos), The Watchman appears on the roof, eerily lit by the flaming brazier he carries on. While the audience listens to an already familiar exposition they look to the southwest, awaiting the flare of a beacon fire on the nearby Pnyx that will signal the fall of Troy.

During the twenty years separating Gratien Gélinas's Tit-Coq in 1948, a play considered a foundation piece of Québécois (as opposed to French-Canadian) dramaturgy, and the 1968 creation of Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs which opens the era of ‘new’ Québécois dramaturgy, Quebec society underwent a radical change. It was no longer traditional, religious and rural, but had become fully urbanized.

A quarter of a century later, Michel Tremblay has published over twenty books—novels, plays and screenplays—composing an original body of work which reflects, sometimes almost clinically and through the use of joual (the idiomatic French spoken in the working-class district of East Montreal) the local Québécois reality. At the same time, it has a universal value: to a typically Montreal universe, Tremblay's creation integrates dramaturgical influences ranging from Greek tragedy to Tennessee Williams. The result is a unique and strong combination of a musical language, with powerful monologues and vivid dialogues, and of innovative dramatic structures reflecting (in a lucid and ironic manner) a society in quest of its identity, torn between traditional values centred on the family unit, and the liberating, dream world of the theatre.

The archaeological digs at the sites of the Rose and Globe theatres have given us a fund of new information about the theatres, and not least about the composition of their central, open yards. Those of us who took part in the campaign to protect the Rose from the great caterpillar-tracked machines that loomed over it in May 1989 will remember the surprisingly pristine look of its mortar yard, smashed through to be sure by the concrete piles of the 1950s office block that had by then been removed, and damaged around its perimeters by Elizabethan erosion of one sort or another. Yet much of it still looked clean and smooth after its four centuries of watery slumber. One day it was thrown open to an invited audience of celebrities, and bystanders could watch as Dustin Hofman—then playing The Merchant of Venice at the Phoenix—trod where the groundlings had stood long ago, or as Judi Dench—not yet a Dame—picked her way across the yard, her narrow heels apparently doing no damage at all.

Après avoir établi que le théâtre et la recherche théâtrale au Canada ont poursuivi une évolution parallèle, l'auteur examine la nature et les contributions de cette recherche au cours de ces vingt dernières années, période pendant laquelle il a lui-même participé à ce cheminement. En tant que discipline universitaire, la recherche théâtrale s'inscrit, en quelque sorte, dans une idéologie «alternative» semblable à celle qui a amené la création d'un théâtre national, écrit et produit par et pour les Canadiens. Cette idéologie, fondée sur une activité dite «professionnelle» et «nationale» à laquelle on appliquait les grilles théoriques et méthodologiques agréées par la discipline, a servi à proposer des normes ou des cadres théoriques définis sur un mode empirique ou documentaire. Mais cette discipline «alternative» est désormais remise en question par une érudition nouvelle qui en identifie les faiblesses et explore certains aspects jusqu'ici occultés ou marginalisés de la création dramatique.

The National Drama was a nineteenth-century dramatic genre unique to Scotland, dealing with Scottish characters in Scottish settings. It has been neglected this century by scholars of theatre and of Scottish history in general. This is a curious oversight given the importance of the National Drama in the development of the Scottish theatre and to the image of Scotland as a nation at home and abroad. The omission may have been the result of a too close association with Sir Walter Scott in the minds of many for whom the phrase ‘High Tory Romanticism’ summed up Scott's career and influence. But, the National Drama is worthy of fresh consideration because, although it is true that dramatizations of some of Scott's Scottish works formed the core of the national repertoire, the National Drama comprised a wide variety of pieces from a range of sources and its influence over the Scottish theatre was considerable.

Jean-Pierre Ronfard's Vie et mort du Roi Boiteux, an impressive six-play cycle telling the story of King Richard ‘Premier’ (i.e. ‘The First’, but Premier is meant here as a family name, as would be Jones or Smith), was created in 1981 and has been seen ever since as a landmark in the recent evolution of Québécois drama. It starts out as games played by children in a back lane and focuses on a limping boy who will be king. The limping king whose story is told as a ‘play-within-a-play’ refers to Oedipus's club foot as well as to Shakespeare's deformed Richard III. The story is heavily parodic, set simultaneously in all parts of the world and at all times, so that Marilyn Monroe and Queen Nefertiti can meet, as well as Brecht and Aristotle. Each play has been staged separately, but the full cycle was occasionally done in succession, a spectacular event lasting fifteen hours. The subject of this article is the very first full-length production, done partly outdoors, on 24 June 1982, in Montreal.

The Scottish National Players were the most interesting and important group in Scottish theatre in the 1920s, and the ‘national drama’ which they produced defined Scottish theatre for almost two decades. The SNP, as they were known, became the focus for the aspirations of young people wanting to progress to a professional career within theatre and were responsible for training a whole generation of Scottish actors. Later theatre groups, such as the Curtain and the Gateway, were greatly influenced by the Scottish National Players, who also made a major contribution to the early years of broadcasting in Scotland. Though mainly an amateur group, the SNP recognized the necessity for a national theatre company to tour as widely as possible, and in doing so helped to fire the enthusiasm for amateur drama which swept Scotland in the thirties. Many of the problems and debates which confronted them in their attempt to provide Scotland with a national theatre, such as the vexed question of whether production should be restricted to Scottish plays, irrespective of quality in the hope of better things to come, are still relevant issues.

My dear Mackenzie, the fact is—my plays are too liberal for the aristocratic illiberals of Ireland.… My plays breathe the noble sentiments of the influential classes of Ireland.… But I am going to a place where the feelings and the reality of liberty exist in their most glowing form—and not the form alone, but the embodied spirit. I am going to America.

Le théâtre canadien anglais a toujours été et est encore un art marginal. Bien que certaines transformations culturelles et économiques–nous pensons, par exemple, à la poussée exponentielle de la culture de masse–aient contribué à marginaliser le théâtre, au Canada aussi bien que dans le reste du monde, nous considérons que cette marginalisation constitue un élément positif de la culture post-coloniale et postmoderne. Le théâtre Canadian anglais, plus que tout autre, est un produit presque exclusif des théâtres «à cote», ou alternatifs. Trois pièces récentes, deux écrites en anglais (Love and Anger de George F. Walker et Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing de Tomson Highway) et une en français (Á toi, pour toujouis, ta Marie-Lou, de Michel Tremblay dans la traduction de John Van Burek et Bill Glassco), présentent en raccourci l'esthétique actuelle du nouveau théâtre canadien, qui est ici analysé dans les rapports complexes entretenus entre les divers courants d'activité théatrale, tant au point de vue de la représentation de ces pièces que par rapport à leurs structures textuelles.

Histories of broadcasting in Britain tend to have a distinct London bias–in other words they all but completely ignore developments in Scotland –and yet the early broadcasting infrastructure ensured that each regional centre could advance the boundaries of radio in more exciting and challenging ways (certainly in different ways) than the production centre in London. This critical bias, however, is perhaps only symptomatic of a more general social tendency to displace diversity within British culture and to focus on a metropolitan vision, a core-legitimized version of culture which discounts the regional and the local as parochial. This tendency is thrown into relief at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when social and cultural requirements, technological and political contexts reset the role of the state and its institutions (and the BBC is one of the most powerful in the system) as fundamental to the dissemination of culture. In this indigenous and local cultural activities may fall outwith the legitimized cultural capital of the state, and yet be fundamental to the identity used and referred to by the region. This is the perceived lack for ‘Scottish culture’ within the context of British arts. Increased centralization and bureaucratization of the arts community and cultural institutions towards the metropolitan core can produce an intractable gap between the respectable culture of the centre and the barbaric, parochial, dangerous arts of the periphery: a periphery which may then be recast as ‘other’. Within that context, however, the same technological, political and social advances are imposed and experienced but they will be interpreted and used with reference to the local and the indigenous as well as to the national and the international. To discount the distinctiveness of much of Scottish culture is, within a centralist model, justified.

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.

When Barney Simon's play Cincinatti was presented at the Market Theatre in 1979, it epitomized a watershed event in the development of theatre in South Africa, anticipating a new tend towards a tradition of a multi-racial theatre. In 1965 legislation had forced racial segregation in the theatre. Pleas for the official desegregation of races in the theatre had finally been successful in 1977 and Cincinatti, sporting one of the first multi-racial casts, was symbolic of a reaching-out amongst different racial, cultural and lingual groups in a highly polarized South African society. Cincinatti was chosen by Hauptfleisch and Steadman to represent Alternative theatre in their anthology (South African Theatre, Four Plays and an Introduction, 1984), thereby acknowledging a new theatrical tradition on the South African theatre scene.

7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company was launched in 1973 through an epoch-making tour of The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, pioneering small-scale touring theatre in Scotland. The arrival of the company coincided with a more general resurgence in indigenous theatre and its success heralded the rise of touring companies as an integral part of the theatrical scene. During the 1970s, its reputation was established as a campaigning left-wing company which combined music and documentary in shows touring to popular audiences throughout Scotland. Although 7:84 had been a revenue-funded client of the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) since 1976, in January 1988 SAC announced that it was to withdraw the company from the list of revenue-funded clients from April 1989. On 22 July 1988 John McGrath, writer, director and co-founder of the company resigned as Artistic Director, levelling allegations of political interference at SAC because of this proposal. The company was taken over by David Hayman, Gerard Kelly, and Jo Beddoe. By the beginning of 1992, Jo Beddoe had left the company and the intention of Kelly and Hayman to resign had been made public.

Les œuvres des dramaturges contemporains canadiens-anglais, Margaret Hollingsworth, George F. Walker, Judith Thompson et Beverley Simons entre dans la catégorie de la «dramaturgie de la perversité». La «perversité» est, selon Knowles, un principe structurel dialogique qui remet en question les concepts aristotéliciens du renversement et de la reconnaissance, aussi bien que les notions modernistes de pureté, de clarté et de cohérence. Est pervers ce qui fait éclater les concepts traditionnels tels que la convergence et l'unité, et toutes les stratégies théâtrales mises en œuvre pour fragmenter la perception du spectateur, pour l'obliger à repenser sa position vis-à-vis de l'objet spectaculaire, c'est-à-dire, à se repenserr. Knowles se propose, done, d'analyser ici les pièces les plus représentatives de ce courant choisies parmi les œuvres des quatre auteurs cités.

The purpose of this article is to examine theatre in Quebec as the site of transformation of its collective images as they have evolved through theatrical texts over the past twenty years. Quebec society, in a constant state of mutation as it searches for its national identity, has been particularly receptive to forms of theatre that emphasize the theme of the family. For example, the first important work of this ‘new theatre’ which dared to liberate the language from its French model was Tremblay's Les Belles-Sœurs, a play where all the action is located in a kitchen and whose characters are all women. In the development of Tremblay's work, we see how the discourses of women are taken over by masculine characters, mediated through the transvestite within a homosexual theme and finally liberated from the feminine model by the affirmation of the homosexual couple. In other more recent works, playwrights such as Normand Chaurette and Michel Marc Bouchard, have incorporated the search for a patrilinear descent into the very heart of the family conflict where the mother is put to death in a ritual killing, presented either as a ceremony (Chaurette), or as the unfolding of a myth (Bouchard).

In all these cases, the evolution of the fictive family structure is the projection of social transformations taking place in Quebec where the maternal heritage, represented historically by France, is necessarily damaged and eventually eliminated in order to lay claim to a political structure which confirms the rights of the father.

The Arab, as presented in plays of the early days of settlement, is linked by his manual labour to the land of his birth. He might be primitive and his encounter with the chalutzim may be necessary to improve his situation and show him how the world has progressed, but he is also an example to be copied for his sheer work capability. He is seen as a powerful competitor with the Jewish work-force, due both to his ability to be content with little and to his forced acceptance of meagre wages. Towards the end of this period and for several decades afterwards, the Arab was pushed aside into the fringes of the labour market. Work that was previously thought by the Zionist pioneering ideology to be of utmost importance, was no longer considered as such. As occasionally the Arab image served as a reminder of an ideology of manual labour that no longer existed.

The Israeli playwright is a representative of the beliefs and opinions of a particular group in Israeli society; mainly that of the western intelligentsia. Almost all of the playwrights mentioned in this article are from the ranks of the Labour Movement and Zionist tradition. Their attitude regarding Jewish labour and towards the Arabs who do the ‘dirty work’, derives from a yearning for standards and values that had formerly stood at the centre of education and debate for many prominent sectors of Jewish society. From the early 1950s, and particularly after the 1967 war, the ideology of Jewish labour, especially manual labour, became one of mere slogans, symbols, songs and folk dances, or as subject for study matter, but no longer an active component in the life of the Israeli Jewish citizen.

From the beginning of the 1970s, but mainly towards the end of that period and continuing into the 1980s, the Israeli playwright saw the driving of the Arab work-force into despised jobs, under degrading conditions of exploitation, as a central cause for the unrest that led to the Palestinian uprising. The image of the exploited Arab was no longer an ideological, nostalgic reminder but, rather, a social time bomb that might explode at any time and fragment the Israeli social and economic structure. It is interesting to compare the reasoning given by the Jewish Israeli playwrights for the outbreak of the Intifada with an Arab-Israeli play staged in 1990 in Nazareth. In The Ninth Wave by Riad Massaraweh, although the playwright describes the labourers that line up daily in the Haifa ‘slave market’ as exploited, degraded and slave labourers, his main emphasis is on the Palestinian longing for national identity. Research too reveals that the nationalistic element and the state of the refugee camps are the most serious causes of the Intifada. Despite this, the Jewish Israeli playwright presents the economic factor as the important one. This discrepancy between the Israeli theatre and Palestinian reality, derives from the playwright's ignorance of, and lack of attempt to study the actuality of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as well as their ignorance of the conditions of daily life there. The playwright meets Palestinians in the local (Israeli) cafe or restaurant, on building sites and in other places where the Arabs work and where Jews are not willing to do so. He deals with the problems that bother him and with his target audience, and not necessarily with the problems that bother the Palestinians. However, the Jewish Israeli playwright nonetheless senses the indignity of their exploitation and the dangerous dependency of the Israeli economy on a hostile population, and he tries to express his reservations about this Israeli ‘work schedule’ when he takes refuge on occasion in ideals that no longer exist.