Several of the novels of the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867–1928) have provided the basis for theatrical adaptations: but the version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) by Peter Granger-Taylor, staged in March 1990 at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, was the first for sixty years. In the following feature, Ian Craven, who teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, provides a full account of Jon Pope's production, considering questions of adaptation, performance, and response, and also paying special attention to the influence of the screen versions of 1921 and 1962. His analysis is complemented by extracts from an interview with the adapter and director. A study by Margaret Eddershaw of Philip Prowse's production of Brecht's Mother Courage, in which Glenda Jackson took the title role during the same season at the Citizens, appeared in NTQ28 (November 1991).

Adam Versényi here considers responses to the call for a new kind of Latin American theatre, combining anthropological awareness of the area's history and culture with the technical abilities and thematic sophistication of western theatre, through an analysis of two plays which suggests both the benefits and pitfalls of such an approach. These are Nahui Ollin, a shadow-puppet play dramatizing episodes from Nahuatl cosmogeny, and Los enemigos, a contemporary adaptation of the unique Mayan script, the Rabinal Achí. Adam Versényi has written widely on the theatre of Latin America, including a study of recent developments in liberation theology and liberation theatre, and for NTQ two articles on earlier periods – in NTQ16 (1988), on the theatricality of pre-Columbian performance rituals, and in NTQ19 (1989) on the adaptation of Aztec rituals by the mendicant friars who came in the wake of Cortés – this piece being selected as the ‘Younger Scholar's Prizewinning Article’ of the year by the American Society for Theatre Research.

The actor, as a reminder of personal mutability, has always provoked the condemnation of absolutist philosophers and churchmen. Historically, this anti-theatrical prejudice has pressed even harder on the actress, for in her case ‘personal’ connotes sexual mutability. In Victorian times, when purity was enjoined on Woman for Man's sake as well as her own, the actress's situation was further complicated. In the following article, Julie Hankey examines the treatment of actress-characters in certain novels of the nineteenth century – Wilkie Collin's No Name, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Henry James's The Tragic Muse, among others – exploring in particular their peculiarly physical system of representation, a system which reproduced the social and moral attitudes of the day on a more visceral level of irrational prejudice. Irrespective of their artistry or sympathies, authors were remarkably consistent in their use of the same relatively narrow but at the same time powerful range of signals – dress, pose, interiors, gardens, flowers, and so on – clearly confident that by this means the actress could be adequately expressed. Julie Hankey is presently co-editor of the ‘Plays and Performance’ series, now published by Cambridge University Press, and has herself prepared the individual volumes on Richard III and Othello.

When Harold Clurman died in 1980, he was almost as old as the century, but still in harness – perhaps the most venerable as well as the most versatile polymath of the American theatre. His life in the theatre extended from acting with the Theatre Guild in the ‘twenties, through his creation and direction of the Group Theatre in the ‘thirties, to a distinguished post-war career as free-lance director, highly respected theatre critic – first for the New Republic, then since 1953 for The Nation – and also theatre historian and university teacher. It was in this last role that, as a student, Joanna Rotté met Harold Clurman in 1969, and in the article which follows she blends personal recollections of an enduring friendship with a wider-ranging assessment of the qualities that distinguished Clurman as a critic and a human being. Joanna Rotté presently chairs the Theatre Department at Villanova University, Pennsylvania.

The Polish actor Ryszard Cieslak, who died in June 1990, joined Jerzy Grotowski's first theatrical venture, the Theatre of the Thirteen Rows in Opole, in 1962, three years after its formation, remaining with Grotowski throughout the life of the Laboratory Theatre in Wroclaw, and until it ceased touring early in 1980 after Grotowski's period of paratheatrical experiments had begun. Cieslak is best remembered for his performances in The Constant Prince and Apocalypsis cum Figuris, and his achievements as an actor were in some senses inseparable from those of Grotowski – but in later years he worked independently, both as a director and, before his death, in the memorable Tiresias-like role of Dhrtarastra in Peter Brook's version of The Mahabharata. In the first part of this feature, Ferdinando Taviani explores the nature and the quality of Cieslak's work, and its relationship with the Laboratory Theatre. To complement his analysis, we are reprinting the final interview given by Cieslak before his death, which was first published on 2 May 1990 in the literary supplement of the Polish-language American journal Nowy Dziennik. Its occasion was the screening of the film of The Mahabharata in Los Angeles and other United States cities in May and June 1990.

At the moment, you're working with young actors teaching a course in experimental theatre at New York University. What are you trying to teach them?

How to be true in performance, that above all. I struggle to plant in them the principle that Grotowski handed on to me: we act so much in our daily lives that to make theatre what we need to do is to stop acting. Another very important thing to understand is that an actor must concentrate on his own body. The actor's instrument is not his voice or his diction, it's his whole body. Theatre can be a combination of all the arts – music, dance, painting, writing – but above all it is moving visual art. So long as an actor has elementary problems with his body, he is limited. So just as a musician has to exercise his fingers every day, so an actor has to exercise his body almost to the point of overcoming it, that is, being in complete control of it.

In addition to being a theatre director, Vladimir Mirzoev is a novelist, poet, critic, and artist. Born in Moscow in 1957, he enrolled at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1975, and in 1981 graduated from the Faculty of Directing at the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatrical Arts in Moscow, where he studied with Mark Mestechkin, a disciple of his teachers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Before he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in May 1989, Mirzoev was known in Russian theatre as an iconoclast and a leading figure of the avant garde. His productions of Voltaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Büchner, Strindberg, Claudel, Weiss, and Howard Barker became renowned for the plasticity of the actors' movement and the use of metaphor to convey meaning, and Russian critics hailed his extraordinary ability to sculpt a unique theatrical language, which blended the ironic and the grotesque. Rita Much interviewed Mirzoev in the autumn of 1991, between the abortive coup and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In this article Eckhard Breitinger traces the sources of present-day popular theatre in Uganda back to the situation shortly before and after independence, when Europeans, Indians, Goans, and Ugandans each had their own separate cultural and theatrical traditions. Theatrical activity came to a virtual standstill under the repressive regimes of Obote and Amin, when many prominent theatre people were killed or exiled, but quickly began to flourish again after 1986: in downtown Kampala semi-professional groups thus produce commercial comedies, while in the suburbs amateur companies use theatre to supplement their meagre incomes. Meanwhile, government and aid organizations involve themselves mainly in theatre for education, particularly health education, and the campaign against Aids has generated new needs – met by a new style of ‘morality play’, here illustrated and analyzed in detail. Eckhard Breitinger teaches American, African, and Caribbean literature at the University of Bayreuth, and has also taught in Jamaica, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, and France. He is a translator of radio plays, author of monographs on the gothic novel and American radio drama, and editor of several books on African and new English literature. Presently he is editor of Bayreuth African Studies, and directing a research project on cultural communication in Africa.