Howard Brenton began his theatrical career in the late 'sixties as one of the ‘Portable playwrights’, but quickly felt the need to utilize the resources available on larger stages-without compromising the political impact of his plays. Now established as one of the leading playwrights of his generation, Brenton works regularly with the National Theatre, and in the interview which follows the discussion ranges from his feelings about the ‘scandal’ worked up by the production there of The Romans in Britain to how his feelings about Brecht were affected by preparing their version of The Life of Galileo, and also covers his recent collaboration with David Hare, creating a monstrous press baron, in Pravda. Touching on other recent plays such as The Genius and Bloody Poetry, the discussion thus complements an earlier Theatre Quarterly interview with Howard Brenton, included in TQ17 (1975) and reprinted in New Theatre Voices of the Seventies, edited by Simon Trussler (Methuen, 1981). The interviewer, Tony Mitchell, currently teaches in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is the author of Dario Fo: People's Court Jester (Methuen. 1984). His Methuen ‘Writer-File’ on Howard Brenton is due for publication in 1988.

This year marks the 350th anniversary of the death of Ben Jonson – who, but for the happenstance of Shakespeare, would certainly have been Britain's national playwright, but whose achievement has in fact been overshadowed not only by the genius of his sometime colleague, but by the quite different styles and theatrical assumptions of their respective work. The dramatist Peter Barnes, who acknowledges a debt to Jonson in his own writing, is also a leading director of the playwright's work, with productions of Eastward Ho, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, and The Devil is an Ass already to his credit, and, among other productions planned for this anniversary year, one of TheMagnetic Lady for BBC Radio, in apt juxtaposition to the projected RSC revival of The New Inn. Here, Peter Barnes contributes a personal celebration of the playwright's distinctive and defiantly unquenchable work.

In this wide-ranging article. Peter Holland explores the relationship between the director and the playwright from contrasting historical and artistic perspectives. A typical film-contract, as recently signed by Trevor Griffiths with Warner Brothers, is thus made to shed retrospective light on the less overtly proprietorial assumptions which governed Stanislavski's approach to the plays of Chekhov – and which, in effect, sanitized them of their political insights into pre-revolutionary Russian society, creating instead bourgeois tragedies about flawed individuals. Acknowledging the difficulties of creating a framework within which the role of the playwright could be introduced more authoritatively into the theatrical structure, the author nonetheless stresses the importance of recognizing the nature of the hierarchy, which gives pre-eminence to the directorial ‘reading’. Peter Holland, University Lecturer in Drama in the University of Cambridge, is currently writing (in collaboration with Vera Gottlieb) a study of Stanislavski for Cambridge University Press, and is preparing the Oxford Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A director's ‘reading’ of the play – the hierarchical implications of which were discussed by Peter Holland in the preceding article – normally begins with just that: a reading, of the printed or typewritten text. Here. Michael Quinn discusses the various factors through which this initial acquaintance becomes a stage production carrying the stamp of the resulting perceptions – some of which go unrecognized, as much by the director as by those who evaluate his work. These may vary from preconceptions (or a lack of them) about the writer himself to the prevailing modes of the director's own work, or from such imponderables as the ‘lingering’ effect of objects on stage whose original function has been fulfilled to the ‘intertextuality’ always present when a play has a previous production history. The author argues not for the impossible elimination of such influences, but for their proper recognition, so that the director may be better aware of the reasons behind the choices he makes in translating a ‘reading’ into a production. Michael L. Quinn has previously published essays on Brecht and Roman Jakobson, and is currently serving as a play-reader for the San Francisco Magic Theater while preparing his doctoral dissertation on the theatre semiotics of the Prague school.

In the autumn of last year, two events took place which marked in very different ways the recognition that feminist thinking has affected theatre more profoundly than through the necessary logistics of job and role redistribution. In August, the first-ever festival of women in experimental theatre, known as Magdalena 86, took place in Cardiff. Then, in the following month, the International School of Theatre Anthropology devoted its congress in Holstebro, Denmark, to the subject of ‘The Female Role’ – a title we borrow for this short feature, in which Susan Bassnett. who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, and has been a regular contributor both to NTQ and its predecessor, analyzes and evaluates these occasions in successive reports. The core paper presented at Holstebro by ISTA director Eugenio Barba, which discusses the balance between the qualities of ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ necessary to the actor's energy, ‘completes’ a feature which, in the questions it raises for further discussion, remains necessarily inconclusive.

HOLSTEBRO in Northern Denmark has become famous as the home of the Nordisk Theaterlaboratorium and the Odin Theatre Company, led by Eugenio Barba. In September 1986 an international congress organized by ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology, also directed by Eugenio Barba, was held in Holstebro on the subject of ‘The Female Role as Represented on the Stage’ in various cultures.

INTEREST IN ACTORS who play female roles and actresses who play male roles is periodically rekindled. At such times, one might almost suspect that behind these disguises, these contrasts between reality and fiction, lie hidden one of the theatre's secret potentialities. One also often speaks of the actor's female side and the actress's male side, and attempts to develop these forthwith by means of apposite exercises.

What happens when a play without words, about one evening in the life of a lonely middle-aged woman, is transposed from its original bourgeois German setting into that of a deprived Indian city? Rustom Bharucha, himself born in Calcutta and now an expatriate living in the USA, was so impressed by an American production of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Request Concert that, together with a German colleague Manuel Lutgenhorst, he set out to relate the problems, theatrical and social, posed by this one-woman play to the conditions of nine Asian cities over a period of three years. He began in his native city, where Kroetz's Fraulein Rasch became the unmarried office-worker Joya Sen in the performance by Calcutta actress Usha Ganguli. The rehearsals and the final production – in a converted puppet theatre – were illuminating both in the similarities and the differences they revealed between East and West, and in this, the first of three accounts of Request Concert in its Indian productions, Rustom Bharucha records the mutual learning process involved in a fascinating intercultural experience.

In Autumn 1986 Teatr Provisorium from eastern Poland became the latest of the radical groups from that country to visit Britain after an imposed absence. Like the pioneering Teatr Osmego Dnia a year earlier (featured in NTQ8), they came through the support of the Chapter Arts Centre. Cardiff, the Brith Gof Theatre from Aberystwyth. and contacts at Warwick University. Shortly after their previous English performances at the first LIFT festival, most of the company were imprisoned under martial law – what Poles call ‘the War State’ – and one of their company left Poland for good shortly after his release. In the Spring of 1986 they were officially downgraded to the status of unpaid amateurs in an effort to reduce their output. But the company's director. Janusz Oprynski, believes that their work has not changed fundamentally since its foundation: ‘The theatrical space has not changed; nor has our way of creating a theatrical reality. The most important thing is that drama gives us a possibility of transposing personal experience into the language of theatre and this is perhaps – it should be – the most interesting part of theatre work’. In this composite piece, the full context is provided by the whole company in discussion with Tony Howard, who also describes their most recent productions, and finally Piotr Kuhiwczak, a Warsaw lecturer and essayist, speaks with Janusz Oprynski shortly after his arrival in Britain. The translation is by Barbara Plebanek.

Interpretive criticism applied to the plays of W. S. Gilbert verges upon self-parody, suggests Eric Midwinter. The musical plays to which Sullivan contributed his inimitable scores were careful and calculated blends of the theatrical resources which Gilbert could command with plot and character conventions of proven and sustained appeal – which could, moreover, attract to the theatre the respectable family audiences for which the Savoy became almost a home-from-home. Eric Midwinter analyzes the ingredients of the operas which contributed to this popular success, describes the veritable industry of spin-offs which they generated, and assesses their contribution to the development of the ‘musical play’ as distinct from the ‘musical comedy’. Eric Midwinter is a social historian and social policy analyst, whose books include Make 'Em Laugh: Famous Comedians and Their World (1979) and Fair Game: Myth and Reality in Sport (1986). He has published widely on social aspects of popular theatre and television, and is presently Director of the Centre for Policy on Ageing.

Though his work is as yet less familiar in Europe and the USA than that of Wole Soyinka. Femi Osofisan, while acknowledging a discipleship to his predecessor, is more concerned with specific social issues than with universalized themes, and is pre-eminent among contemporary Nigerian playwrights in combining a radical perspective with a recognition of the importance of cultural traditions. In this article. Sandra L. Richards explores his work in terms of the way that its social analysis elicits an active response from its audiences, through the reshaping of recognizable forms – ‘whodunits without solutions’ – while accepting the often-limited resources of theatre machinery and personnel on which most of his directors will be able to call. Sandra L. Richards spent two years in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Benin, and is presently Assistant Professor of Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University, California. An earlier version of the present article was presented at the annual African Literature Association conference held at Michigan State University in 1986.