The rise and (perceived) decline of Madonna has gone, so to say, hand-in-hand with that of postmodern theory – slightly démodé just at present, but none the less pervasively influential for that. The singer's two most recent albums were critical successes, and the controversy in Argentina over the choice of the star to play Eva Peron testifies to her continuing capacity to attract notoriety. But in what does that notoriety consist? How is the persona that is all we know of Madonna constructed, and how does it work? How is she able to make such distinctive use of the emergent potential of multimedia? What constitutes the coherence of Madonna's image? Mark Watts, a graduate in Film and Literature of the University of Warwick, here analyzes the appeal of the singer-actress in terms of the concept of punctum, defined by Barthes (in opposition to the rational, linear understanding of studium) as the ‘electrifying fragment’ that seizes and ravishes the imagination.

International organizations are increasingly turning to theatre as a means of raising development issues, exploring options, and influencing behaviour. This paper examines some structures and techniques inherent in this type of applied theatre, analyzing two plays used to supplement AIDS education programmes in Uganda. One is a video production by a typical urban popular theatre group, while the second production analyzed exemplifies the Theatre for Development approach through its sub-genre, Campaign Theatre, used to raise awareness on health issues, hygiene, sanitation, child care, and the environment. The study analyzes the performance of the two plays and addresses some contradictions arising from the involvement and influence of external organizations. Marion Frank is a graduate of Bayreuth University in Germany, whose extensive field research has resulted in the publication of AIDS Education through Theater (Bayreuth African Studies Series, Bayreuth, 1995). Dr. Frank is currently living in the US, where as a Visiting Scholar at Duke University she is now working on a research project aiming to establish a closer link between literary/cultural studies and medicine/medical anthropology.

Rustom Bharucha's Theatre of the World (Routledge, 1993), sections of which first appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, was a major intervention in the debate about the nature and ethics of interculturalism – an unfortunate side-effect being that he has, by his own wry admission, now been ‘academicized as Peter Brook's Other’, a category he finds both offensive and redundant. The following article extends his explorations by developing a careful and pertinent distinction between interculturalism and intraculturalism – a distinction derived from practice rather than theory, specifically from his experience directing an Indian production of Peer Gynt, performed in Kannada as Gundegowdana Charitre. Rustom Bharucha explores the implications of ‘translating’ such a classic text across and within cultures as well as languages – and the further paradox of this being, as for most of us, a process of transmission through English rather than Norwegian. He sums up the nature of the challenge as ‘to negotiate different selves, cultures, histories, and languages through the labyrinth of multiple Others’.

The piece which follows was written in 1964 after seeing the Theatre of Cruelty season, directed by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz at the then recently opened LAMDA Theatre in West London, and has never been published in full before. It was my attempt to sum up discussions with colleagues and friends in the weeks after performances, and has served something of that purpose with students later. Following from this I was asked by Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves if they could quote from it in their recent book on Peter Brook in the CUP ‘Directors’ series. Since then, another author has quoted from this source, and, in the event of further excerpting, it seems wise to publish the document in full so that any future quotation will be in recognition of the context in which the statement is made. There are other reasons. Looking back, 1964 can be seen as a crucial crossroads in the British theatre, and the interest in Artaud and Theatre of Cruelty one of the manifestations of a growing frustration with the British actor's inability or unwillingness to physicalize the action rather than intellectualize and verbalize it. It takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Littlewood in that year with Oh, What a Lovely War! and the formation of E15 Acting School by Margaret Bury, as with the Copeau-style training work initiated by John Blatchley at Central School, which led to his formation, with Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, of Drama Centre. The founding of these two schools signalled a significant shift in the training methods and programmes for British actors. The Theatre of Cruelty season seems in retrospect to sum up Brook's frustration at being unable to realize his ideas in the British theatre. Subsequent writers, who in the main never saw the performances, have tended to mark down the season as a great success, instead of the dismal failure I thought it – whether in terms of finding solutions to the problems posed or of keeping any sort of faith with the ideas propounded by Artaud. So a mythology has grown up. Looking at what I wrote then from the position of today I stand by my critique, though I also see what I gained from the performances in the development of my own work, since they revealed clearly a number of blind alleys to be avoided and also enabled me to view the area of training actors to be the crucial issue to be addressed if the British theatre was to move forward. After this, Brook moved Paris and began to experiment further with the problems he was pursuing by importing actors, and consequently skills and styles, from other countries and traditions. Early in his time there, I was present in the Meubilier National, along with an audience of school-children, to witness work in progress on forms of narrative. The experience was as enlightening and enlivening as the Theatre of Cruelty had been stultifying. Though I assured him that I had nothing but praise, Brook asked me not to publish anything on what I had seen, and I did not want to offend him. I have often wished that I had set down my analysis of that experience to counterbalance what I had written on Theatre of Cruelty. I am happy to publish the following article to give an alternative view of this crucial moment in British theatre history, but I regret not being able to put the positive companion piece alongsid.

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Aleks Sierz examines Look Back in Anger not as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. After showing how the anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, he goes on to show how John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in making Look Back in Anger part of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. He then questions the prevailing assumption, common in radical drama, that culture can be revolutionary, and asks whether radicalism in culture is a substitute for political radicalism. Aleks Sierz is theatre critic for Tribune.

How far do popular theatre forms express popular sentiments, and how far populist? This is one of the issues explored in the following article, in which Jim Davis looks at the ideology, explicit and underlying, of the spectacular Drury Lane pantomimes of the late nineteenth century. At once imperialist and redolent of Little England, the pantomimes often displayed an ambiguous attitude to the moral concerns of the time, from temperance reform to ‘the woman question’ – to the influence of the music hall from which they drew their most popular performers. The prevailing tone, it becomes clear, was lower middle rather than working class, despite the irony of such class imperatives being energised by a form which has always transgressed sexual and racial identities. Jim Davis, who teaches in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies in the University of New South Wales, has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century theatre: his earlier contributions to New Theatre Quarterly have included a survey of nautical melodrama in NTQ14 (1988), a study of the ‘reform’ of the East End theatres in NTQ23 (1990), and an analysis of the melodramas played at the Britannia, Hoxton, in NTQ28 (1991).

The New World Performance Laboratory is an experimental theatre company based in Cleveland, Ohio, founded by a number of artists who originally collaborated in the context of Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme. NWPL investigates traditional performance techniques of various cultures, conducting private research as well as mounting publicly-accessible productions. Iranian director Massoud Saidpour, a founding member of the company, has developed a series of performances based on Sufi teaching stories which explore the adaptation of traditional Persian materials and performance idioms for presentation by a culturally-diverse ensemble. Here, Lisa Wolford examines the traditions and source materials from which Saidpour's performance structures are derived, and considers the potential impact, both for participants and spectators, of working with material drawn from esoteric or initiatory genres. Lisa Wolford participated in Jerzy Grotowski's Objective Drama Programme from 1989 to its conclusion in 1992. Her book on Objective Drama Research, The Intersection of the Timeless Moment, is forthcoming, and she is also co-editor with Richard Schechner of The Grotowski Sourcebook, to be published by Routledge. Her writings on Grotowski and the New World Performance Laboratory have appeared in The Drama Review, and she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on Grotowski's recent work at Northwestern University.

The Lewes Bonfire Festival is an important piece of popular theatre, which has largely resisted attempts by higher authority to control and redefine it. Annually some 2,000 costumed participants, watched by up to 80,000 spectators, take over the streets of the usually staid county town of East Sussex, and effigies of contemporary politicians and of the Pope are burnt during six hours of carnivalesque rule. Here, David Wiles analyzes the history and organizational structure of the festival, and examines the ideology of Englishness upon which the event turns. David Wiles is Reader in Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London. His interest in popular theatre has principally been historical, and he has published books on the Robin Hood play and on the Elizabethan clown. Most recently, in Shakespeare's Almanac (D. S. Brewer, 1993) he has explored the structural logic of the festive calendar.