Christmas 1911 saw a remarkable collaboration in London between the Austrian director Max Reinhardt and the protean English impresario C. B. Cochran, to create what Margaret Shewring here calls ‘the most remarkable Christmas pantomime ever presented’ – The Miracle, a religious spectacular with a cast of two thousand, staged in the huge arena of the Olympia exhibition centre. Although subsequent revivals of the show, generally in more orthodox performing spaces, have already been documented, there has previously been no full account of this inaugural and in many ways most successful production. Margaret Shewring. who teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, has drawn on the previously untapped resources of Olympia, now held at Earl's Court, in this account of the spectacle from inception to reception.

If the playwright is the most written about of all theatre practitioners, he or she is also, financially, the least underwritten. Despite the emergence of a Theatre Writers' Union during the 'seventies, the path for the novice writer into the profession remains as uncertain as ever, and security is tenuous even for the established dramatist. Christine Eccles has worked in the theatre both as a director and as a member of that elusive species, the playreader, and is currently reviewing for Time Out and Plays International. Here, she looks at the various ways in which a script may – or, more probably, may not – reach the stage, and at the few sources of financial support for the aspiring playwright. NTQ will be looking in depth at each of the major areas here outlined in future issues.

The conflict of generations is a theme familiar enough in western drama – but less expected in an African context, with its strong traditions of ‘respectful, submissive behaviour towards the old in general, and towards one's parents in particular’. Yet a theme of aggression between fathers and sons has, argues Stewart Crehan, been discernible in a significant proportion of the plays staged in the last three festivals of the Zambian National Theatre Arts Association. He analyzes some of these plays, and examines the implications of the theme in the various social circumstances of contemporary Zambian society, besides discussing the ‘mythical dimension’ which is also involved. Stewart Crehan is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Zambia, and has been active in Zambian theatre as a playwright, actor, director, and adjudicator. He is author of a critical study and selected edition of the work of William Blake, and has published various articles on literature from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, and on African drama and literature.

When the current spate of ‘Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland over a decade ago. it was fashionable to lament the lack of plays about the political and military situation there. Now there is no shortage of plays, but a persistent worry – here articulated by Philomena Muinzer – that most of them do little to analyze the events. let alone to suggest a resolution of a crisis which is coming to be accepted as somehow endemic and inevitable. This fatalism, she suggests, is because the plays either fit all too easily into old forms which sanctify antiquated assumptions, or mould no less constricting new ‘conventions’ – thus creating a dramaturgical vicious circle which perpetuates the political. Taking a cross-section of recent plays about Ulster, she thus suggests how they share a body of themes and concerns which ‘become part of an inherited dramatic fabric, which then prejudices new political analysis and new creative thinking alike’. Philomena Muinzer herself grew up in Northern Ireland, and subsequently attended the Universities of Princeton. Essex, and Yale. In 1982 she received an Arts Council bursary on the strength of her play Together Against Him. and she is currently working on a new play about the Troubles.

In the previous article, the author exempted one company's work from her strictures on the present state of Ulster playwriting. That company was Field Day, based in the town whose very choice of name distinguishes Catholic from Protestant, Derry or Londonderry. Here, Michael Etherton outlines the aims of the company, which extend far beyond the theatrical, and also describes and assesses three plays which, although not all originating from Field Day, seem to him to reflect the distinctive ‘poetic and political view’ which he believes the company has nurtured. Most notable, be believes, is its attempt to reveal and replace the arid rhetoric to which beliefs and argument on both ‘sides’ have been reduced. Michael Etherton, presently teaching at King Alfred's College, Winchester, has previously published widely in the field of African theatre, on which he wrote in TQ10 of our original series, and he is preparing a volume on contemporary Irish drama for the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series.

In NTQ4 and 5 David Hornbrook offered a two-part analysis of the purposes, practices, and projected future of drama teaching in schools. Discussion continued in NTQ7 and 8, with responses to Hornbrook's suggestions from a number of other practitioners in the area. Among them was Jon Nixon, currently research fellow in the Division of Education at Sheffield University, who now continues the debate with an article in which he provides a broader perspective, presenting a functional rather than theoretical model of classroom practice. This, he suggests, takes a three-dimensional form: drama as social interaction, as discourse, and as a mode of cognition – or what he calls the ‘depth dimension’ which ‘complements our various ways of knowing’. He concludes that drama should not by necessity be consigned to the margins of ‘the arts’, but be recognized for the vital role it can play not only in the whole humanities cirriculum but, crucially, in the cross-curricular development of communication and expressive skills.

The Theatre Festival of the Americas, launched in the summer of 1985. attempts to bring this huge continent – perhaps too often preoccupied with looking back to European and other antecedents – into mutual self-awareness: between North America and South, and between both hemispheres and the newly-assertive states of Central America. Josette Feral, currently teaching in the Département de Théâtre at the Université du Québec in Montreal, reports on the companies represented at the inaugural festival, and at what their work seems to suggest about present preoccupations and potential cross-fertilization.

Early in 1986, the Ballet Folklorico Nacional de Nicaragua was invited by the London Borough of Camden to play a season at the Shaw Theatre. Its founder and director. Ronald Abud V, taked to Elaine Turner, with the assistance of the company's translator Margaret Clark, about the work and aims of a company which has become closely identified with its country's revolution, and about the means of expressing a rediscovered national identity through the performing arts.