Defiantly, Nicaragua mounted its International Theatre Festival in 1986 while the country remained on a war footing against the contras and their American backers. The San Francisco Mime Troupe were invited, and found the experience very different from other such occasions, east or west. Despite problems of logistics – which left the company without their equipment for much of the visit and virtually having to camp-out in an American-owned hotel – the experience, as recorded here by Daniel Chumley, who has been an actor and director with the group since 1968. was finally and triumphantly affirmative.

How can the socially critical aspects of comedy be reconciled with a ‘happy ending’ which seems to affirm the existing order of things? This perennial problem has become acute in a period when both playwrights and comic performers are increasingly conscious of the dangers inherent in the stereotyping – racial, sexual, and hierarchical – on which so much comedy depends. In this article, Susan Carlson looks at some recent ‘meta-comedies’ which have used the form, as it were, to expose itself – notably, Trevor Griffiths's Comedians, Peter Barnes's Laughter, Susan Hayes's Not Waving, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine – and analyzes their responses to comedy, which range from the despairing to the affirmative. She concludes that only Churchill has found a positive way of ‘connecting the painful recognitions of twentieth-century dissociations to comic hope’. Susan Carlson is Associate Professor of English at lowa State University. In addition to numerous articles on modern drama and the novel, she has published a full-length study of the plays of Henry James, and is currently working on a book about women in comedy.

‘Verbatim Theatre’ has been the term utilized by Derek Paget during his extensive researches into that form of documentary drama which employs (largely or exclusively) tape-recorded material from the ‘real-life’ originals of the characters and events to which it gives dramatic shape. Though clearly indebted to sources such as the radio ballads of the 'fifties, and to the tradition which culminated in Joan Littlewood's Oh what a Lovely War, most of its practitioners acknowledge Peter Cheeseman's work at Stoke-on-Trent as the direct inspiration - in one case, as first received through the ‘Production Casebook’ on his work published in the first issue of the original Theatre Quarterly (1971). Quite simply, the form owes its present health and exciting potential to the flexibility and unobtrusiveness of the portable cassette recorder - ironically, a technological weapon against which are ranged other mass technological media such as broadcasting and the press, which tend to marginalize the concerns and emphases of popular oral history. Here, Derek Paget, who is currently completing his doctoral thesis on this subject, discusses with leading practitioners their ideas and working methods. Derek Paget teaches English and Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education, and has also had practical theatre experience ranging from community work to the West End, and from Joan Littlewood's final season at Stratford East to the King's Head, Islington.

One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’: the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.

In this, the centenary year of Pirandello's birth, there has been a revival, hopefully more than just circumstantial, of interest in his work in the English-speaking theatre – which has previously tended to acknowledge his influence without often producing his plays. But Pirandello's own theatrical ambitions, which came quite late in his creative life, were initially as a director – indeed, the association with Mussolini which has sometimes cast a pall upon his reputation was largely in the interests of obtaining state patronage for his Teatro d' Arte company, which struggled unsuccessfully for survival between 1925 and 1928. Initially, however, hopes were high, and the inaugural productions both artistically and technically exciting. In the following feature. Susan Bassnett, a Pirandello specialist who teaches in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature in the University of Warwick and is a regular contributor to NTQ, describes the circumstances behind the opening of the company, while Alessandro Tinterri, of the Actors' Museum of Genoa, analyzes the curious encounter in the first major production. The Gods of the Mountain, between Pirandello as director and the now little-remembered Irish cricketer-dramatist. Lord Dunsany.

AFTER THE one‐act Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, the opening‐night gala performance at the Teatro d'Arte concluded with The Gods of the Mountain by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany, whose work had never been performed in Italy before. In the early press releases about the future programme of the company, there was even talk about a second Dunsany play, A Night at the Inn, but this never reached production. There were also plans for Dunsany to visit Rome and give some lectures about his work: clearly, he was intended to play a large part in the work of the newly established theatre.

Although numbered among the earliest of masterpieces from the modern repertoire, Gogol's The Government Inspector has its roots deep in earlier Russian society, and much of its apparent humour is based on close observation of the gradations and prejudices of provincial Russian society in the early nineteenth century. In a detailed exploration of the revival in the National Theatre's Olivier auditorium, Mark Hawkins-Dady relates the play to its origins, suggesting that the director Richard Eyre stuck closely to the metaphorical truth, at least, of the social ambience selected by Gogol – and that the apparently eccentric casting of ‘alternative comedian’ Rik Mayall in the central role closely reflected Gogol's own feelings about the nature and playing of the character. Mark Hawkins-Dady is a graduate student in the Drama Department of Royal Holloway College. University of London, currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on directing practices at the National Theatre.

In the first of this series of three articles, published in NTQ 11, the director Rustom Bharucha – born in India. but living and working mainly in New York – described how he initially became intrigued by the idea of transposing Franz Xaver Kroetz's play without words, Request Concert, concerning the last evening in the life of a very ordinary German woman, into a variety of Asian contexts. His ambition was first realized – in collaboration with fellow-director Manuel Lutgenhorst, and with valued assistance from the International School of Theatre Anthropology – in a production mounted in Calcutta, with the actress Joya Sen. The following account of the second production, in Bombay, illuminates both the varieties of Indian urban life and the varieties of theatrical experience, with fascinating insights into the nature of Bombay's competitive, media-saturated society, and the perceptions of the actress Sulabha Deshpande concerning her role and its technical requirements – and how both shed new light on this play and on the nature of theatricality.