Socialism is alive. Theatre is alive. Socialist theatre is alive. And, in every sense except the literal one, John McGrath, whose body gave up a long, brave fight against illness in January this year, is alive and kicking – Liberal and Tory arses for choice.

After John's death, I scanned my diaries for memories of our meetings. I found an entry about going up to the Highlands to see one of his productions. It was There Is a Happy Land, a people's history of the Highlands in songs and stories, from pre-Christianity and the clan chiefs to absentee landlords and NATO bases. I'd commissioned him to make a TV version of it for Channel 4, filming the live performance on the road in faraway villages, school halls, community centres, mixing its bold acting and gorgeous songs and dance tunes with the elating Scottish landscape, with documents of history and economics. He made this piece, as he made all his cornerstone work, for his 7:84 company – its title pointing to the fact that seven per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the wealth.

Early on in the first Thatcher term, one of her young Turk backbenchers announced that his mission in life was to eliminate all small touring theatre companies with the word ‘red’ in their title. In doing so, he acknowledged that in the 'seventies oppositional theatre had ceased to be constrained within theatre buildings (in the mid-'sixties, he'd have wanted to abolish all companies called ‘English’ working in theatres called ‘Court’).

Pamela Howard designed Border Warfare and John Brown's Body at the Tramway, Glasgow, for John McGrath, and Wicked Old Man, which he wrote and directed for West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1992. Here, she recalls the highly distinctive visual language of the playwright, and the differences this made in seeing through a design from initial discussion to practical use in performance. Pamela Howard is a scenographer, director, writer, educator, exhibition curator, and international producer who has created theatre events in many countries and languages. She was awarded a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in 1999 to write What is Scenography? (published by Routledge in 2001), and as adaptor, director, and scenographer created La Celestina at the Hopkins Center, USA, in February 2002, of which the text is forthcoming from Oberon Books.

In this essay, Drew Milne suggests affinities between the dramatization of history in the work of John McGrath and Karl Marx. He shows how both Marx and McGrath refused to mourn the histories of Germany and Scotland as tragedies, but that differences emerge in the politics of McGrath's radical populism – differences apparent in McGrath's use of music, historical quotation, and direct address. McGrath's layered theatricality engages audience sympathies in ways that emphasize awkward parallels between modern and pre-modern Scotland, and this can lead to unreconciled tensions between nationalism and socialism which are constitutive of McGrath's plays. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He has published various articles on drama and performance, including essays on the work of August Boal, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter, and is currently completing a book entitled Performance Criticism.

John McGrath spurned the easy road to television fame that seemed open to him early in his career, but remained concerned throughout his life to develop the creative potential of the medium, and to exploit what made it distinctive from the forms of film and theatre in which he was also engaged. Unlike many of his contemporaries, McGrath's work was thus underpinned by a strong sense of the differing qualities of the performing media, and nowhere is this more evident than in Blood Red Roses, which began its life as a stage play for 7:84 Scotland in 1980, was adapted into a three-part television serial for Channel 4 in 1985, and re-edited for the version directed by McGrath for Freeway Films. In exploring the differing sensibilities and structures of the different versions, Stephen Lacey draws on ideas – notably the concept of realism – as formulated by George Lukács largely in relation to yet another genre, that of the novel, in which he often found himself in conflict with the ideas of Bertolt Brecht. Stephen Lacey is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-director of a major AHRB-funded research project, ‘Cultures of British TV Drama: 1960–82’.

Taking a wide-ranging look at the aesthetics and economics of theatre on both sides of the Atlantic, and highlighting the increasing interest in learning about theatre in the educational sphere at a time when institutional theatre appears to be floundering, John Russell Brown here draws on his own visits over the past decade to traditional and contemporary theatres in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia to suggest how new approaches to and locations for theatre might build on forms which continue to draw audiences worldwide. John Russell Brown founded the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at Birmingham University, and for fifteen years was an Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. His New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience, and Asia was published by Routledge in 1999. His articles on Asian theatres and their influence in Europe and America have appeared in recent years in New Theatre Quarterly and several Indian journals. He edited and contributed to The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (1995) and has been General Editor of the ‘Theatre Production Studies’ and ‘Theatre Concepts’ series, both for Routledge. This article is based upon his inaugural lecture at Middlesex University, where he is currently Visiting Professor.

Does the prevailing approach to performing Shakespeare, which increasingly reflects nothing more than directorial quirks consuming more cash than creative energy, threaten to cast us adrift from the plays? Those who think so have been strengthened in their belief by a surprisingly inexpensive venture operating in Bristol since the year 2000, under the title ‘Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’. This company have been working in an industrial setting with a minimal production and publicity budget but intense dedication to close textual reading, and have been quick to attract national attention with their pared-down presentations. Professor Emeritus George Brandt, who describes the origins and aims of this group, has been observing the local theatrical scene since 1951, when he joined the Drama Department of the University of Bristol. In his 35 years on its staff, during which he served as its Head of Department over a number of years, he shaped much of its policy, creating among other things the first practical postgraduate film course at a British university. George Brandt edited British Television Drama (1981) and British Television Drama in the 1980s (1993) for Cambridge University Press. His German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848 (1993), with Professor Hogendoorn, was part of the CUP series ‘Theatre in Europe’. His Modern Theories of Drama was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Bristol.

Challenging contemporary orthodoxies, notably Derrida's perception of the actor as an ‘interpretive slave’, Richard Hornby here suggests that so far from exerting a tyranny, the fixed text provides a lifeline which the actor, having grasped, then makes his or her own. If a tyranny exists, it is that of the auteur-director who denies the actor the creative freedom that can be claimed from the text on the page. Richard Hornby is Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Riverside, and regular theatre critic for The Hudson Review. He is the author of six books and over a hundred articles on theatre, the most recent being The End of Acting, published by Applause Books in 1992, and Mad about Theatre, a collection of his theatre reviews published by Applause in 1996. His well-known Script into Performance has gone through many editions, most recently in 1996, and his latest work, Theatre in Crisis, is due out next year. This essay is an adaptation of a paper he delivered in Amsterdam for the ‘Theatre and Cultural Memory’ conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research, held in July 2002.

The Market Theatre of Johannesburg opened in 1976, the year of the Soweto Uprising – the beginning of the end for the oppressive apartheid regime. Founded by Barney Simon, Mannie Manim, and a group of white actors, the theatre's policy, in line with the advice to white liberals from the Black Consciousness Movement, was to raise the awareness of its mainly white audiences about the oppression of apartheid and their own social, political, and economic privileges. The theatre went on through the late 'seventies and 'eighties to attract international acclaim for productions developed in collaboration with black artists that reflected the struggle against the incumbent regime, including such classics as The Island, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and Woza Albert! How has the Market fared with the emergence of the new South Africa in the 'nineties? Has it built on the past? Has it reflected the changes? What is happening at the theatre today? Actress, writer, and director Hilary Burns went to Johannesburg in November 2000 to find out. She worked in various departments of the theatre, attended productions, and interviewed theatre artists and members of the audience. This article will form part of her book, The Cultural Precinct, inspired by this experience to explore how the theatres born in the protest era have responded to the challenges of the new society.

The Jewish-German-Hungarian director and playwright George Tabori has been one of the prominent figures of German-speaking theatre over the past thirty years. Outside Germany, Tabori is best known as the author of provocative Holocaust drama, such as The Cannibals (1968) and Mein Kampf (1987). But as a director Tabori has produced an equally impressive body of work, with ground-breaking productions of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Kafka. Tabori's promotion of theatre as therapy and his unusual actor-centred approach to rehearsal earned his work a ‘somewhat dubious’ reputation of being closely related to psychotherapeutic activity. In this article, Antje Diedrich seeks to clarify the extent to which there are concrete intersections and parallels of thought between Gestalt therapy and Tabori's early theatre practice. She identifies the influence of works by Frederick S. Perls and John O. Stevens on Tabori's discourse on acting and rehearsal practice, and concludes with a discussion of Sigmunds Freude (1975), a production based on protocols of Gestalt therapeutic sessions by Frederick S. Perls. Antje Diedrich works as a Lecturer in European Theatre Arts at Rose Bruford College in London. She has completed a PhD thesis about George Tabori's theatre practice and is currently working on further articles about Tabori's work as a director and playwright.

Report on the conference to celebrate and interrogate John McGrath's work held at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 19–20 April 2002.

Report of the conference on ‘The Greek Theatre Mask in Ancient and Modern Performance’, held at the Noh Studio at Royal Holloway, University of London, on 20–21 April 2002.