Jan Kott meets Jerzy Grotowski: a theatre critic, who has achieved in his work the merging of the interpretive and the creative acts, encounters the guru, as Kott describes him, whose life has been spent breaking down other boundaries – between ritual and theatre, between theatre and life itself. Both the original Theatre Quarterly and NTQ have been fortunate in publishing regular contributions from Jan Kott, and in his long-standing role as one of our advisory editors. Grotowski we have observed, even criticized, from a greater distance. Here, Jan Kott narrows the gap.

The English Shakespeare Company was founded in 1986 by Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington with a commitment to take large-scale productions to regional venues. Henry IV, Parts One and Two and Henry V opened at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in November 1986 under the title The Henrys: they were then staged at the Old Vic and toured extensively. In December 1987 Richard II, with a two-part adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI (House of Lancaster and House of York) and Richard III, were added to the previous trilogy to create a complete cycle of history plays – The Wars of the Roses. The cycle was toured in England and abroad before playing at the Old Vic in the spring of 1989. It has since been filmed for television by Portman Productions. The only comparable treatment of the histories in the theatre took place at Stratford in 1964. when Peter Hall and John Barton staged seven plays as a sequence spanning English history from the reign of Richard II to the downfall of Richard III. Andrew Jarvis has been with the English Shakespeare Company since 1986 when he played Gadshill, Douglas, Harcourt, and the Dauphin. He has since played Exton, Hotspur, and Richard III. In 1988 he won the Manchester Evening News Award for Best Actor in a Visiting Production for his portrayal of Richard III. Prior to joining the ESC he had played many roles for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Here, he is interviewed by Stephen Phillips, lecturer in drama at the College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth, who is currently preparing a study of Shakespeare's history cycles in performance in the twentieth century.

This is the third in a series of interviews with women who are involved in various capacities in feminist theatre today, whose career paths intersect and connect with the feminist movement and the feminist theatre movement, tracing developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview, with Gillian Hanna of Monstrous Regiment, set out to provide an update of previously published information, and thereby to keep alive and accurate the current debate about British feminist theatre groups. The second interview, with playwright Charlotte Keatley, put forward a new vision of a ‘map’ to women and (play)writing. This interview carries on the discourse between feminist theatres and their intended audiences by putting forward the responses of one of Britain's strongest young performers, Tilda Swinton, to questions about the challenges and expectations involved in performing gender roles and reversals, or of ‘playing woman’, on film and on stage. Tilda Swinton was born in London in 1960. She studied Social and Political Sciences and English at Cambridge as an undergraduate from 1980 to 1983, under the supervision of Margot Heinemann. It was at Cambridge that Swinton first met and worked with director Stephen Unwin, her closest colleague throughout her career. In 1983, she went to Southampton and worked for six months at the Nuffield Theatre, where she earned her Equity card. In 1984–85, she worked with the RSC, but has chosen not to work on the main stages of the nationally subsidized theatres since. Swinton is primarily known for her work in political theatre, based at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, the Almeida (most notably on The Tourist Guide in 1987 and Mozart and Salieri in 1989), and the Royal Court in London, where she starred in the celebrated Man to Man – a transfer from the Traverse – in 1987, and where she assistant-directed Conquest of the South Pole in 1988. Swinton has also worked at the National Theatre Studio, and has just played Nova at the Cottesloe in a production of Peter Handke's The Long Way Round. She has worked in Italian opera (1988), and has collaborated on and been featured in films by John Berger (Play Me Something, 1988) and Derek Jarman (most notably, Caravaggio, 1986; The Last of England, 1987; and War Requiem, 1988): she continues to collaborate with both. Current and future projects include work on a TV series written by John Byme, which began filming in late September 1989, and work with director Sally Potter on a film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in which Swinton plays Orlando.

A brilliant Richard III and King Lear, Ramaz Chkhikvadze has firmly established himself among the world's greatest Shakespearean actors, for whom Robert Sturua, director of the famous Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, orients all his productions. Here, the theatre critic Sergei Parkhomenko talks to Chkhikvadze about his work, and his personal definition of acting and the human qualities it demands.

This article continues NTQ's recent exploration of the interaction between the study of theatrical performance and other disciplines – in this case, relating in particular to ‘Quantum Physics and the Language of Theatre’, published in NTQ 18 (1989). Schmitt argues that there is a correspondence between the contemporary interest in performance theory and the view of nature provided by modern physics. The analysis of nature in terms of events rather than objects, the perception of reality as a network of non-teleological, non-hierarchical relations, the interest in the interplay between nature and our perception of it: all correlate, she suggests, with an interest in theory of performance. Natalie Crohn Schmitt is Professor of Theater at the University of lllinois at Chicago. She published ‘Stanislavski, Creativity, and the Unconscious’ in NTQ 8 (1986), and has also published in Theatre Notebook, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Theatre Journal, Comparative Drama, Theatre Survey, and elsewhere. Her full-length study. Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature has just appeared, from Northwestern University Press.

Sustaining the long, initially pioneering concern of TQ and NTQ with popular aspects of nineteenth-century theatre. Jim Davis looks here at the men and the methods involved in improving the reputations of the neighbourhood theatres of the East End of London. Usually noticed for its effects on the licensing of theatre buildings, the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 also brought the newly ‘legitimate’ theatres under the direct control of the Lord Chamberlain. Particularly around the mid-century, the Examiner of Plays, William Bodham Donne, responded to public concern (some genuine, some worked-up by interested parties) by commissioning police reports on theatres, and on occasion requiring appropriate action – from the limiting of performances to one per evening, to the erection of public urinals. Here, Jim Davis, who contributed an article on ‘Images of the British Navy in Nautical Melodrama’ to NTQ14 (1988), and is the author of several books and articles in related areas, offers the first documentation of a little-explored subject.

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the company's achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndham's Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the author's doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.

On 11 September 1973 the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist–Communist coalition government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. The coup marked the beginning of severe repression against leftists, trade unionists, journalists, and artists, many of whom were exiled, killed, or merely ‘disappeared’ after being arrested. This letter focuses on the years following the coup: it was written almost one year before the plebiscite on 5 October 1988 when Chileans voted against Pinochet continuing in power as president for another eight years, preparing the way for the elections of December 1989. Despite these hopeful developments – and previous coverage of theatre under the dictatorship, by Catherine Boyle in NTQ 15 (1988) and Enzo Cozzi in NTQ 22 (1989) – we felt it important to publish this moving account by a Chilean actively involved in the struggle, written to Eugenio Barba following the UNESCO-sponsored meeting on Latin American theatre they both attended in Lima, Peru, in April 1987. Its author, Hector Noguera, is a professor in the Theatre Department of Santiago's Catholic University as well as director of the university's professional theatre company, a founding member of several independent groups where he continues to direct and act, and president of the International Theatre Institute in Chile.

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Back in the early 1970s, the original Theatre Quarterly published a number of articles which revived interest in the Federal Theatre Project. In TQ 4, Heinz Bernard placed the work of the FTP's Living Newspaper Unit in the context of American left-wing theatrical practice in the 1930s, and a piece on its techniques by Arthur Arent, the principal writer of the Living Newspapers, first published in 1938, was reprinted in the same issue. Then, in TQ 9 (1973), came Arnold Goldman's incisive and far-ranging article, ‘Life and Death of the Living Newspaper Unit’, which not only traced the political rise and fall of the Unit and the Project, but suggested the importance of the Living Newspaper form to American political theatre, and identified important formal links with Soviet and German practices. This marked the beginning of a reassessment of the work of the Unit, whose reputation had been tarnished and somewhat marginalized in the wake of the FTP's closure by Congress on the grounds of political extremism, and the subsequent legacy of the McCarthy years. The present article by Gerry Cobb continues the reassessment process, and deals with the Living Newspaper considered most contentious of all both by Congressional opponents of the Project and by its own hierarchy – Injunction Granted. Cobb argues that this piece was singled out for attack because of its divergence from the policies of the New Deal, and its call for the organization of workers under the auspices of the CIO, its politics thus coming to obscure its theatrical strengths. His article both demonstrates the historical relevance of Injunction Granted at the time of its creation, and emphasizes and reassesses its strengths as a piece of theatre. Gerry Cobb is a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where, in addition to working on a doctoral thesis on the Living Newspapers, he is editing a volume of the four major works in the form, including Injunction Granted, for publication by Bristol Classical Press late in 1990.