The Über-Marions notebooks were written by Gordon Craig during 1905 and 1906. The main interest of these unpublished manuscripts lies in the rich information on the über-marionette which, oddly enough, Craig initially thought to ‘find’ or ‘collect’, and the project for a theatre in Dresden. Many entries give a new insight into these subjects while other notes emphasize the direct link between the über-marionette and Craig's theory as it was formulated in The Art of the Theatre (1905), and in ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’ (1907) and ‘The Actor and the Über-marionette’ (1907).

The Spanish theatre in the twentieth century has often been criticized for its allegedly poor and unoriginal qualities, only Lorca and Valle-Inclán being widely accepted as dramatists who sought to revitalize the theatre of their day. The period of the Civil War, however, was a time when a number of writers, such as Max Aub, Miguel Hernández and Rafael Alberti, made important experiments with political theatre which are as yet largely unstudied. It is the aim of this article to redress the balance somewhat, by suggesting that the Civil War was not a disaster for the Spanish theatre but gave rise to radical innovations which have generally been neglected, such as Alberti's 1937 adaptation of Cervantes's tragedy El cerco de Numancia (c. 1580–7).

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the theatre of the sixties and seventies has been the proliferation of small, generally independent, theatre groups. This phenomenon has not been limited to France but has spread throughout Europe and North America. For the most part, the groups have sought to reform, if not reject, conventional theatre practices, be it the method of productions, the dramatic language or the nature of the dramatic experience itself. Their alternative approaches have focussed attention on the process of dramatic creation. As a result, terms such as ‘collective creation’ and ‘audience participation’ have become critical clichés. But, whereas the practice of the former has been discussed widely both in the context of specific groups and of the general development of contemporary drama, the concept of audience participation has remained vague. Thus, much has been written on the transfer of creative responsibility from author to acting company and on the accompanying change in status of the actor, but the position of the spectator as a creative force has received little detailed treatment.

In 1977, John Arden produced a collection of essays called To Present the Pretence, in which he tried to articulate for himself and for us the main lines of his development, and to define, through his various projects and enthusiasms for other playwrights, what theatre is and what it might become. Arden's book is a fascinating work which chronicles the itinerary of a man who took the risk of opening himself and his art to the great forces of contemporary history and whose work increasingly bears the marks of the contradictions in that history. At the ideological level, these essays mark the stages in Arden's progress from a vague Left-Wing quasi-liberalism and pacificism tinged with anarchism, to a more affirmative neo-Marxism which still bears some traces of his early idealism. This political development brought with it an increasing pressure on Arden's theory and practice; and perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of his career is the tense interplay between the demands of political praxis and those implied by what he calls ‘the Ancient Principles of Drama’.