Sitting between the First Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and a Vice-President of the Council of State for Cultural and Socialist Education in the official box at the Opera House for the gala première of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” on 23 October and watching those adroit fairies prepare Bottom for his night of love with Titania, I began to get an uneasy feeling that things were not going well as I observed their consternation and embarrassment at the erotic miming before us. This impression was confirmed by their almost monosyllabic comments at my reception during the interval. “Très intéressant” said Gliga, but then words failed him; “très piquant” said [Ion] Blad—a more apposite comment on the scene than perhaps intended, but even this faint praise clearly left other thoughts unexpressed. . . . However, on the following day my Cultural Attaché and later the manager of the Company were called to a 2 1/2-hour meeting with ARIA, the Romanian State impresarios, to hear their “suggestions” for the modification of the “Phallic Bottom” episode; but the manager insisted that he had no power to alter Peter Brook's masterpiece in any way at all and this particular scene in fact remained unaltered during the remainder of the run.—D. R. Ashe On 31 October 1972, Derick Rosslyn Ashe, the British ambassador to Romania, sent this strictly confidential report to J. L. Bullard, the head of the East European and Soviet Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. His report was written a few days after the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) had completed its tour in Romania, which took place from 22 to 28 October 1972. Although Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had originally premiered on 27 August 1970 at Stratford-upon-Avon, the British Council chose it for a tour of Eastern Europe in 1972, and the company played it in Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Zagreb, and Warsaw.

Imre Kálmán's operetta Die Csárdásfürstin premiered in Vienna in 1915 and was soon an international success. It appeared in Budapest as Csárdáskirályné (1916), in Moscow as Сuпьва (1917), in New York as The Riviera Girl (1917) and in London as The Gipsy Princess (1921). By considering its different stagings, this article focuses on the reciprocal ways whereby Western and Eastern Europeans interact, influence, react and respond to each other. Thus the aim of the article is to bring together the different formulations of European and international theatre to show the various networks, connections and relations among the different theatre traditions both within and outside Europe; and to set up a methodology of theatre historiography which goes beyond European orientation, the East/West divide and the image of the 'West' as a single and unified entity.

The article deals with the 1940 and the 1986 stagings of The Merchant of Venice in Hungary and with the forty-six-year gap between them. Comparing these events, the article draws attention to the ways in which the dominant ideology of these entirely different regimes influenced the interpretation of Shakespeare’s play and its staging.

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In my paper I shall investigate the major changes in the concept of the national theatre from the early debates on the Hamburg Theatre in 1767 until the 2005 establishment of the National Theatre of Scotland. The starting assumption is that while in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the notion of the national theatre was regarded as a means for the integration of a nation or even an empire in most Western-European countries, in Eastern-Europe, the debates on and later the realization of the national theatres took place within the context of and against oppressive imperiums. In Eastern Europe, the realization of National Theatre was utilised for representing a unified nation in a virtual way, and its role was to maintain national identity and national culture. In present day Scotland, however, the notion of the national theatre has changed again as the National Theatre is used to represent a diverse and multicultural Scotland.