The confrontation of the foreign was a key aspect of the theatrical culture of eighteenth-century British culture. The performances of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comic opera The Duenna (1775) in Kingston, Jamaica, and his comedy The School for Scandal (1777) in Calcutta, Bengal, enabled residents to embrace both the love of alterity and the longing for home that were each endemic to colonial life, as the comic figures of the Jew and the nabob and the forlorn figure of the enslaved child suggested that Britishness and otherness were not far removed from each other, as theatrical performance in circulation began to sketch in more similarities than differences dividing us from them.