Using rarely seen minutes, manuscripts and photographs preserved in the Shanghai Jingju Theatre archive, an analysis of Interrogating the Chair, a revolutionary Chinese opera embodying Mao's instruction ‘We should never forget the class struggle’, reveals how the ideological demands of the mid-1960s interfered with Chinese theatre. Further, the many revisions of the opera show how the traditional jingju repertoire was transformed into model opera. Interviews with those involved at the time are used to present a direct account of how practitioners dealt with the dilemma of presenting a revolutionary and contemporary theme while keeping faith with their indigenous theatrical form.

Three eighteenth-century writers, the actor Luigi Riccoboni, the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the printer-pornographer Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, wrote antitheatrical or reform treatises identifying women as a significant source of ‘mortal poison’ in the theatre. Although Rousseau saw no way to purify or redeem the stage, the others proposed various bizarre reforms that would reduce or control the power of predatory female sexuality to seduce male audience members. These treatises reveal the depth of eighteenth-century misogyny during the so-called ‘reign of women’. Powerful women – and the stars of the Paris stage were powerful, economically independent, sexually liberated, and iconic – threatened male hegemony and provoked retaliation.

Korean playwright, Oh Tae-sok tenaciously has pursued the question of Koreanness in his uniquely experimental style of theatre since the 1970s. The changing visions of Koreanness represented in his social dramas Africa (1984) and Love with Foxes (1996) are examined from a postcolonial perspective. In Africa, Oh's early-80s vision of Korea's historical encounters with the outside world reveals a traditional sense of integrity and innocence being crushed by an increasing sense of alienating globalization. In Love with Foxes, Oh projects another vision of a globalized Korea of the mid-90s as the ‘double’ of a Western metropolitan centre, grimly replicating the dynamics of domination among Korean diasporas and other Asian peoples. Oh, however, ultimately bases his hope for an imagined community of Koreans on their traditional sense of integrity, embracing all kinds of differences.

Since it was restored to the English theatre during the 1930s, Volpone has enjoyed a unique currency amongst Ben Jonson's works; it has had a more consistent and successful performance history than any other of his plays. Although its beast fable scheme has apparently rendered it more immediately accessible (and allegedly more universal) than the author's humours comedies, it has also provoked responses of ambivalence and unease, in that its coupling of the animal and the human actively unsettles the ethical relations between nature, culture, economics and morality that the allegory ostensibly intends to clarify. In performance, the play has given rise to a critical discourse of vituperation, deviance and excess which reflects the tensions and contradictions endemic to the cultural vocabulary of anthropomorphism. Theatre practice has dealt with the play's problems and provocations by incorporating the image of the animal into an inclusive, consensual and predominantly realist mode of characterization and mise en scène. A notable exception was in 1968, when Tyrone Guthrie directed a production for the National Theatre at the Old Vic which literalized animal identities to the point of excess. The result was a radically contradictory rethinking of the play, and of the performance vocabularies which have been, and can be, deployed to animate it.

Two lesser-known fragments written by Heiner Müller in 1979 and 1990 openly refer to Brecht and offer perspectives on the problematic relationship between the two playwrights. Form and content in Brechtian dialectical theatre are treated ironically in both fragments. Müller reveals an ambivalence that accepts the tenets of Brechtian dramaturgy in order to surpass them. Müller criticizes perceived limitations in Brecht's poetics yet redirects the dialectic for the postmodern times in which he lived. The degree to which Müller radicalizes Brecht's principles and practice represents an endpoint of (but not an all-out break with) Brechtian dramaturgy. An important corollary of this conclusion is that Müller is still associated with the Enlightenment project. This latter assertion is at odds with many readings of the later plays as documentations of ‘the end of history’, a category Müller roundly criticized in his life and resisted in his own dialectical drama.

In October 1997 the City of Buenos Aires hosted its first International Festival of theatre, music, dance, and the visual arts with performances by groups from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Latin American theorists, among them Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama, who have long considered such a transcultural event not as culturally transcendent but, rather, as culturally transformative, provide a frame for reading the Buenos Aires Festival as a site of transnational and transcultural operations. Particular focus is placed on the Festival's geopolitico-cultural project, constructed out of the complex relations of local, national, regional, and international politics and performance.

London-based DV8 Physical Theatre makes company-devised hybrid dance/theatre performance which consistently is socially committed, exploring the power dynamics of different forms of social inclusion and exclusion. The company's 2000 show, Can We Afford This, focused particularly on social prejudice about ‘the body beautiful’. Using seventeen dancers of different physical and technical abilities, ages, genders, and sizes, the show both critiqued prejudices about what constitutes the body beautiful and posited other, more inclusive, images of beautiful bodies. This analysis considers how the show's argument was focused and enhanced in its original context of devising and production (Sydney, Australia, in its Olympic and Paralympic year of 2000) and, in contrast, was dissipated and generalized when it moved out of that context to tour to the international markets of London and Hong Kong.

The twentieth-century avant-garde sought to create a theatre dominated, not by language, but by stage images. Is a performance, based solely on speechless images and adopting the style of silent movies, capable of describing a complex fictional world? A superficial study of such movies reveals that even these do not represent silent fictional worlds. On the contrary, their silent frames are meant to evoke verbal interaction, too. This study suggests seven principles, which account for the fact that a speechless theatre production, A Fleeting Shadow (The Khan Theatre, Jerusalem, 1999), despite utter complexity, was fully understood and warmly received by critics and public.