The focus of this article is the range of feminisms which circulate through Belfast-based Oona Doherty's choreographies for groups of women, namely the second episode of Hard to Be Soft: A Belfast Prayer (2017), which is titled ‘Sugar Army', and Lady Magma: The Birth of a Cult (2019). This analysis is motivated by the need to expand discussion of feminisms in tandem with examination of more complex identities in Northern Ireland: to look beyond a Nationalist–Unionist binary within post-conflict society and examine the intersections of gender, class and race. Tracking the movement of feminisms through Doherty's choreographies will explore how they mobilize, and fail, these women, as well as revealing the potential for, and pitfalls of, community and solidarity. Doherty's work has the potential to mobilize a dynamic intergenerational and intersectional feminism which recognizes the experiences of ‘differently positioned women’.

In the last twenty years, memory has gained broader attention in Turkey's social, cultural and political arena. In line with this movement, independent and subsidized theatres produced plays engaging with Armenian history through diverse political and aesthetic agendas. Among these works, public and state theatre productions remained mostly invisible in theatre scholarship due to their ambiguous position that does not directly align with the framework of political theatre. This article examines the adaptation of the Ottoman Armenian playwright Hagop Baronian's Adamnapuyj aravelyan (1868) as Şark Dişçisi (The Oriental Dentist) (2011) by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theatres (İBBŞT). While promoting confrontation with the past, Şark Dişçisi eliminates the crucial political insights of its source text and their ramifications for contemporary demands for historical justice regarding the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The intersection of revisionist theatre historiography and broader political dynamics in the adaptation process reveals the ambivalences of post-Genocide memory work in Turkey.

This paper is an exploration of the most recent revival of Utpal Dutt's play Titu Mir in 2019 by the ensemble group Theatre Formation Paribartak in India. Islamic religious reformer Titu Mir led a peasant rebellion from 1827 to 1831 in the Barasat region of Bengal and the play focuses on a narrative of revolutionary resistance to colonialism. Titu Mir becomes an articulation of political theatre against the Hindu right-wing agenda of expunging Muslim national heroes from Indian history. This essay seeks Titu Mir's relevance as a site and theory of materializing historical contradictions, and as part of a ‘gestic’ feminist criticism of theatre. The essay attempts to understand how critique of patriarchal ideology is enmeshed in critique of colonialism in Titu Mir, especially in those moments where the play addresses complexities of political violence, interracial romance, martyrdom, alienation in the colony and deep-rooted misogyny in the project of colonialism.

Abhilash Pillai's stage adaptation of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (2005–6) introduced a new visual language to Indian theatre, conceiving performance between theatre and cinema. Pillai's work presents history as memory, amnesia and re-remembering within the framework of a multisensorial scenography that largely uses the vocabularies of the Bollywood film industry. The politics of the performance lies less in the thematic than in its optical dynamics, different as they are from both scene painting and the aestheticization of the public sphere. The production shows how theatre experience in a media society may primarily build on the perceptual, but without dismissing text or suspending the cognitive altogether. The visual media are used more as an intervention in politico-aesthetic discourse than as mere technology. As I explain the reasons for the long absence of any scholarly study of the production, I also consider its relevance to the current political scene in India.

How are theatre practitioners (re)defining the realist project, a form of theatre intrinsic to the ideological domestication of capitalism? This paper takes up this question through an examination of Simon Stone's production of The Wild Duck ‘after Ibsen’, staged at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney in 2011, and the late Mark Fisher's (2009) theorization of a market-dominated present as capitalist realism. In doing so, it refers to three different cultural contexts by making parallels to the German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier's work and pointing to developments in Britain. It argues that performances dependent upon the subject's capacity to know and represent the world are predicated on a subjective response and therefore risk locating systemic issues in the closed fictional cosmos of situational dramatic art as part of its exploration of the paralysis intrinsic to the capitalist realist politics of (theatre) spectatorship.