This article examines the representation of Aboriginality in Charles Reade's It is Never Too Late to Mend (1865). It does so by imagining the character of Jacky-Kalingaloonga in performance, specifically in performance by Stanislaus Calhaem – by a white actor in black-face – on the opening night of the melodrama's first London production. Bringing Calhaem back on stage in the mind's eye turns on recovering historic modes of reception, on reconstructing how audience members participated in bringing Jacky-Kalingaloonga ‘to life’. This problematizes readings of the mid-Victorian construction of Aboriginality which presume ‘fact’ claims such as Reade made for Jacky-Kalingaloonga were straightforwardly accepted by Victorian audiences as grounds on which to interpret the character as an authentic ‘anthropological’ specimen. Any promotion of this outcome instead became part of a play between the anthropological and the theatrical which Victorian audiences were expected to negotiate, incorporating that negotiation into an imperialist gesture effected in the process of performance on stage and in the auditorium.

This essay offers a comparative critique of all major Indian theatre histories written during the modern era. It reveals three distinct representations of Indian theatre and argues that each was a manifestation of a discrete historiographic approach, shaped by its particular historical and cultural moment. Theatre histories of the Orientalist period offer a narrow and elitist construction of Indian theatre as synonymous with a single defunct genre, the ancient Sanskrit theatre. Histories of the high nationalist phase make a token acknowledgement of the Sanskrit and traditional genres but define Indian theatre as comprising primarily of the modern genre. Postcolonial histories construct a democratic and comprehensive Indian theatre – embracing the Sanskrit, traditional, and modern genre – but with an unpersuasively high significance assigned to the modern genre's post-Independence phase. Such different representations of Indian theatre show how theatre historiography in the modern period, like theatre historiography in any era, regularly refashioned itself under the pressure of changing historical, political, and cultural conditions.

In Germany in the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer engaged in three years of practical research at the Dessau Bauhaus School of Art, on the nature of ‘non-naturalisitic’ or ‘abstract’ stage space, that is, space exploited theatrically for its dynamism, scale, texture and sonic properties. It is argued here that Schlemmer attempts to recreate on stage the metaphysically resonant spaces which he depicts in his paintings. By engaging with an embodied art form, performance, Schlemmer defies the commonly held assumption that the Bauhaus Stage is locked into the ‘machine age’ mentality and rigid Modernist essentialism. On the contrary Schlemmer's work is revelatory of stage space in direct, simple and phenomenologically intense ways and has much to teach us about the nature of theatrical power in postmodern visual and object theatre, and is better interpreted in the light of postmodern, rather than Modernist, sensibilities.

The image of the National Motherhood is the potent cultural code for Koreans. The word ‘Feminism’ in the Korean context is identified as a system of ideas originating from the West. What happens when these two disparate cultural/historical impulses meet at the intersection of modern Korean theatre? This study examines the cultural transfer of Western feminisms and feminist plays in the Korean theatre from the 1920s, when Ibsen's play A Doll's House was first introduced to Korea, to the present. More specifically, it analyses six Western feminist plays such as Nell Dunn's Steaming and Marsha Norman's 'Night, Mother, by focusing on how the Korean women's movement and modern Korean drama movement intersect with each other in terms of historical and cultural background; how these two historical impulses interact with Western feminist plays in terms of the intentions and reception of such plays in the Korean theatre arena, and how the image of the National Motherhood, the potent cultural code for Koreans, intervenes in this process.

Theatresports have been played for several decades now, and the form can claim international acceptance. This success is best viewed against the background of theatre's position in contemporary art and society. This form of theatre markedly takes advantage of the specificity of theatre, of its immediacy, of the fact that it is ‘live’ art. The improvisational matches thereby stress to what extent the ‘live’ aspect of theatrical performance has become distinctive in the domain of art. Moreover, theatresports highlight the social nature of theatre to such an extent that they probe the boundaries between the artistic and the social fields. By privileging the social event theatresports turn to advantage an aspect that allows theatre to buttress its position in competition with screen media.

The Italian director Giorgio Strehler (1921–97) staged more plays by Shakespeare than by any other playwright, but only a few of his most recent and successful Shakespearean stagings have received international critical attention. By focusing on one of Strehler's early productions, The Tempest of 1948, this article has a double purpose: to examine the cultural context of a production that was quite anomalous for the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, then in its second season, and to underline how, from the beginning of his career, Strehler developed a crucial attention for a mutable theatre space.