This article casts a spotlight on Khashabi Theatre, one of several independent Palestinian venues in Haifa. It explores Khashabi's dramaturgical–performative discourse with ghosts, and thereby examines how it produces a ‘dual presence’ of Palestinian urbanism: the ghostly presence of victims of history who were uprooted from the city, and the presence of the contemporary community that, by converging at the theatre, plays a key part in the revival of urban leisure culture. The article discusses the particular location of the theatre in the city and the dramaturgical characteristics of the two plays staged in the first season. It also examines the objects and the actors’ bodies as elements that evoke and conjure up ghosts, and shows how artistic practice, which allows alternative places to be established, plays a key role in the struggle for the ‘right to the city’, which is also the struggle for the ‘right of return’.

Colombian theatre-makers have been searching for aesthetic languages to speak about the national conflict for decades. By analysing two of the most prominent theatrical productions from the 2010s, I explore the mechanisms they employ for the inscription of testimonies on audiences. I argue that the use of ghosts onstage to make the disappeared present transforms these plays into both ritual spaces and testimonial encounters at the same time. I do this by engaging with Derrida's works on spectres, along with the work of Latin American scholars who have explored the ethical and aesthetic challenges of making art in times of war.

I began working on this article in the winter of 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine shattered the fragile stability of Europe. Artur Solomonov's tragifarce How We Buried Josef Stalin (2019) speaks directly to this catastrophic time but also to the legacy of Stalinism in Russia. ‘A play about flexibility and immortality’, Solomonov's farce confronts its audience with the dilemma of Stalinism, which Putin's putrid regime continues to mobilize. Using irony, hyperbole and grotesque, it proposes a dramaturgical response to the question of why hostility to the world, isolationism and nationalistic aspirations are deeply ingrained in the collective psyche of Russian society. To Solomonov, the issue rests in the malleability of a Russian psyche that embraces an image of the tyrant and allows it to remain immortal; it also feeds Russian collective nostalgia, which prepared the ground for the rise of what Lev Gudkov called ‘recurring totalitarianism’.

From the ‘real’ stage performance in the late 1980s to the ‘virtual’ stage performance in April 2020, when China, after months of being locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was gingerly reopening for life again, Chinese theatre artists have persisted in their efforts to adapt the Beckettian play for their sociocultural, artistic and existential needs in the Beckettian spirit of ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’.

Is it possible for audiences to be transported to the theatrical past? Though the landmark theatres Teatro Olimpico and Drottningholm Slottsteater appear to differ completely, the meanings of their pasts are interpreted through the concepts of historicity versus historicism. After briefly examining the theatres’ histories and the historiography of their place in theatre history, we then analyse the details of the Olimpico's and Slottsteater's ‘performances’ in the following characteristics: how their distinctive features employ motion and space, the presence of their silent ghost audiences, their similarities as one-room theatres and in the ‘democratic nature’ of their auditoriums, and their use of trompe l'oeil in their construction. Through these elements, the Teatro Olimpico and Drottningholm Slottsteater perform their pasts, achieving their status as iconic playhouses that still make an impact on audiences and visitors. Does that impact effectively ‘take us back in time’?