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.

Restoration theatre theory, polemic, and practice are closely concerned with questions of value, although they have received little attention in recent criticism that considers the formation of the English canon up to and during the eighteenth century. The main issue addressed concerns the legitimacy of dramatic form, which dominates the metatheatre of 1668–75, but also appears unexpectedly in the political drama (especially the comedy) of the early 1660s and the antitheatrical rhetoric of the 1690s. In all these instances, the complexity, integrity, and completeness of drama-in-performance are seen to determine the value of plays as well as playwriting. While the attack on heroic drama in metatheatrical plays such as Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers (1668) and Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671) is directed by authors of one persuasion against another, Thomas Duffett's burlesque attack on the theatre of spectacle in the 1670s paradoxically is reinforced by the self-criticism of his targets. Moreover, Jeremy Collier's antitheatrical offensive in the late 1690s shows an atypical concern with specific dramatic content, especially in comedy, suggesting that both metatheatre and antitheatre in the Restoration focus their oppositional energies on the particulars of genre.

While anti-apartheid theatre was known worldwide for dramatizing the struggle against apartheid, theatre in South Africa today is hampered by the loss of a focused movement for change and by inefficient and compromised institutions of patronage and development. Well-placed administrators and stakeholders channel limited subsidy to large institutions such as the Market and the State Theatre, whose repertoires are dominated by nostalgic revivals, while cutting-edge performance must rely on corporate or international support. Under these conditions, theatre that is innovative in seeking new audiences and functions, as well as forms, happens often outside theatres: in film and radio, in education, and as an informal legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's project of personal and national healing.

Two South African films, Oliver Schmitz's 1988 Mapantsula and Ramadan Suleman's 1997 Fools, drawing from the revolutionary fervour of Third Cinema, developed a radical consciousness against a backdrop of Anglo-Afrikaner cinema in South Africa. Set in Soweto during the 1980s, both films, in their representation of blackness, address issues of the body, identity and agency. With their anti-heroes at the centre, they explore questions of African identity by imaging the black body differently, and free it from the grip of the apartheid imaginary. Meanwhile, the white body in the films is ‘shot’ as a homogenized symbol of apartheid violence and oppression, thus ‘fixing’ white identity as a strategy for political truth claiming.

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.

A Cuban cocktail called mulata inspires an examination of the mulata body. Beyond an analysis of the cocktail as a commercial commodity, the mulata body can be placed within an intercultural space shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. By examining the grammars in the mulata cocktail, the discussion moves the subject through other texts and discourses in order to mediate the mulata's embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. As a hybrid body that inhabits a ‘racialized’ performativity, the mulata's subaltern agency is imagined beyond the exoticism charged to its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. A closer look at the mulata body helps to trace not only the process of objecthood affected by masculinist power and desire, but also by the way the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved.

The Singapore play, Talaq, was denied a public entertainment licence in October 2000 despite having been staged twice before, and its producer was arrested for trespassing when she refused to vacate the theatre in her bid to document the rehearsal process. The controversy, staged as a meta-drama by the print and broadcast media, reveals much about the cultural dynamics of Singapore's arts scene in respect of state subvention and artistic freedom, and the play itself raises questions about the performance of gender and ethnicity, as well as the political anatomy of the performing body.

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.

The making of culture in South Africa through different but linked forms and genres focuses on the medium of radio, and the ‘emergent genre’ of Zulu serial radio drama. Using Benedict Anderson's notion of ‘socioscape’ a link is drawn between the wide sweep of historical events and the production of culture. Beginning with the case of the musical, uMabatha [Macbeth], its performance history, and its links with serial radio drama in Zulu, this article focuses on the ways in which this, in turn was linked to the ‘performance’ of African football commentary on radio, and points to the national resonances that the act, and art, of commentating built up for both announcers and listeners. Finally, three representative radio serial plays from the 1970s are examined in relation to the ways in which they engaged with the social and political realities of the time. Through the multi-accentual nature of language and the polysemic nature of the plays themselves these plays might appear to endorse or, at least, acquiesce in the dominant apartheid ideology of the era, yet at the same time they offered resistant alternatives to it.

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.

Tanzanian popular theatre consists of a dizzying variety of ‘traditional’ dances, plays, acrobatics, and musical acts that freely borrow from traditions across the globe. In a stark contrast to the fluidity of these performances, however, the plays maintain a rigid division between representations of the urban city and rural home. This demarcation operates along the gendered lines described by Anne McClintock, in which the village is coded as the feminized model of tradition in contrast to the ‘male’, modern world of the city, leading to stereotypical roles of the innocent rural girl and the lustful urban woman. At the same time, the participatory, improvisational quality of popular performance clears a space for the ‘unnatural’ urban women in the audience to resist these stereotypes. Also, the theatre troupe Muungano creates plays which challenge essentialist constructions of the primordial ‘home’, allowing complex interactions of geography and gender to be revealed and explored.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has inspired several pieces of theatre that emphasize the powerful aesthetics of testimony and the challenges of an ethical response. While many of these are experimental plays with high production values and engage with Ålite liberal audiences on a metaphoric level, the theatrical space remains a comment upon, but does not merge with, everyday reality. The focus here is on three plays in which audiences are not watching an ‘other’ but are watching themselves. They are brought on a journey of healing as a community. That Spirit by Mina Nawe, Thetha Ngikhulume (‘Speak so that I may speak’) by Bongani Linda and The Victory Sonqoba Theatre Company and The Story I am About to Tell by Khulumani Support Group belong to the category of Theatre for Development (TfD). TfD most often stages intellectual debates on social and political issues affecting a particular, usually geographically defined, community. However, rather than exploring the socio-political aspects of the TRC, these plays focus on the deep emotional trauma that remains with survivors as the TRC goes about ‘healing the nation’. This article draws on the theories of social change associated with TfD, Augusto Boal's theories of theatre as therapy, psychologists’ theories of post-conflict recovery, and, theories of restorative justice to evaluate the healing potential of both the TRC and TfD.

Although the Dutch theatre system appears balanced and functioning, contemporary forms of the theatrical imagination extend to only a very small part of the Dutch population. In the long term, this can threaten the role of theatre in maintaining and developing the creative power of the community. Moreover, a lack of cohesion among several elements of the system causes its limited functioning. An analysis of production, distribution and reception within the Dutch theatre system determines the main developments and problems.

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.

The task of Theatre in Education (TIE) performers is examined in relation to what I have witnessed in TIE programmes in South Africa, found in reports written by students and ideas proposed by theatre theorists. The four contextual frames, which John O'Toole maintains are at work in TIE (namely neighbourhood, venue, audience availability and the world of the play), provide a workable configuration through which to examine the effects of each of these on performance. The interaction between the performers, the performance site and the audience in TIE promises the possibility of a more flexible approach to theatre. Creative opportunities arise that should be utilized, not only in TIE, by a variety of theatre-makers in South Africa.

An analysis of the main companies, groups and practitioners producing text-based theatre in the Netherlands in the last few years provides a backdrop for a more detailed examination of the work of writer/director Gerardjan Rijnders. Further, special focus is given to the work of the greatest theatre innovator of the last two decades, Jan Joris Lamers, and two young theatre collectives are presented as representative of a broader movement of playwrights, actors and directors, who perform in smaller black-box theatres.

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.

The Gate of Heaven, which toured the United States for two years marking the 50th anniversary of the Dachau concentration camp liberation and commemorating the heroism of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II, imagines the friendship between a Japanese-American veteran and the Holocaust survivor he saves at the gates of Dachau in 1945. While the playwright-performers set out simply to celebrate their family histories – Lane Nishikawa is a third-generation Japanese American and Victor Talmadge lost many relatives in the Holocaust – the commemorative politics they encountered at each stop on the tour transformed the meaning of their play. A reconstruction of the social framework the play encountered at four venues, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Old Globe Theatre in southern California, demonstrates the malleable nature of race relations in America and the instability of Holocaust representation.

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.