Women writers from the peripheries and semiperipheries of Europe who participated in the metropolitan melting pots of new ideas at the fin de siècle are often marginalized or excluded in historiographical accounts, making their contributions to a European cultural heritage invisible.1 This marginalization, shared by numerous women playwrights and artists, prompts the need to explore ways of providing a fair account of their contributions. Swedish playwright Anne Charlotte Leffler (1849–92) was one of these women who set out on a European journey to try her luck with an international career. In this essay I explore her contribution to the late nineteenth-century London avant-garde with her play Sanna kvinnor (1883) [True Women, 1892].2 The application of any quantitative method, or those that rely solely on the translation, staging, publication, and reviews of actual plays, would likely obscure rather than illuminate the reception of her work. To contextualize the reception of Leffler’s play, it is necessary to adopt a theoretical perspective that integrates the political and the artistic, while also considering Leffler’s status as a foreign playwright in Britain. Furthermore, the pattern of reception requires theoretical conceptualization and evaluation in line with the social and cultural position of women at the time. In the case of Leffler, this conceptualization should consider the reception of her embodiment of the New Woman together with her contribution to theatre as part of the endeavors of a personal network marked by blurred boundaries between the private and the public, as well as between life, politics, and art.3

In her influential 1988 essay “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” American performance theorist Peggy Phelan documented her “most disturbingly interesting” exposure to what she calls “Eastern dance forms” at an international gathering of scholars, performers, and the like.1 The conference is said not only to have fostered strenuous discussions of the female role in such traditions as Balinese dance-drama, Indian kathakali, Japanese kabuki, and “Chinese opera,” but also to have featured the performance of a youthful male performer of female roles in the Indian odissi tradition. Astonished, if not disappointed, by the conference’s disengagement with the politics of representing female roles, Phelan asserts that “[s]uch classical female roles played by men or women do not, by definition and design, penetrate the ‘identity’ of any female; they are surface representations whose appeal exists precisely as surface.”2 And this “surface femininity” is said to hinge upon “immediate recognition of the comic artifice and reverent idealization of the form,” which “reminds the spectator of the absence of the female (the lack) rather than of her presence.”3

On 24 December 1871, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida premiered in Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House. The Khedive of Egypt, Ismail, had commissioned Verdi to compose the opera as part of a larger program of urban renewal that had peaked with the Suez Canal’s inauguration in November 1869. Wide boulevards, landscaped gardens, and luxury hotels of iron, steel, and the improved glass of the nineteenth century modernized sections of Cairo and Alexandria. In anticipation of the many guests who planned to attend the canal’s inauguration, Ismail funded the construction of a road leading directly from Cairo to the pyramids and patronized the construction of a Khedivial Opera House.1

Challenging China’s official history since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 is uncommon among Chinese theatre makers in the twenty-first century. Given the stringent rules that severely limit artistic expression, such attempts are rare and, aesthetically, noticeably obscure. Director Wang Chong (b. 1982) and his collective Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental nevertheless embark on an audacious journey of deconstructing and reassembling some of China’s most taboo historical moments in their productions The Warfare of Landmine 2.0 (Dileizhan 2.0, 2013) and Lu Xun (Da Xiansheng, 2016). Wang’s critical reconfiguration of deliberately forgotten violent events from the Maoist and post-Maoist eras is articulated onstage through the intermediation of far more visible and “stage-safe” historical moments that predate Maoist China. While obscuring the direct messages of the performances, Wang’s cunning technique of contesting Beijing’s memory of politically sensitive events manages to unearth “hidden” violent moments of which many Chinese youth today may be completely oblivious.

The Lenin Memorial mass meeting, organized by the newly formed National Council of American–Soviet Friendship (NCASF) and featuring scenes from the Soviet play adapted and directed for the Theatre Guild, followed quickly on the heels of a similar mass meeting and rally, “Salute to Our Russian Ally,” staged at Madison Square Garden on 1 November 1942 and attended by twenty thousand supporters. Both events presented speeches by American political, military, and arts leaders and Soviet dignitaries, along with theatrical scenes and musical performances. The rallies concluded when the crowd had been effectively emotionally aroused and asked to stand for the playing of the national anthems of the United States and the USSR. The crowd was asked to approve statements on US–Soviet cooperation and peace to send to President Roosevelt and General Stalin, and it apparently roared back to the stage its approval.