11 May 2003. As I was preparing to write the Editorial for this, my last issue as Senior Editor, three seemingly unrelated incidents of transnational significance impinged on my consciousness. First, a Nigerian woman asylum-seker in Ireland was granted a stay of deportation, a direct challenge to a ministerial change in the Irish constitution which now decrees that foreign-national mothers of Irish-born children no longer have any residency rights. Her choice is stark, like that of Grusha in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle: she can either take her child back to Nigeria with her, or (since the child is an Irish citizen) leave him behind in an orphanage. No sooner had I read of this woman's plight than I discovered the case of four Kosovan Albanian asylum-seekers in the UK who had fled as much for reason of persecution of their homosexuality as an escape from ethnic fighting, but who ended up, because of their statelessness and immigrational illegitimacy, being forced to prostitute that same sexuality in order to pay off their unscrupulous traffickers. And then at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport's railway station I watched in despair as a Romanian woman risked her life to retrieve a €1 coin from the tracks, dropped inadvertently by an American tourist moments earlier.

An exploration of the repressed issues of class and gender which inhabit the Irish national unconscious, also seeks to intervene in the essentialism/constructionism debate concerning national identity which has preoccupied post-colonial scholars and Irish studies academics over the last few decades. The argument focuses on Synge's plays and culminates in an examination of his magnum opus The Playboy of the Western World (1907), while analysing Declan Kiberd's appropriation of Frantz Fanon's theories of decolonization in his critique of Synge's play. The objective is not only to trace the Möbius strip of national essence qua cultural construct, but also to analyse the dialectic of desire which energizes cultural and political identification.

This collection addresses issues of performativity and the practices of representation, both historically at the interfaces of theatre practitioners and sexual practices, and intermedially at the intersection of performance and the constructed liveness of mediatized events. The formula of the performative as a ‘doing’ by a thing done, as phrased by Elin Diamond, neatly conveys the ‘mediation’ of the events which are extra-performative and locates performance in a particular tense, thus heightening the tension between the simulation of an act and its enaction.

Burmese-Australian choreographer/performer Rakini Devi is informed by her diverse skills in the areas of classical Indian dance, visual arts and contemporary performance practice. She uses these skills as well as her satirical wit and storytelling abilities to create an intricate portrait of the lived experiences of a contemporary diasporic subject. This is a portrait that is not only aesthetically stimulating but also politically inflected and provocative at the same time. Through her work Devi encourages us to remember that diaspora is more than a theoretical trope, that it is a complex and often contradictory experience which results in joy as well as pain as it is played out on live bodies.

In 1772, William Kenrick published Love in the Suds, a direct attack on David Garrick. In 1776, Humphrey Nettle [William Jackson] published Sodom and Onan, a satire against Samuel Foote. Both of these texts make explicit charges of homosexuality against the two men. Why were these two actors singled out at this particular moment: serendipity or a new mechanism of power? An examination, thus, is required, of the representational practices operating within and without theatre, through which accepted sexual practices and new forms of personhood were normalized and put into discourse in late eighteenth-century London. The fact that this was to be achieved by placing actor's image and actor's body, occupying an ambiguous social position, under close scrutiny, points to a new economy in performing cultural and societal norms.

German Dada, particularly the Berlin performance practices of George Grosz and Richard Hülsenbeck, shifted the ‘eternal’ history of the German Reich into the immediacy and annihilation of the postwar Berlin environment. These practitioners formed their social and political opinions into Dada's own German national narrative. The Weimar government responded by classifying ‘Dada’ as obscene, putting its members on trial, and judging its practices to be detrimental to the reforming German nation. The issues raised by Berlin Dada's performance practices formed the basis for Berlin Dada's future historical treatment by its own members, who sought to establish the German cell's primacy as both the singular heir to Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire and the only legitimate mode of Dada expression in Weimar Germany.

Gothic drama deals obsessively with the spectacle of pale, broken and effectively castrated masculinity. The scopic epistemology of gothic drama insists that the emaciated male form be fetishized as the lost paternal origin of the dramatic action and the source of psychological dread. These plays embrace ‘unnatural absurdity’ as a way of breaking through the complacency of bourgeois ideology and challenging sexual normativity with the spectacle of sexual excess. The resulting ‘sensationalism’ begins to suggest a revolution in the coding and decoding of sexual identities, just at the moment when such identities are being produced for the purposes of wholesale cultural labelling, as well as to articulate theatricalized resistance to the normative dictates that those identities presuppose.

The Hindu festival of Taipucam celebrated in honour of the male god Murugan is one of the public festivals that Hindus in Singapore celebrate with a great deal of aplomb and ceremony. It takes on the hue of a carnival and is a major tourist attraction. At the centre of the festival is the male kavadi bearer. Beside him walks the docile woman carrying her pot of milk. In the Taipucam festival procession, there is clearly apparent an empowered male versus a subsidiary female space, which appears determinate and confined, marking a tentative emergence of a subversive ‘feminist’ space that attempts to grasp at a measure of empowerment for women.

The disappearance of Meyerhold into the Soviet prison system in 1939 fostered legends, which contributed to his rehabilitation as a martyr. A primary contribution to this process was a fictional account of his defiant speech at the All-Soviet Directors' Conference a few days before his arrest. The speech, made up out of whole cloth by the émigré musician Yury Elagin in 1951, gained considerable currency and was circulated as Cold War propaganda. It was not wholly discredited until the 1990s, when the publication of the stenographic transcript of the Conference proceedings revealed Meyerhold's actual capitulation to Stalinist artistic policy and his poor showing on the podium.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

Hughes Mearns

Although the concept of ‘intermediality’ recently has gained prominence within the discourse of Theatre Studies, still various contradictory definitions of that term circulate, none of which applies insight from the field of Media Theory to theatre. Rather than clinging to the banal formula ‘theatre + media = intermedial theatre’ and thus perpetuating the idea of medial specificity, an approach to intermediality informed by Media Theory stresses underlying strategies of processing all kinds of information, including the aesthetic, within a certain period. Consequently, theatre's genuine ‘mediality’ already implies its ‘intermediality’, which in fact can be traced back all the way to classical Greek drama. Within the present transformation from McLuhan's ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ into an ‘electrONic culture’, theatre now trains its spectators in cognitive strategies of that emerging cultural paradigm. The performance Circulation Module by the Japanese group NEST reflects these significant repercussions of electrONic culture on theatrical performance at the turn of the twenty-first century.

James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.

Although current theories of diaspora argue for a break between an older irrevocable migration from one nation to another and a new transnational movement between host country and birthplace, research on nineteenth- as well as twentieth-century North America demonstrates that earlier migration also had a transnational dimension. The cultural consequences of this two-way traffic include syncretic performance forms, institutions, and audiences, whose legitimacy depended on engagement with but not total assimilation in local conventions and on the mobilization of touristic nostalgia in, say, Cantonese opera in California or Bavarian-American musicals in New York, to appeal to nativist and immigrant consumers. Today, syncretic theatre of diaspora is complicated on the one hand by a theatre of diasporic residence, in which immigrants dramatize inherited conflicts in the host country, such as Québécois separatism in Canada, along with problems of migrants, among them South Asians, and on the other by a theatre of non-residence, touring companies bringing theatre from the home country, say India, to ‘non-resident Indians’ and local audiences in the United States.

Community theatre in Israel emerged as a unique theatrical form at the beginning of the 1970s in several disadvantaged neighbourhoods inhabited by the Mizrahim (Jews originating from Arab countries). It has since developed into a vital and diverse cultural intervention within different groups and locations. The political community theatre of the Mizrahi ethnic group reflects the power relationships between the hegemonic establishment of the Ashkenazi (Jews originating from Western countries) and the Mizrahi minority. The socio-cultural categories of ethnicity, class and gender are applied to two community theatre performances as generators of an alternative identity processing.

The implications of a technology of virtualization invite the question: ‘How does the constitution of Shakespeare as a performance event stand to be changed by its performance in the virtual?’ Performance as a virtual event on the internet alters a number of balances that are still in place for those who only see it by going to the theatre. It modifies the production of the audience's participation in performances, by weighting their response towards the performability (rather than the performance) of the play in question, and by incorporating that participation into the play's public profile and publicity. It also changes the territory of the production space and activity by an exposure of the company's cultural and commercial space, a space that presents itself in terms of solicitation of the internet audience's engagement. But virtual performance can also constitute itself as adjacency, as theatrical critique in a mediation between Shakespeare theatre and other forms of performance. Finally, there is no simple opposition between the live and its mediated reproduction, since it is the mediatization that enables – animates – the ‘liveness’ of the actor in performance.

German American theatre in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New York City became a model for both a national American theatre and other diasporic theatres in the US. This theatre aspired to an autonomous, class-free, universal culture, which was seen as the legacy of a German Enlightenment tradition epitomized by Schiller's national(izing) theatre. German Americans were thus exceptionally positioned to claim the ideology of a universal culture as a national characteristic. At the same time, however, the theatre was structured by market demands and the need to appeal to a diverse German American constituency. This oscillation between idealistic and commercial culture made the German American theatre attractive. In the end, the theatre not only helped legitimize New York City's cultural periphery, but became a model when a new American ‘national’ culture, the national theatre, was being imagined, which ultimately illustrates the importance of the concept of legitimacy for hybrid public cultures.

The performative uses which Mark Ravenhill's Faust (Faust Is Dead) (1997) and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), no matter how different, have made of the televised 1992 Los Angeles riots, underwrite Hal Foster's thesis that the 1990s have been confronted with a ‘return of the real’ in art and theory, through the insistence upon a renewed grounding in actual bodies and social sites, after the 1970s paradigm of art-as-text (Foucault) and the 1980s' art-as-simulacrum (Baudrillard). As such, Ravenhill's play and Smith's docudrama permit a commentary on the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center thereby further exploding the nation's semblance of reality and the false immunity it fosters.

Home, a pioneering theatrical production in post-communist Romania, cast homeless/orphaned youth in the Youth Theatre in Bucharest. The ‘orphan problem’ has been one of the most covered topics on Romania in western media, and one of the signs of Romania's ‘backwardness’, while neglect and indifference have characterized local press coverage. The significance of the production in changing the Romanian public's perception of these young people, many of whom are from the Roma ethnic group, is analysed, as are much wider political implications. Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament rapporteur for Romania, saw Home and afterwards expressed her support for Romania's acceptance into the European Union. The production and its reception permit a tracing of the historical relationship between the performance of Romanian marginality and national identity in relation to Europe.

The history of the earliest documented Chinese opera performances in California (1852) and their successors during the following decades reveal how Chinese theatre in the diaspora was produced and consumed by Chinese immigrants, European visitors and Americans. On the one hand, a familiar repertoire eased the nostalgia and reinforced the national consciousness of Chinese immigrants, while on the other, the ethnocentric reading and writing of Chinese theatre helped establish an eternal frontier in the ‘old West’ to protect American national identity in late nineteenth-century California's periods of economic and political turmoil. Finally, the exoticism of California's Chinese theatre in America contributed to a European sense of American cultural uniqueness. Chinese opera performances played a crucial role in the invention of Californian identity.

Among the cultural forms of the Indian diaspora in the West, the radical obscurity of drama and theatre in comparison with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry suggests a complicated relation between genre, location, language, and experience. As a collaborative public medium theatre depends on material resources, institutional networks, and specific cultural contexts which place it at several removes from the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres. Moreover, while novelists often employ diaspora as the enabling condition but not the subject of narrative, immigrant playwrights can create original theatre only when they distance themselves from their cultures of origin and embrace the experience of residence in the host culture, with all its attendant problems of acculturation and identity. In Canada, where the Indian immigrant communities are older, often visibly underprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the home-nation as well as of conditions in the diaspora. In the United States, in contrast, where large-scale immigration from India is relatively recent, socially privileged, and unencumbered by colonial baggage, original drama is virtually absent, and various forms of ‘travelling’ theatre dominate the culture of performance, reinforcing a powerful synonymy between ‘diaspora’ and ‘nation’. These two North American locations are paradigmatic examples, therefore, of the historically grounded interconnections between diaspora, nation, and theatre in the modern Indian context.