This article investigates Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) through Dominick LaCapra’s concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’, analyzing how the play transforms theatrical spectatorship into an ethical confrontation with violence. Kane’s ‘in-yer-face’ dramaturgy dismantles naturalistic boundaries, collapsing a private hotel room into a war-torn landscape where the personal and political fuse in a relentless exposure of brutality. Drawing on LaCapra’s distinction between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’, the discussion explores how Kane converts trauma from representation to experience, compelling audiences to oscillate between immersion and reflection. Ian’s progression from perpetrator to victim, his detached journalism, and the play’s fragmentation of time and space collectively enact an ethics of witnessing that resists voyeurism and moral closure. By situating Kane’s theatre within debates on trauma, spectatorship, and media desensitization, including the ideas of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler, the article argues that Blasted teaches empathy through discomfort, inserting the passivity of spectators and demanding moral responsiveness. In doing so, Kane redefines theatrical realism not as a mirror of violence but as a site where empathy, horror, and ethical awareness co-exist in productive tension.

Utilizing a Practice-as-Research methodology (PaR), this article reflects on creative discoveries made in the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ creative development, which was a series a workshops conducted by the author to develop the scripts for a queer early modern adaptation titled Love & Faith (and something unholy), which debuted at Qtopia Sydney in 2024. The workshop series engaged a team of LGBTIQ+ actors to explore scenes from John Lyly’s Galatea and William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, considering how these works might be adapted into a queer split-bill performance the following year. This paper unpacks several creative discoveries made in the workshops, as well as actor insights and reflections, situating the rehearsal room as a central site of knowledge generation. It demonstrates how the adaptation of early modern plays can provide queer artists with the opportunity to locate personal and collective histories that have been lost or erased, and highlights how these histories might allow queer artists to rethink the present and produce positive futures through creative embodiment. Such discoveries draw attention to the reparative function of adaptation: how it might offer LGBTIQ+ creatives the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with time itself by creatively engaging with the inbuilt queerness of early modern plays.

This article identifies and theorizes a significant paradigm shift within the Chinese entertainment industry: the ‘immersive turn’ in escape-room design. Moving beyond the established model of sequential puzzle-solving, a new generation of premium Chinese escape rooms – exemplified by UMEPLAY’s ‘Tape Series’ – prioritizes narrative atmosphere, emotional engagement, and multi-sensory scenography. This study argues that this evolution is not merely a commercial upgrade but constitutes a legitimate form of postdramatic theatre practice, as conceptualized by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Through a detailed performance analysis of UMEPLAY’s ‘Abeille’, supported by designer interviews and participant observation, the paper demonstrates how these environments operate through a postdramatic paradigm: they decentre linear narrative in favour of fragmented, atmospheric storytelling; transform architectural space into an active, performative force; and reconfigure participants as ‘performing spectators’ whose embodied actions complete the work. The analysis further examines the tension between curated experience and perceived agency, and confronts the implications of a commercially driven, popular postdramatic form. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute a new theoretical framework for analyzing hybrid immersive experiences, expand the geographical and cultural scope of postdramatic performance studies, and posit the Chinese immersive escape room as a vital site for understanding the evolving boundaries between theatre, game, and experiential consumption in the twenty-first century.

Theatre reviews have long shaped artistic discourse, but their role in capturing the cultural depth of global majority theatre is seldom addressed. HOME X, a collaboration between East Asian artists in London and Hong Kong, highlights the rich interactions between theatre, diasporic identity, and Chinese literary traditions. However, its British theatre reviews largely ignored these cultural references, prioritizing the production’s technological aspect over HOME X’s deep-rooted engagement with Chinese literature including mythology, fable, poetry, and the novel. This article foregrounds the cultural and literary depth of HOME X, and contrasts it with the limited lens of existing British theatre reviews, further drawing on such theories as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘epistemic violence’ and Ric Knowles’s ‘new interculturalism’ to address the controversies surrounding such reviews. It thus argues for a more inclusive and culturally aware approach to reviewing East and South East Asian (ESEA) performances in an era when global majority theatre practices and audience are visibly increasing.

From an eco-spectatorial perspective, every live theatrical event is an ecosystem – a fusion of production, reception, society, and the environment. In Timothy Morton’s phrase from Being Ecological (2018), live theatre is ‘an experiential space’. When theatre (whatever its subject matter) is recognized as ecological, flows of energy, matter, and ideas come into view, as the combined life force driving the whole. In 2016, Carl Lavery asked, of the relationship between performance and the environmental crisis, ‘What Can Theatre Do?’ As a keen reader of nature writing, with a long-standing interest in eco-spectatorship, I see parallels between theatre and nature writing. Yet, a nature/culture divide separates the two fields. In this article, I experimentally conjoin them, in the hope of seeing more clearly what theatre might do. My opening paragraphs set the ecocritical scene. A shift in style brings in nature writing as a practical experiment in spectatorship. I explore several recent examples of live theatre, as a spectator: the RSC/Good Chance 2024 production of Kyoto; the 2024 revival of Complicité’s 1999 devised production Mnemonic; Kae Tempest’s 2021 play Paradise (National Theatre); and the RSC’s 2023 Theatre Green Book production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

The playwright and translator Alfred Sutro (1863–1933), now largely forgotten, played a rarely acknowledged part in the turn to a more socially conscious drama at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article seeks to reassess his relevance as a transitional figure whose career reflected the contradictory features of a changing cultural landscape. Commercially successful in the West End and able to draw large audiences to his plays, he nonetheless probed the latent tensions and conflicts of the Edwardian era with a critical gaze. In Sutro’s work, the interplay between the established conventions of West End theatre models and occasional subversive elements which undermine them is representative of a period which accommodated a widening range of approaches and perspectives. As a serious dramatist who nonetheless remained attuned to box-office appeal, he combined moments of frivolous humour with a strong moralizing tendency, bringing together two seemingly incompatible sides of the Edwardian theatre.

This article develops an intercultural hermeneutic for reading contemporary kunqu as a site where aesthetic practice and theory meet in mutual articulation. Centring its focus on the Shishuo Xinyu [A New Account of Tales of the World] – an ongoing series of kunqu vignettes by the Jiangsu Province Kun Opera Theatre – this article examines three of its episodes (Fang Dai, Wu Jue, and Tiao Zheng) in order to argue that such xiqu (Chinese traditional opera) principles as ‘using the virtual to evoke the tangible’ and ‘vital resonance’ articulate a relational model of theatrical mediation in which body, object, and imagination co-produce presence through rhythmic reciprocity. In dialogue with Irina Rajewsky’s intermedial reference and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s autopoietic feedback loop, the analysis seeks to demonstrate how minimal scenic cues – a cloak, a mirror, a zither – may function as intersemiotic triggers that transform suggestion into embodied historiography, reanimating the Wei-Jin ethos for contemporary spectators. Drawing on scripts, performance recordings, production materials, and artist interviews, the article positions kunqu not merely as a cultural heritage form but as a theoretical interlocutor that contributes an indigenous aesthetic logic to global debates on intermediality, minimal scenography, and the modernization of intangible heritage.

This article reflects on performing A Taste of Millefeuille, a visual theatre piece by Éric de Sarria that develops the aesthetic and pedagogical legacy of Compagnie Philippe Genty. Focusing on the 2024 production at Theatre YOUNG (Shanghai), it examines how physical manipulation, gendered presence, and material interaction were adapted to linguistic, cultural, and performative contexts. Using a practice-based and auto-ethnographic lens, it explores how memory, rhythm, and performer–object relations were negotiated in rehearsal and performance. These reflections are placed within wider debates on intercultural theatre-making and visual dramaturgy, showing how meaning can emerge across cultures through non-verbal performance.

This article explores the historical antecedents and later developments of the ‘quick-change’ or so-called ‘protean’ performance genres enacted on the British stage by male and female artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Foundational in intent and chronological in approach, it foregrounds previously unknown or neglected performers, especially (though not exclusively) from Britain, whose respective contributions to these genres have seldom been recognized. Overall, the research highlights the rich complexity of these marginalized yet sophisticated performance practices that have been critically ignored within theatre historiography but which are still alive today.

With her politically engaged writing and innovative adaptations, Stef Smith is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British theatre. She first gained recognition in 2010 for Roadkill, which won an Olivier Award, and her later plays, such as Swallow (2015), Girl in the Machine (2017), and Enough (2019), have been staged internationally. While each of these pieces attests to the playwright’s ability to confront such urgent social issues as technology, gender, and identity, the focus of her 2016 play Human Animals is on humans’ fragile relationship with animals and the wider environment. By foregrounding animals as literal and symbolic agents, the play challenges its audiences to reconsider the boundaries between human and non-human animals, and the ethical implications of survival. In this interview, conducted in December 2025, Tuğba Aygan talks to Stef Smith about Human Animals. Their discussion highlights Smith’s creative process, thematic concerns, and her insights into our relationship with non-human animals.

Drawing on the framework of intermediality, this article investigates Martin McDonagh’s decision to embed Robert Flaherty’s documentary Man of Aran within The Cripple of Inishmaan. Such an intertextual layering produces a dialogic encounter between theatre and cinema that dismantles Flaherty’s idealized vision of a harsh, primitive island existence in 1930s Ireland, substituting instead a sardonic, anti-romantic critique. McDonagh highlights the fractured familial relations, the peculiarities of the island community, and the absence of any natural harmony to construct a counter-perspective. This dramaturgical device of the ‘film-within-a-play’ operates ‘ekphrastically’, allowing the inserted text to breach the dramatic frame and open onto a liminal space – at once intermediary and unstable – between reality and representation. The article argues that this intermedial practice prompts spectators to interrogate both cinematic myth-making and theatrical narration, generating a hybrid aesthetic zone where stage and screen unsettle traditional dramatic forms and broaden the field of interpretation.

Festival de Almada – which was established in the city of Almada, on the south bank of the River Tagus, in 1984 – is Portugal’s pre-eminent international theatre festival. Led by its founding director, the acclaimed theatre-maker Joaquim Benite, until his death in 2012, the showcase has been taken forward successfully by his successor Rodrigo Francisco. Famous for its friendly and welcoming atmosphere, its democratic ethos and its ambitious programming, the festival has attracted many of the greatest companies, directors, and actors in world theatre. In 2020, Festival de Almada was the first summer festival to proceed – under assiduously applied public health protocols – in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article Mark Brown (who has attended most editions of the festival since 2008) provides a historical overview of the Almada showcase, highlighting particularly significant aspects of its ethos and programming, and offering critical insights into some notable productions.