Series: In Performance

Theatre in New Zealand began as a tool of the British Empire, imported along with Christianity, seeds, and other commodities as a way of acculturating the indigenous Māori population. In the decades since, it has been turned to different ends, and is now a crucial outlet for the voices of the ever more diverse population of New Zealanders. This collection...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognised in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek’s groundbreaking work that...

Since premiering his pioneering linguistic experiment I Love XXX in Beijing nearly twenty-five years ago, Meng Jinghui has been credited with revitalizing Chinese theatre by popularising the avant-garde. Mixing high culture with mass culture, his plays address China’s enduring revolutionary nostalgia and current social problems, challenging the artistic status quo from the mainstream rather than the margins. His creations range...

By turns astonishing, fierce, and tender, these seven plays by Latina-American dramatist Caridad Svich highlight more than two decades of boundary-breaking and genre-defying dramatic work. Populated by characters struggling to survive, these plays are joined by thematic threads of loss, remembrance, resurrection, grave wit, and heroic survival. The centrepiece of this collection, Instructions for Breathing, is a lyrical, dreamlike meditation...

The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa’s Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays explore themes of memory and identity. Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates—they converge and separate while the characters inhabit many dimensions at once with ease. In one way or another, the heroes and heroines...