In this article Swati Arora analyzes a contemporary Indian feminist performance, Thoda Dhyaan Se (A Little Carefully, 2013), by framing it in the spatial ecosystem of the city of Delhi and exploring its engagement with feminist discourse and the national imaginary of India. It highlights the workings of the cultural economy of the city, which is defined by its spatial contours as well as the privileges of caste, class, sexuality, and ethnicity, and at the same time explores the heterogeneous nature of the country's feminist movement through an intersectional perspective. Swati Arora argues that the concerns raised by Thoda Dhyaan Se are limited to urban, middle-class, and upper-caste women and overlook the oppressive realities of women from non-urban, lower-class, and lower-caste backgrounds. With conversations around gender focused through campaigns like #MeToo and #TImesUp, it is important to contextualize the voices that are articulated and those that are excluded. Swati Arora is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Her work exists at the intersections of theatre and performance, feminist theory, critical urban studies, post/de-colonial theory, and visual cultures. She completed her PhD at the University of Exeter and is a coconvenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research.

In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre, where it is argued that the genre is essentially ‘predramatic’. Considered as such, ancient Greek tragedy cannot be fully investigated using dramatic theories developed since early modernity. In view of this, Walter J. Ong's caution with respect to the rational processes produced by generations of literate culture will be acknowledged and alternative critiques sought, including performance criticism and performance-oriented frameworks such as orality, via which Frendo traces possible critical trajectories that would allow contemporary scholarship to deal with ancient tragedy as a performance rather than literary phenomenon. Reference will be made to Aristotle's use of the term ‘poetry’, and how performance criticism may provide new insight into how the Poetics deals with one of the earliest performance phenomena in the West. Mario Frendo is lecturer of theatre and performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is director of CaP, a research group focusing on links between culture and performance. His research interests include musicality in theatre, ancient tragedy, and relations between philosophical thought and performance.

In this article, Alex Mangold identifies failure as a defining element of tragedy and argues that traditional understandings of the genre have been too narrow. Here, he asserts that tragic failure contributes to a tragic ‘mode’ that transcends genre definitions and, instead, extends to all kinds of contemporary theatre and performance. Examining a wide range of performance examples, including work from Sophocles to Sarah Kane, Forced Entertainment, Sasha Waltz, and Orlan, he argues that tragic failure, as it has come to be realized in examples of postdramatic writing and in site-specific or dance-based performance, is presented as an option, a dramatic choice, an outcome or part of an overall denial of dramatic form. The true power of the new tragic consequently lies in its ability to foster social change and a more ethical stance toward social dystopias. Alex Mangold lectures in the Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is co-editor (with Broderick Chow) of Žižek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014) and has published articles and chapters on the work of Sarah Kane and Howard Barker.

Before the October Revolution, political exiles and Jewish refugees spread the image of Russia as a vast prison, riven by violence and corruption. After the Revolution, émigrés who scattered across the globe broadcast their idea of a fabulous, high-spirited Russia. Cabaret – an arena for theatrical innovation, stylistic experimentation, and avant-garde audacity – was a choice medium to dramatize this idea to non-Russian audiences. Throughout the 1920s, émigré cabarets enjoyed great popularity: Nikita Baliev's Chauve- Souris in New York, Jurij Jushnij's Die Blaue Vogel in Berlin, J. Son's Maschere in Italy, among others. Although the acts were polyglot and the compère pattered away in a pidgin version of whichever language was current, the chief attraction was an artificial Russian - ness. Cabarets promulgated a vision of a fairy-tale, toy-box Russia, akin to the pictures on Palekh boxes. This candy-box depiction was then perpetuated by nightclubs staffed by waiters in Cossack blouses and balalaika orchestras. Nostalgic regret for a factitious homeland deepened among the departed. In contrast, Soviet Russia came to look even more hostile and desolate. With time, the distance between the lives they had lived and those portrayed to foreigners increased, and became unmoored from reality. Laurence Senelick's most recent books include Soviet Theater: a Documentary History (2014, with Sergei Ostrovsky), the second, enlarged edition of A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre (2015), and Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Yi Sun-shin (1545–98), an admiral of the Joseon dynasty, is a Korean national hero who is admired by both North and South Korea regardless of political ideology. Yet between 1960 and 1970 North and South Korea presented Yi from different perspectives in accordance with their own political interests. In South Korea, Yi was portrayed as a solitary hero who sacrificed himself to save the country despite the blame and entrapment he suffered as a result. Alongside, North Korea presented Yi as an ideal leader with the warmth of a father figure who embraced the people's aspirations to fight against their Japanese enemies. In this article, Seong-kwan Cho and Jae-beom Hong discuss these representations of Yi and survey North Korean theatre of the 1960s, which is rarely examined in theatre scholarship outside the Korean peninsula. Seong-kwan Cho (first author) lectures in the Korean Department of Konkuk University, and published in NTQ136 on South Korean theatre censorship. Jae-beom Hong (corresponding author) is a Professor in the same Department. The pair have recently been researching North Korean realist theatre, and this article is their third on the subject. This paper was supported by Konkuk University in 2016.

In this article Pompila Burcică traces the work and legal conditions in which Hungarian theatre professionals – company directors and actors – operated as a national minority of middle-class status in Greater Romania after 1918. Their attempts at representing Hungarian culture in the public space, as revealed in their business correspondence with the Romanian state, placed theatre professionals not at the vanguard of a collective action on behalf of a minority and its cultural life, but at the forefront of civic engagement and individual private initiative that led to economic recovery and development, thus illustrating the array of civic choices and economic opportunities for minorities holding Romanian citizenship in a nation state. The article focuses on two issues: the work environment for minorities that helped them adjust professionally and negotiate and exert a civic identity in the new nation state; and the degree to which a cultural field such as theatre was actually treated as an economic entrerprise, free of political interference. These civic and economic concerns accounted for the success of these theatre entrepreneurs, operating their businesses under the control of a paternalistic state.