‘Silent Voices/Forbidden Lives: Censorship and Performance’ was the topic of IFTR's annual conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, in July 2009. Introducing the theme of the conference, the organizers signalled the importance of censorship for Portugal and other countries with histories of governmental dictatorship, given the ways in which this has made an impact or left its mark on the cultural, social and political fabric of the nation. The first two articles in this issue, by Jean Graham-Jones and Paul Rae, arose out of papers presented at the Lisbon conference. Both authors open up the censorship debate to argue for more subtle accounts of how the term is conceptualized. In brief, both are mindful of the cautionary note sounded in an earlier TRI article on ‘the limits of censorship’ by Janelle Reinelt where she writes, ‘“Censorship” has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it.’

This article probes some of the ‘catches’ in the universal application of the common-sense word ‘censorship’. To do so, it scrutinizes the application of the Spanish-language term censura to theatre produced in Buenos Aires and its working-class suburbs in the past thirty-five years, under dictatorship as well as democracy, through the examination of specific cases of productions and plays classified as censored, self-censored, and/or counter-censorial. The article concludes by examining two plays whose writing pre-dates the last dictatorship but which are still considered illustrative of a certain kind of Argentinian censorship. Through these various examples drawn from Argentinian theatrical practice, the article exposes censorship as a problematic category when applied equally at all times.

Too programmatic an opposition to censorship fails to account for the nuanced justifications and popular support that underwrite some of the world's most refined censorship regimes. In this article, I argue that in order to do so, we need to place freedom, repression, regulation, expression and productivity in a more dynamic relationship than conventional critics of censorship are generally willing to entertain. By way of example, I examine theatre censorship in Singapore. The South East Asian city state inherited draconian colonial-era censorship regulations from the British, which it variously amends, rescinds and refines on a regular basis through a combination of negotiation, government review and, increasingly, public participation. I explore several examples, including an all-male production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which triggered a range of local and international responses, thereby exemplifying the complex historical, political and aesthetic dynamics of censorship in a highly globalized environment.

This article is about the power of cultural performances to shape and sometimes coerce public opinion and public behaviours. In the process, I intend to defend a concept which has few supporters these days: ‘political correctness’. So prevalent is this concept in our public discourse that its meanings have become habitual, thus ideologically invisible. Beginning with an examination of the term and its history, I situate it in relation to the arts through its relation to censorship, and frame it within the broad field of cultural performances to which it belongs. Concluding with a specific case study taken from theatre, I hope to perform a ‘correction’ of sorts – to reintroduce the term as a positive value and practice in an artistic milieu which has largely rejected its utility.

In a fashion that harks back to the birth of naturalistic drama, but also reflects contemporary anxieties about the etiolation of the real, the forensic capabilities of theatre have become, in the last two decades, the primary focus of theatrical attention. Reconsidering landmark works and rhetorical frames that helped to establish verbatim, virtual and in-yer-face theatre, this article explores the ways in which these key works and genres deploy, and attempt to jam, theatre's diagnostic machinery. The article contextualizes that machinery in relation to the medical underpinnings of naturalism, the growth of theatrical reflexivity from Pirandello to Beckett to Blast Theory, and the televisual phenomena of crime-scene investigation and fly-on-the-wall ‘reality shows’. In the final section I move to address two works which are explicitly about diagnosis, but which, in signal and purposeful ways, evade diagnosis: Must, by American performance artist Peggy Shaw and British company Clod Ensemble; and If That's All There Is, by UK-based company Inspector Sands.

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments.