This article examines two recent queer adaptations of Romeo and Juliet in Seoul, attending to their opposite receptions in relation to the gap between queer theory and gay reality. It focuses on LAS's Juliet and Juliet, hailed as ‘female queer theatre’ despite being conservative gay, while discussing briefly in comparison Yohangza's Romeo and Juliet, decried as ‘anti-queer’ for all its queerness. Although the dream of a happy married life in Juliet and Juliet appears similar to the much-critiqued homonormativity, I defend it as a ‘gay utopian fantasy’ rooted in the predicament of Korean queers under the ideology of familism. Questioning the adequacy of Western-centric queer theory to explain Korean gay reality, I call for the need to develop alternative concepts and positive vocabularies to give voice to the lived experience and aspiration of sexual minorities in countries like Korea, for whom the post-gay era has not yet arrived.

The Western tours of the Mei Lanfang and Tsutsui troupes in 1930 illustrated how to (re)construct the theatrical nationality of China and Japan through the manifestation and manipulation of the performance of Peking opera and kabuki. Through the ‘purification’ of Peking opera's stage presentation system, the Mei Lanfang troupe forged a ‘pure’ theatrical Chineseness that boosted the Americans’ fascination with the ‘(a)historicality’ of Chinese theatrical tradition. By presenting Westerners with a ‘hybridized’ kabuki, which embodied a ‘historically authentic’ theatrical Japaneseness, the Tsutsui troupe deconstructed Westerners’ psychological expectations of a culturally imagined ‘pure’ and ‘classical’ Japanese theatre. As two sides of the same coin, the two troupes’ (re)construction of theatrical Chineseness and Japaneseness together challenged the West's essentialist views of cultural ‘Others’, which forcibly endowed Eastern theatre with a pure and unchanged ‘otherness’.

The aim of this article is an interpretation of Eimuntas Nekrošius's performances staged in the National Theatre Warsaw in the last years of his life. In the context of complex political and cultural relationships between Poland and Lithuania, the aesthetics of the theatre of sensual metaphors invented by Nekrošius might be perceived from an uncommon perspective – not as a type of universal art presenting crucial issues of mankind, but as a transnational reinterpretation of Polish classic plays – first of all, the nineteenth-century Forefathers’ Eve by Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet born near Vilnius in Lithuania. From this point of view, the theatre of Nekrošius reveals his political potential to create a transnational bridge between neighbour states. The author tries to apply notions of ‘subaltern agency’ (Gayatri Spivak) and the ‘cosmopolitan subject’ (Yana Meerzon) to present the complex issue of empowerment of Polish and Lithunanian subjects – from rejection of the false messianic consciousness to transnational rapprochement.

Since the early 2010s, the arts and culture in Sweden have taken a stand against the prevailing epistemic ignorance of the country's Indigenous Sámi people by confronting majoritarian society with the realities of settler colonialism. This article suggests that theatre and performance form part of this Sámi cultural activism and highlights the decolonial labour of Giron Sámi Teáhter, the oldest professionally driven touring company in the Swedish part of Sápmi. Taking one specific production as a springboard, the article demonstrates the larger, structural issues at stake. Giron Sámi Teáhter deploys the stage as a vibrant, decolonial forum where the history of settler colonialism and the Sámi people's struggle toward self-determination is performed, celebrated and encouraged. The company has long striven to gain official status as the national theatre for Sámi performing arts in Sweden and the article therefore also outlines the financial and political impediments encountered by Giron Sámi Teáhter.

For left cultural activism, ‘theatre’ forms an important ‘worksite of democracy’ which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing ‘field of forces’. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play Nahi Qubool (Unacceptable) was designed to expose neo-liberal policies undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. The play continued to be performed even after a change of government with suitable modifications for changed circumstances. This genealogy of performance demonstrates the contours of politics and activist performances in contemporary India. It reveals that theatre as a ‘laboratory for democracy’ can also perform a diagnostic role to enhance the effectiveness of political strategy.