Among the cultural forms of the Indian diaspora in the West, the radical obscurity of drama and theatre in comparison with fiction, non-fiction, and poetry suggests a complicated relation between genre, location, language, and experience. As a collaborative public medium theatre depends on material resources, institutional networks, and specific cultural contexts which place it at several removes from the privacy and relative self-sufficiency of print genres. Moreover, while novelists often employ diaspora as the enabling condition but not the subject of narrative, immigrant playwrights can create original theatre only when they distance themselves from their cultures of origin and embrace the experience of residence in the host culture, with all its attendant problems of acculturation and identity. In Canada, where the Indian immigrant communities are older, often visibly underprivileged, and entangled in post/colonial histories, an emergent culture of original playwriting and performance has offered a critique of the home-nation as well as of conditions in the diaspora. In the United States, in contrast, where large-scale immigration from India is relatively recent, socially privileged, and unencumbered by colonial baggage, original drama is virtually absent, and various forms of ‘travelling’ theatre dominate the culture of performance, reinforcing a powerful synonymy between ‘diaspora’ and ‘nation’. These two North American locations are paradigmatic examples, therefore, of the historically grounded interconnections between diaspora, nation, and theatre in the modern Indian context.

In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman's 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.