As I read these articles over, I am struck yet again at how many connections I find among them. I have come to think of this issue of Theatre Research International as the unintended special issue. But special issue on what? Overall, I think that taken together the articles are a primer on the challenges, possibilities and imperatives of representing globalization in live performance. But there are other connections as well. The economics and geopolitics of neoliberalism undergird all four explorations, especially as they provoke human migration and upend traditional arts-funding paradigms. What exactly constitutes ‘local’ is also very much an open question for all the authors. Whether it is because the performances are perceived as ‘from here’ or ‘from away’, or because the audiences and the artists do not share a common nation, local is revealed as a very unstable concept.

This article analyses Stories of Love & Hate, a headphone verbatim play produced in the aftermath of the Cronulla Riots in Sydney, Australia. While verbatim theatre typically invites audiences to listen therapeutically, Stories of Love & Hate enacts and enables two alternative forms of listening. First, it enacts the paradoxical mode of ‘ethical eavesdropping’; second, it enables the metatheatrical mode of ‘mediatized listening’. In doing so, the play asks spectators to reconsider whom they listen to and how. It also asks scholars to reconsider claims that verbatim theatre gives voice to those who go unheard by the media. Instead, the article argues that in the case of Stories of Love & Hate, headphone verbatim theatre enables the audience to listen to how the media listen.

100% Vancouver was created by Rimini Protokoll and produced in 2011 by Theatre Replacement as part of the PuSh Festival. One hundred Vancouver residents performed a statistical portrait of the city based on Canada's 2006 mandatory long-form census. In this article, I set out to understand how a show that felt so local is part of a global project and a transposable dramaturgy that is designed to be tented anywhere. I explore this seeming paradox in 100% Vancouver because it self-consciously shared the stage with a corporate sponsor connected to the globalizing force of finance capitalism. I propose that this transparent redistribution of artistic capital to corporations that deal in finance capital is not a capitulation to the market. Rather, it is a social relationship with the market. 100% Vancouver demonstrates how contemporary citizen-led performance is a battleground for declining and dominant visions of governmentality that range from welfare government to finance capitalism.

This article focuses on the practice of translating Brazilian playwright Samir Yazbek's play The Ritual for the Royal National Theatre, as part of its 2012 Connections season. The article charts the course of the translation through its different stages, and through the different drafts of the play as they emerged, and examines the way in which translation itself can become a mediator for dramaturgical support, development, enquiry and critique. Through an interrogation not only of what is retained by the playwright, but also of what ultimately falls by the wayside, what is lost, I examine the peculiarly British notion of ‘workshopping’ new writing, in its linguistic mediated form of translation, and the role of the translator as cultural mediator. Ultimately, the article points towards an international economy of playwriting products where translation becomes a means of mediating cultures through particular and specific frames that remain largely unchallenged.

Profound demographic shifts in Australia's population are raising fundamental questions about how we reimagine the practices of our mainstream cultural institutions. The ability and the willingness of these institutions to reconceptualize their work in ways that encompass a diversity of traditions and tastes are critical. The paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notions of distinctions and taste to examine the influence of cultural identification on the choices that young people make about attending live theatre. The paper includes findings from a large Australian study, TheatreSpace, which examined why young people chose to engage or not to engage with theatre. In New South Wales nearly 40 per cent of the 726 young participants spoke a language other than English at home. Most were attending with their schools, many with no history of family attendance. This paper highlights significant issues about cultural relevance, accessibility and the often unintended challenges and confrontations that theatre can present to young first-generation Australians.