This collection addresses issues of performativity and the practices of representation, both historically at the interfaces of theatre practitioners and sexual practices, and intermedially at the intersection of performance and the constructed liveness of mediatized events. The formula of the performative as a ‘doing’ by a thing done, as phrased by Elin Diamond, neatly conveys the ‘mediation’ of the events which are extra-performative and locates performance in a particular tense, thus heightening the tension between the simulation of an act and its enaction.

In 1772, William Kenrick published Love in the Suds, a direct attack on David Garrick. In 1776, Humphrey Nettle [William Jackson] published Sodom and Onan, a satire against Samuel Foote. Both of these texts make explicit charges of homosexuality against the two men. Why were these two actors singled out at this particular moment: serendipity or a new mechanism of power? An examination, thus, is required, of the representational practices operating within and without theatre, through which accepted sexual practices and new forms of personhood were normalized and put into discourse in late eighteenth-century London. The fact that this was to be achieved by placing actor's image and actor's body, occupying an ambiguous social position, under close scrutiny, points to a new economy in performing cultural and societal norms.

Gothic drama deals obsessively with the spectacle of pale, broken and effectively castrated masculinity. The scopic epistemology of gothic drama insists that the emaciated male form be fetishized as the lost paternal origin of the dramatic action and the source of psychological dread. These plays embrace ‘unnatural absurdity’ as a way of breaking through the complacency of bourgeois ideology and challenging sexual normativity with the spectacle of sexual excess. The resulting ‘sensationalism’ begins to suggest a revolution in the coding and decoding of sexual identities, just at the moment when such identities are being produced for the purposes of wholesale cultural labelling, as well as to articulate theatricalized resistance to the normative dictates that those identities presuppose.

Although the concept of ‘intermediality’ recently has gained prominence within the discourse of Theatre Studies, still various contradictory definitions of that term circulate, none of which applies insight from the field of Media Theory to theatre. Rather than clinging to the banal formula ‘theatre + media = intermedial theatre’ and thus perpetuating the idea of medial specificity, an approach to intermediality informed by Media Theory stresses underlying strategies of processing all kinds of information, including the aesthetic, within a certain period. Consequently, theatre's genuine ‘mediality’ already implies its ‘intermediality’, which in fact can be traced back all the way to classical Greek drama. Within the present transformation from McLuhan's ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ into an ‘electrONic culture’, theatre now trains its spectators in cognitive strategies of that emerging cultural paradigm. The performance Circulation Module by the Japanese group NEST reflects these significant repercussions of electrONic culture on theatrical performance at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The implications of a technology of virtualization invite the question: ‘How does the constitution of Shakespeare as a performance event stand to be changed by its performance in the virtual?’ Performance as a virtual event on the internet alters a number of balances that are still in place for those who only see it by going to the theatre. It modifies the production of the audience's participation in performances, by weighting their response towards the performability (rather than the performance) of the play in question, and by incorporating that participation into the play's public profile and publicity. It also changes the territory of the production space and activity by an exposure of the company's cultural and commercial space, a space that presents itself in terms of solicitation of the internet audience's engagement. But virtual performance can also constitute itself as adjacency, as theatrical critique in a mediation between Shakespeare theatre and other forms of performance. Finally, there is no simple opposition between the live and its mediated reproduction, since it is the mediatization that enables – animates – the ‘liveness’ of the actor in performance.

The performative uses which Mark Ravenhill's Faust (Faust Is Dead) (1997) and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), no matter how different, have made of the televised 1992 Los Angeles riots, underwrite Hal Foster's thesis that the 1990s have been confronted with a ‘return of the real’ in art and theory, through the insistence upon a renewed grounding in actual bodies and social sites, after the 1970s paradigm of art-as-text (Foucault) and the 1980s' art-as-simulacrum (Baudrillard). As such, Ravenhill's play and Smith's docudrama permit a commentary on the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center thereby further exploding the nation's semblance of reality and the false immunity it fosters.

The Singaporean company TheatreWorks, under the artistic direction of Ong Keng Sen, has been responsible for the creation of a number of large-scale Asian intercultural works that have toured to international festivals from Adelaide to Hamburg. Among the best known of these are Lear and Desdemona, both of which use Shakespeare as a point of departure for new performance pieces that bring together practitioners representing a wide range of traditional and contemporary art forms. Unlike other intercultural experiments, in Lear and Desdemona practitioners stay largely within the frame of their own performance and linguistic traditions, creating a work which, especially in the case of Desdemona, is far from seamless. Using the 2000 production of Desdemona as an object of inquiry, this model of Asian intercultural production is examined against the backdrop of the politics of one's location, the troubled audience response to the work in Singapore and Adelaide, and the current state of intercultural theory.