An exploration of the repressed issues of class and gender which inhabit the Irish national unconscious, also seeks to intervene in the essentialism/constructionism debate concerning national identity which has preoccupied post-colonial scholars and Irish studies academics over the last few decades. The argument focuses on Synge's plays and culminates in an examination of his magnum opus The Playboy of the Western World (1907), while analysing Declan Kiberd's appropriation of Frantz Fanon's theories of decolonization in his critique of Synge's play. The objective is not only to trace the Möbius strip of national essence qua cultural construct, but also to analyse the dialectic of desire which energizes cultural and political identification.

German Dada, particularly the Berlin performance practices of George Grosz and Richard Hülsenbeck, shifted the ‘eternal’ history of the German Reich into the immediacy and annihilation of the postwar Berlin environment. These practitioners formed their social and political opinions into Dada's own German national narrative. The Weimar government responded by classifying ‘Dada’ as obscene, putting its members on trial, and judging its practices to be detrimental to the reforming German nation. The issues raised by Berlin Dada's performance practices formed the basis for Berlin Dada's future historical treatment by its own members, who sought to establish the German cell's primacy as both the singular heir to Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire and the only legitimate mode of Dada expression in Weimar Germany.

The disappearance of Meyerhold into the Soviet prison system in 1939 fostered legends, which contributed to his rehabilitation as a martyr. A primary contribution to this process was a fictional account of his defiant speech at the All-Soviet Directors' Conference a few days before his arrest. The speech, made up out of whole cloth by the émigré musician Yury Elagin in 1951, gained considerable currency and was circulated as Cold War propaganda. It was not wholly discredited until the 1990s, when the publication of the stenographic transcript of the Conference proceedings revealed Meyerhold's actual capitulation to Stalinist artistic policy and his poor showing on the podium.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

Hughes Mearns

James Joyce's one extant play, Exiles, has never been held in great critical esteem. But rather than viewing it as an aberration in the Joyce canon, a fairer reading of the play takes into consideration the play's own theatrical context: what contemporary dramatists were doing both in print and on stage, what evidence there is of Joyce's own theatrical interests and what models he may have used in his own playwriting. The conclusion is that Joyce, surprisingly, wrote neither a ‘bad’ Edwardian play nor a slavishly Ibsenist one, but a pastiche of Victorian and Symbolist drama that roots the play firmly in the theatrical currents of the 1890s. In addition, Harold Pinter's landmark productions of the play in 1970 and 1971 revealed affinities with postmodernist drama, so that the play looks forward as well as back – it is simply not of its own time. If Exiles seems out of step with the developments of modernism, that is largely because it takes its inspiration from the European experimental theatre of the fin de siécle – not from the theatrical world of the Dadaists, Joyce's contemporaries. While this realization may not rehabilitate Exiles into the modernist canon or indeed the theatrical one, looking at the play's context and history raises key questions about the role of theatre and performance in the historiography of modernism.

Community theatre in Israel emerged as a unique theatrical form at the beginning of the 1970s in several disadvantaged neighbourhoods inhabited by the Mizrahim (Jews originating from Arab countries). It has since developed into a vital and diverse cultural intervention within different groups and locations. The political community theatre of the Mizrahi ethnic group reflects the power relationships between the hegemonic establishment of the Ashkenazi (Jews originating from Western countries) and the Mizrahi minority. The socio-cultural categories of ethnicity, class and gender are applied to two community theatre performances as generators of an alternative identity processing.

Home, a pioneering theatrical production in post-communist Romania, cast homeless/orphaned youth in the Youth Theatre in Bucharest. The ‘orphan problem’ has been one of the most covered topics on Romania in western media, and one of the signs of Romania's ‘backwardness’, while neglect and indifference have characterized local press coverage. The significance of the production in changing the Romanian public's perception of these young people, many of whom are from the Roma ethnic group, is analysed, as are much wider political implications. Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament rapporteur for Romania, saw Home and afterwards expressed her support for Romania's acceptance into the European Union. The production and its reception permit a tracing of the historical relationship between the performance of Romanian marginality and national identity in relation to Europe.