This article investigates Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) through Dominick LaCapra’s concept of ‘empathic unsettlement’, analyzing how the play transforms theatrical spectatorship into an ethical confrontation with violence. Kane’s ‘in-yer-face’ dramaturgy dismantles naturalistic boundaries, collapsing a private hotel room into a war-torn landscape where the personal and political fuse in a relentless exposure of brutality. Drawing on LaCapra’s distinction between ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’, the discussion explores how Kane converts trauma from representation to experience, compelling audiences to oscillate between immersion and reflection. Ian’s progression from perpetrator to victim, his detached journalism, and the play’s fragmentation of time and space collectively enact an ethics of witnessing that resists voyeurism and moral closure. By situating Kane’s theatre within debates on trauma, spectatorship, and media desensitization, including the ideas of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler, the article argues that Blasted teaches empathy through discomfort, inserting the passivity of spectators and demanding moral responsiveness. In doing so, Kane redefines theatrical realism not as a mirror of violence but as a site where empathy, horror, and ethical awareness co-exist in productive tension.

Utilizing a Practice-as-Research methodology (PaR), this article reflects on creative discoveries made in the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ creative development, which was a series a workshops conducted by the author to develop the scripts for a queer early modern adaptation titled Love & Faith (and something unholy), which debuted at Qtopia Sydney in 2024. The workshop series engaged a team of LGBTIQ+ actors to explore scenes from John Lyly’s Galatea and William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, considering how these works might be adapted into a queer split-bill performance the following year. This paper unpacks several creative discoveries made in the workshops, as well as actor insights and reflections, situating the rehearsal room as a central site of knowledge generation. It demonstrates how the adaptation of early modern plays can provide queer artists with the opportunity to locate personal and collective histories that have been lost or erased, and highlights how these histories might allow queer artists to rethink the present and produce positive futures through creative embodiment. Such discoveries draw attention to the reparative function of adaptation: how it might offer LGBTIQ+ creatives the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with time itself by creatively engaging with the inbuilt queerness of early modern plays.

This article identifies and theorizes a significant paradigm shift within the Chinese entertainment industry: the ‘immersive turn’ in escape-room design. Moving beyond the established model of sequential puzzle-solving, a new generation of premium Chinese escape rooms – exemplified by UMEPLAY’s ‘Tape Series’ – prioritizes narrative atmosphere, emotional engagement, and multi-sensory scenography. This study argues that this evolution is not merely a commercial upgrade but constitutes a legitimate form of postdramatic theatre practice, as conceptualized by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Through a detailed performance analysis of UMEPLAY’s ‘Abeille’, supported by designer interviews and participant observation, the paper demonstrates how these environments operate through a postdramatic paradigm: they decentre linear narrative in favour of fragmented, atmospheric storytelling; transform architectural space into an active, performative force; and reconfigure participants as ‘performing spectators’ whose embodied actions complete the work. The analysis further examines the tension between curated experience and perceived agency, and confronts the implications of a commercially driven, popular postdramatic form. Ultimately, this research seeks to contribute a new theoretical framework for analyzing hybrid immersive experiences, expand the geographical and cultural scope of postdramatic performance studies, and posit the Chinese immersive escape room as a vital site for understanding the evolving boundaries between theatre, game, and experiential consumption in the twenty-first century.

The playwright and translator Alfred Sutro (1863–1933), now largely forgotten, played a rarely acknowledged part in the turn to a more socially conscious drama at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article seeks to reassess his relevance as a transitional figure whose career reflected the contradictory features of a changing cultural landscape. Commercially successful in the West End and able to draw large audiences to his plays, he nonetheless probed the latent tensions and conflicts of the Edwardian era with a critical gaze. In Sutro’s work, the interplay between the established conventions of West End theatre models and occasional subversive elements which undermine them is representative of a period which accommodated a widening range of approaches and perspectives. As a serious dramatist who nonetheless remained attuned to box-office appeal, he combined moments of frivolous humour with a strong moralizing tendency, bringing together two seemingly incompatible sides of the Edwardian theatre.

This article develops an intercultural hermeneutic for reading contemporary kunqu as a site where aesthetic practice and theory meet in mutual articulation. Centring its focus on the Shishuo Xinyu [A New Account of Tales of the World] – an ongoing series of kunqu vignettes by the Jiangsu Province Kun Opera Theatre – this article examines three of its episodes (Fang Dai, Wu Jue, and Tiao Zheng) in order to argue that such xiqu (Chinese traditional opera) principles as ‘using the virtual to evoke the tangible’ and ‘vital resonance’ articulate a relational model of theatrical mediation in which body, object, and imagination co-produce presence through rhythmic reciprocity. In dialogue with Irina Rajewsky’s intermedial reference and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s autopoietic feedback loop, the analysis seeks to demonstrate how minimal scenic cues – a cloak, a mirror, a zither – may function as intersemiotic triggers that transform suggestion into embodied historiography, reanimating the Wei-Jin ethos for contemporary spectators. Drawing on scripts, performance recordings, production materials, and artist interviews, the article positions kunqu not merely as a cultural heritage form but as a theoretical interlocutor that contributes an indigenous aesthetic logic to global debates on intermediality, minimal scenography, and the modernization of intangible heritage.

With her politically engaged writing and innovative adaptations, Stef Smith is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British theatre. She first gained recognition in 2010 for Roadkill, which won an Olivier Award, and her later plays, such as Swallow (2015), Girl in the Machine (2017), and Enough (2019), have been staged internationally. While each of these pieces attests to the playwright’s ability to confront such urgent social issues as technology, gender, and identity, the focus of her 2016 play Human Animals is on humans’ fragile relationship with animals and the wider environment. By foregrounding animals as literal and symbolic agents, the play challenges its audiences to reconsider the boundaries between human and non-human animals, and the ethical implications of survival. In this interview, conducted in December 2025, Tuğba Aygan talks to Stef Smith about Human Animals. Their discussion highlights Smith’s creative process, thematic concerns, and her insights into our relationship with non-human animals.