ABSTRACT
In Chapters 1 and 2 we considered the ways in which public and private spaces associated with motherhood and loss provide a useful model for analysing intercultural translations and adaptations of narrative and ritual. This chapter focuses on the specific materiality of space in theatre. Our aim here is to define the public/private dichotomy in terms of real space and imaginary space, especially in the context of ‘home’ space: both the private home and the more ‘public’ home of geo-political space to which one feels allied. While the construction of identity spaces has been central to the first two chapters, the exploration in this chapter focuses on a different approach to identity formation, based on several interpretations of ‘home’. Charting geo-political and personal home spaces in theatre is
the objective of this chapter, rather than providing an economic or feminist subversion of ‘home’ as a restrictive domain for women. In their explorations of these spaces, the plays that we consider in this chapter provide a journey back to a place that was once ‘home’ (for both the protagonists and the playwrights), as well as travelling forward to forge a new home that incorporates several intercultural spatial spheres.
