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.

In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman's 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.