Theatre and performance rely on the unsettling of identities in terms of their various conceptions of the actress-character or performer-performed relationship. ‘De-stabiliz[ing] the boundary between the subject and its others’ as theatre does in its exploration of the relation between actress and role, ‘dramatize[s] the inseparability of the subject from the realms of the social and the political’ (Ahmed 1997: 153), since the relation between the subject and its others necessarily always operates within the social and/as the political. As such theatre offers an appropriate terrain for the enactment of unsettling identities. Such unsettling or troubling, which takes different forms and carries different meanings within diverse diasporic experiences and representations, constitutes a key dynamic in the work of many Black and Asian women playwrights. Here I shall focus on three plays to discuss that dynamic, Zindika's ‘Leonora's Dance’ (1993), Winsome Pinnock's ‘A Rock in Water’ (1989), and Maya Chowdhry's Kaahini (1997). In each case unsettling identities struggle against the burden of a colonial past which has generated multiple displacements and demands constant negotiations between the here and now and the there and then. These displacements are not only geographical but also cultural and social, revealing the legacies of colonial histories, the internalization of racialist and sexist positions, the problematic of how to live the multi-locationality which is at the heart of diaspora.