Theatre all over the world seems indissolubly tied to crisis (Delgado and Svich, 2002). Sometimes it is perceived as conventional, repetitive, and marginal yet it is often thriving and dynamic in critical times (Brook, 1968; Klaic, 2002; Obeyesekere, 1999; Van Erven, 1988, 1992). Carmody asserts that

But conflict is also the essence of theatre. One of the reasons often given by my research participants for a play being bad was that ‘there is no conflict’. ‘Where there is conflict there is something to show, there is something to say’ explains Rajkumar, ‘and if there is something to say, that place is theatre’. Theatre and crisis relate in multi-faceted ways, in particular in the streets. And the streets have a distinctive connotation in Nepal. Subedi explains that ‘Nepali dramaturgy developed out of street’, as ‘[s]treet represented a space where both men and god walked together’ (2006, 45). The streets hosted festivals and dance dramas were humans personified divine characters; also, it is in the streets that ‘gods travelled in palanquins’, kings journeyed on chariots, the first cars looked like ‘alien machines’ to people, or dictators projected their power (Ibid.), as we will see.

First, theatre language is often employed metaphorically to convey paradoxical or intense moments of social life (Turner, 1974, 23). Inconsistencies in political life are often described as ‘theatre of the absurd’. Nepal's civil war – like all wars – was depicted as a ‘tragedy’. Many journalists labeled the municipal elections that King Gyanendra ordered in February 2006 a ‘farce’ because in a conflictual environment no free and fair election could take place, despite the claims of royal propaganda.