Janelle Reinelt explores playwright Howard Brenton's return to Britain's national stages after almost a decade's absence, discussing recent productions that address the fraught relationship between religious belief and human conduct. Joshua Chambers-Letson contemplates the queer politics of failure in regard to Nao Bustamante's Hero , which challenges the value of “normality” via the possibility of a communal being-in-failure for queers, people of color, and other nonnormative subjects. Engaging South Africa's 2006 National Arts Festival, Daniel Larlham addresses the country's national transformations through its changing artistic landscape, newly opened to a variety of imaginative, discursive, and affective spaces in which a communal historical consciousness might develop.

Looking at the murder case of Stephen Lawrence, and then at the art object made out of the event—the documentary play, The Colour of Justice —the interpenetration of performance codes and practices with “real life” demonstrates the explanatory power of performance to shape ideas, question truth claims, sway public opinion, and construct an aesthetics that might functions as an epistemology.