Cultural Erasure in British Theatre Criticism: HOME X and Chinese Literary Heritage

Theatre reviews have long shaped artistic discourse, but their role in capturing the cultural depth of global majority theatre is seldom addressed. HOME X , a collaboration between East Asian artists in London and Hong Kong, highlights the rich interactions between theatre, diasporic identity, and Chinese literary traditions. However, its British theatre reviews largely ignored these cultural references, prioritizing the production’s technological aspect over HOME X ’s deep-rooted engagement with Chinese literature including mythology, fable, poetry, and the novel. This article foregrounds the cultural and literary depth of HOME X , and contrasts it with the limited lens of existing British theatre reviews, further drawing on such theories as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘epistemic violence’ and Ric Knowles’s ‘new interculturalism’ to address the controversies surrounding such reviews. It thus argues for a more inclusive and culturally aware approach to reviewing East and South East Asian (ESEA) performances in an era when global majority theatre practices and audience are visibly increasing.