Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Contemporary Performance InterActions)

This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since 1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain’s reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism; on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the political power of the theatre – its potential as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over democratic values – while simultaneously attending to the institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the theatre itself everywhere straddlesthe line of capitulating to the marketization of our cultural life. This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since 1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain's reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism; on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the political power of the theatre – its potential as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over democratic values – while simultaneously attending to the institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the theatre itself everywhere straddles the line of capitulating to the marketization of our cultural life. Acknowledgements Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: British Drama and the Neoliberal Consensus A Brief History of the Neoliberal Theatre Staging Business; or, the Business of the Stage Hope and Cynicism References Chapter 2: Corporate Finance and/at the Theatre The Affective Rush of Finance Faith in the Market Financial Bubbles in the Theatre References Chapter 3: Theatrical Compressions of Time and Space Shrinkage, Sprawl, and the Neoliberal Subject Dramatising the Glocal South The Infinite Loop of Capitalist Dramaturgy Neoliberal Gothic Ruins References Chapter 4: Outsourcing Meaning in the Postdramatic Notes from the Postdramatic Field The Postdramatic State of the Nation In/Visible Labour Outsourcing Meaning References Chapter 5: Collaborative Sites of Resistance Austerity and the Social Fabric Form as Praxis Collaboration in the British Context Collaboration in the European Context References Appendix: List of Productions Discussed Index