Michael McKinnie has written a nimble, impressive study of the contemporary political economy of theatre in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. Exploring topics such as the stage manager's labor and the opening performance of the 2012 London Olympics, Theatre in Market Economies discovers how theatre “can capitalise upon the processes of marketisation, while resolving (or at least managing) the social antagonisms that marketisation leaves in its wake” (6).
Theatres, McKinnie posits, have invested in “combin[ing] economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy,” even as society at large has retreated from these ideals (2). To explain how theatres sustain these values, McKinnie reads not primarily plays—though he does analyze some performances—but theatrical operations, and particularly the uses and meanings of theatre buildings. Theatre makes meaning in particular spaces at particular times by how it stages the theatrical event. Perhaps counterintuitively, the theatrical event as such produces a solid (and even perversely real) “counter-script” to an economy now defined by immaterial speculation and financialization. McKinnie argues that theatre today is “industrious,” “productive,” generates “social citizens,” “resuscitates social exchange,” and builds hope for a better future, even if it does these things only ambiguously and partially (157).
Five main chapters focus on keywords in theatre and political economy. Each brings a historical or economic framework into conversation with a particular production or performance site. Chapter 1, “Industry,” considers the history of stage management and blocking alongside Michael Frayn's backstage farce Noises Off. McKinnie identifies blocking as “an industrial practice” that enables “producing and reproducing a performance over time and space” (36). Arts complexes on Britain's South Bank permit new insights into theatre's “Productivity” in Chapter 2. Eschewing traditional ideas of productivity tied to labor, McKinnie suggests that London theatre has been “spatialising” its productivity concerns (62). Venues such as the National Theatre have adapted their welfare-state architectural legacy to become less isolated, thereby serving more than the theatre audiences for which they were designed. While adaptable, London's South Bank cultural sites also promote “fixity and durability” to counterbalance the indeterminacy of the financialized global city (76).
Chapters 3 and 4 shift from the primarily economic vocabulary of the first two chapters to political language: “Citizenship” and “Security,” respectively. McKinnie reflects first on the unrealized promise of a “peace dividend” (98) in Northern Ireland following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. That same year, a revival of Stewart Parker's Northern Star in Belfast's First Presbyterian Church “provided a living model of . . . a non-marketised peace dividend” only realizable in the theatre (99). Elegantly tracing the play's invocations of “citizens of Belfast” (98), McKinnie describes how this dramatization of civic republicanism's history in Ireland accumulated prefigurative force from its site, the same church attended by the play's historical protagonist. In Chapter 4, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which literally straddles the Canada–US border, “allows visitors to practise a kind of civic transnationalism” as they watch plays performed on a Canadian stage from seats in the United States. And yet the Haskell itself remains “a strictly securitised binational space,” able to “transcend border governance” only by being “deeply embedded within it” (134–5).
The final chapter turns to Isles of Wonder, the performance for the opening ceremony of London's 2012 Olympic Games. McKinnie considers national confidence—both economic and political—at the height of austerity politics following the 2008 financial crisis. On the one hand, the Olympics exemplify the worst of the modern mixed economy: massive public investment in venues such as the Olympic Stadium and athletes’ housing, both then turned over to private ownership. (Unlike the National Theatre, the returns on such venues only diminish over time.) On the other hand, the opening performance, and particularly the section celebrating the National Health Service and children's literature, imagined “what an economy based on both efficiency and mutuality might look and feel like” (152). The performance is not, however, ultimately reassuring: the production's “theatrical show of confidence” in some ways authorized the Olympics’ “rentier economics” and austerity politics by offering a reassuring promise that Britain had once been, and could be again, better for its citizens (154).
This ambiguity about theatre's political economy—and about how theatre shapes our attitudes toward politics and economics—permeates the book. McKinnie is clear-eyed about theatre's inherent embeddedness in the market, and willing to find both success and failure as theatre tries to think beyond contemporary economism. Sometimes, McKinnie's readings strain to fit his conceptual apparatuses: a theory of “monopoly performance” (83) in Chapter 2 distorts the meaning of agglomeration (when similar firms cluster geographically) and rent-seeking (maximalizing the income from one's existing capital); an extensive (and wonderfully clear) discussion of Foucault's understanding of civil society falls strangely by the wayside in Chapter 4. Furthermore, the book dismisses too quickly the proposition that theatre itself has become more reliant on rent-seeking—a trend apparent in the increasing clamor about intellectual property rights for performers, directors, and designers, as well as for more expansive versions of existing rights. Such criticisms, however, belie the rich textures here, most notably the subtle historical narrative that threads through each chapter. Billed too modestly as a contemporary study, the book in fact offers a concise but sweeping history of key ideas and landmarks in theatre and political economy since the 1850s: nineteenth-century industrialization, the waxing and waning postwar UK welfare state, Irish peace in the 1990s, North American border panics after 9/11, and austerity politics in the 2010s. In all of these frameworks, McKinnie sees and communicates clearly how the mechanics of theatremaking make political and economic meaning as much as, if not more than, the theatrical performance.
