Stage Business: Britain's Neoliberal Theatre, 1976-2016

Stage Business examines contemporary British drama vis--vis the neoliberal economic reforms that have dominated British policy for the last forty years, attending to the material conditions of theatre production amid a thoroughgoing transformation of the arts relationship to government, business, and consumer culture. The concretization of neoliberal policy in Britains recent political history produced a logical parallel in the countrys theatre history, which has effectively accepted a mixed economy of arts funding and the necessity of cooperation with the worlds of finance and corporate sponsorship. And the British stage has, throughout this fraught history, indexed its own complex entanglement with neoliberal consensus politics: on the one hand, playwrights have denounced the rapacious, acquisitive values encouraged by global capitalism and monetarisms uncontested dominance across the political spectrum; on the other hand, 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.

In their form and content, the plays discussed in Stage Business account for two undeniable trends in contemporary British drama. The first involves an explicit engagement not only with corporate finance and business culture but also with the ways in which neoliberal economics have revised cultural life. Connected to this thematic preoccupation is a structural trend some have called postdramatic, involving a rejection of traditional narrative and characterization. This formal fragmentation requires theatre practitioners to make sense of radically open-ended theatre texts, inviting considerable creative collaboration, but it too resembles the outsourcing of labour central to global capitalism. Stage Business thus tells the story of forty years in the British theatre by zooming in on a selection of plays and productions that function as nodes in Britains recent political, economic, and theatrical history. In so doing, it demonstrates the theatres immeasurable value not only in reflecting the cultural and political contexts from which it emerges but also in resisting a neoliberal hegemony that rides roughshod over social democratic values even when the theatre itself dangerously straddles the line of capitulating to the capitalist marketization of our cultural life.