Theatre in Market Economies by Michael McKinnie (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Theatre in Market Economies by Michael McKinnie
• Alex Ferrone

THEATRE IN MARKET ECONOMIES. By Michael McKinnie. Theatre and Performance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp. 203.

In his lucid and insightful book Theatre in Market Economies, Michael McKinnie pulls no punches, something immediately evident in his pithy opening sentence: “Keynes was wrong” (1). In the five chapters that follow, McKinnie gathers case studies that reveal a theatre industry increasingly taking up the mantle of the “mixed economy”—i.e., the practice of “combin[ing] economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy”—a shift that has coincided with the decline of center-left social democratic politics while “the tools of the welfare state have been used to regulate ever more closely the lives of citizens rather than the operations of markets” (2). The book covers the late 1990s to the present day, a period that McKinnie identifies as a “key transitional phase” in the Western political economy, between “the ascendancy, and then unravelling, of the centre-left ‘Third Way’ and the subsequent emergence, and then entrenchment, of the age of austerity (with the 2008 financial crisis as the linchpin connecting them)” (4).

McKinnie’s central argument is that the theatre is not merely a subject of the political economy but an active agent and performer of political economy itself. What makes his analysis so compelling is his sober, even-handed approach: he avoids those sometimes uncritical maneuvers—not uncommon in our field—that romanticize the theatre by glossing over its more politically ambiguous practices. He points out, for instance, that the production of theatrical ephemera dovetails rather neatly with a neoliberal labor market whose output has become increasingly immaterial, wondering if “theatre—as a key player in the creative industries—has helped exacerbate the defects of an economy that speculates rather than produces actual things” (5). The theatre, ultimately, “is neither heroically resistant nor bluntly instrumental—it is a much more complicated picture than that” (23).

This ambiguity is vertebral to McKinnie’s book: the theatrical political economies he discusses reveal that the theatre is able successfully to “capitalise upon the processes of marketisation, while resolving (or at least managing) the social antagonisms that marketisation leaves in its wake” (6). Part of his methodology involves widening the scope of what constitutes the economic. For this reason, so-called economics plays—David Hare’s The Power of Yes, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money—are not the focus of McKinnie’s study. He explains that the genre “can sometimes treat the economy . . . as something that is external to theatre rather than something in which theatre is deeply imbricated,” an angle that ultimately “contrast[s] an ostensibly disordered and amoral political economy with an eminently sensible and incorruptible theatre” (11–12). In his book, McKinnie gives no such free passes.

In the first chapter, he offers a reading of the blocking notes from a 2012 West End revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and makes a compelling case for blocking as an industrial practice that reveals “the nexus of labour relations on which much theatrical production today has come to depend” (24)—after all, what blocking and its notation demonstrate is theatre’s ability to “reproduce its labour power over time and space efficiently while maintaining managerial discipline” (37). McKinnie extends this reappraisal of the theatre’s productive capacity in chapter 2, where he suggests new metrics for theatrical productivity that move away from the conventional view that the “good” produced by theatre is the show itself: “Instead of focusing on theatre’s labour process, and highlighting what happens onstage, what if we pay more attention to forms of productivity generated by other parts of its infrastructure?” (25). He looks to the brutalist architecture of the varied arts venues in London’s [End Page 122] South Bank as an example of “fixed capital” (61), their (literal) concreteness “increasingly reassuring in a financialised urban economy predicated on flows of capital” (76).

Where these first two chapters consider the national and even global dimensions of political economy, chapters 3 and 4 zoom in on local case studies (though no less applicable to broader contexts). Chapter 3...