Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London by Alex Ferrone

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London by Alex Ferrone Alessandro Simari STAGE BUSINESS AND THE NEOLIBERAL THEATRE OF LONDON. By Alex Ferrone. Contemporary Performance Interactions series. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; pp. 264. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London begins with a story. The book's author, Alex Ferrone, recounts his spectatorial experience of attending Matilda the Musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London's Covent Garden. Ferrone tells us that his booking of a West End show was an "unlikely" occurrence and that, although he took his seat as a [End Page 122] "resolutely sceptical" audience member, the "sheer pleasure" of his spectatorial experience resulted in his leaving the theatre with an "affective rush," as well as an enthusiastically purchased program tucked under his arm (1). Ferrone grounds his affective response to Matilda in its perhaps surprising political potential: that a mainstream West End show, packaged and sold as benign family-friendly drama, should "contain" (in both senses of the word) the capacity to interpellate child spectators as "active subjects with the ability to challenge and disrupt oppressive structures of power" (29) through the deployment of the dramaturgical mechanisms of the musical theatre. This opening anecdote, and the materialist semiotic analysis of several moments of performance from Matilda in the book's introductory chapter, neatly exemplifies both Ferrone's hopeful approach to his subject matter, as well as his methods for critical examination. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London locates and disentangles a perceived tension observed in commercial theatrical productions of an array of contemporary English plays, which are found to give voice to critiques of neoliberalism even as the theatre industry is itself financially reliant upon and "invariably enmeshed in networks of neoliberal capital and labour practices" (187). The single greatest contribution that Stage Business offers to the study of performance and political economy is its insistent attention, by way of richly detailed and incisive readings, to what Ferrone invites us to think of as "capitalist dramaturgy" (115), or the ways in which contemporary English drama visualizes, articulates, and critiques neoliberal policies and ideologies in its dramatic structures and stagings. Each chapter is organized around semiotic readings of performance in one or more significant London theatre productions, attending to how dramaturgical forms, theatre aesthetics, or performance and production practices articulate an opposition to neoliberalism. Ferrone's analyses are united by the adoption of an altitudinal approach to theatre that asserts a claim toward "the analytical and political viability of ambivalence" (5): to deliberately and optimistically conceive of theatre that, while conditioned and constrained by its position within market economies, nonetheless through its form, content, themes, and collaborative labor practices might resist if not rupture the "ethos of capitalism that fundamentally structures cultural life" (4). If there is one downside to this structured approach, it is that the meticulously compiled readings of playtexts, performances, and performance histories that Ferrone weaves together in his individuated assessments feel unmoored within the monograph. The absence of a conclusion to Stage Business—in which the author might have drawn an argumentative through-line between his case studies, drawing connections that provide a clearer insight as to how theatre's position within neoliberalism might instantiate instances of "capitalist dramaturgy" as a method of expressing the tension so aptly articulated in the monograph's introduction—seems something of a missed opportunity. The most striking and successful of Ferrone's readings is found in chapter 2, which focuses on theatre and corporate finance. Ferrone interrogates the dramaturgical concretization of financial instruments in stagings of Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987), attending also to these productions as transatlantic theatre commodities with mirrored performance histories whose commercial successes and failures were determined less by artistic considerations than by the market imperatives that both plays work to critique. Ferrone makes the compelling case that these plays, in their production histories and stagings, "dramatize capitalist logic's infiltration of every aspect of social and cultural life at the turn of the century" (76), including if not especially the performing arts. In chapter 3, the spatial-temporal dislocations in Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica (2013), debbie tucker green...