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2022
Reviews 2022-2

McKinnie, Michael. Theatre in Market Economies.

Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 203. ISBN: 9781107000391
Konstantinos Blatanis
Bibliographical reference

Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 203. ISBN: 9781107000391

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1Michael McKinnie’s contribution to the prestigious Theatre and Performance Theory series – edited by Tracy C. Davis and hosted by Cambridge University Press ever since the early 2000s – covers an expansive area of interest and attains multiple research goals well beyond the limits of what its indisputably multi-referential title already signifies. In the very opening pages of the introduction the reader is specifically informed that this is a study which seeks to examine “theatre’s relationship[not only] to market economies, [but also] to the political institutions that help sustain social processes of marketization […] during roughly the past two decades in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and the US” (2). At the same moment, McKinnie explains that the case studies he carefully selects illuminate why and how it is possible for theatre, in the contemporary Western world, “to combine economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy” (2). Under this prism, the scholar contends that it is instructive to approach and assess theatre “less [as] the subject of political economy, and more [as] its interlocutor” (3). It thus becomes clear to the reader as early as possible that this anatomy of the connections between theatre and the market economies accentuates equally forcefully a plethora of questions regarding the ways in which theatre converses and interrelates with other fieldsof human activity and knowledge such as social theory, political history, political economy, economic geography, urban planning and development, foreign policies and bilateral relations, and mass culture events. It is only logical that this multileveled discussion relies upon and, in its own terms, emphasizes a particularly broad understanding of the very notion of theatre. Theatre in this monograph is studied on stage as well as on page, being explored as an institution and a cultural form of a long and varied history, but also seen as a powerful economic and political agent. Furthermore, it is examined in connection to its concrete built forms, but also considered well outside conventional conceptualizations and prescriptions. In addition to all of the above, it is imperative to highlight that McKinnie’s study manages also to illustrate admirably the epistemological and pedagogical significance of theatre in the present moment.

2This genuinely interdisciplinary and multifocal analysis of the manifold tasks to which contemporary theatre responds is structured, first and foremost, along a carefully selected set of particularly broad thematic lines. McKinnie organizes his research and discussion by prioritizing five general concepts by means of which he titles each one of the monograph’s main chapters, namely, “industry,” “productivity,” “citizenship,” “security,” and “confidence.”In his efforts to do justice to each one of these vast areas of inquiry, the scholar devotes his attention to a small number of diverse case studies that not only represent various national and sociocultural contexts, but more importantly render possible entirely different approaches of the very notion of theatre in theory and in practice. In assessing these eclectic and kaleidoscopic interrogations of theatre, it is important to first note that these are facilitated by McKinnie’s ample command of major concerns and fundamental principles that define contemporary political economy. Second, it is useful to underline that this is indeed a study informed by what the scholar himself outlines as “a broadly materialist” (12) perspective, as there are no traces of strict adherence to the directions of any given school of thought and no signs of pedantic application of well-established axioms or schemas. Instead, McKinnie manages to attain his aims by addressing critically and allowing himself to be inspired primarily by the work of a small number of scientists, theorists and philosophers who vary, nonetheless, from John Maynard Keynes to Michel Foucault and David Harvey. Last but not least, the study needs to be recommended for its unaffected and accessible prose as well as for the carefully organized and well-researched explanatory subsections which introduce each individual area of interest, but most importantly serve to sustain the central argument in each chapter.

3Chapter one illustrates amply the value of these subsections which will prove of paramount help to students and readers in general with limited or insufficient prior knowledge in all the different spheres that the monograph focuses on. The starting point for the discussion is the fact that theatre is indeed “industrial,” with the overall premise being that similarly to most other spheres of human activity theatre also needs “to coordinate, instruct, manage, discipline, verify, document, and deploy [its] constitutive resources (whether human, mechanical, or ‘natural’)” (38). McKinnie intently contends that theatre “has developed, and scaled up, its own highly efficient methods of managing space, time, and material resources, sometimes in advance of the wider economy, for profit or not” (55).The two subsections anchoring the main argument in this chapter are prompted by a 2012 revival of Michael Frayn’s epitomic farce Noises Off (1982) – a work which inventively anatomizes the very mechanics of staging a play – and attempt a brief historical overview and a targeted interrogation of the significance of blocking, notation and prompt books for theatre practice. Analogously, in the second chapter, in which attention shifts from industriousness and production to “productivity,” the instructive subsections offer insights into the development and evolution of the South Bank and the Waterloo tunnels, from the 1940s to the present day, as two sites that “[have] spatially transform[ed] theatre into an exemplary, productive agent within London’s urban economy” (66).

4Admittedly, the economic-political viewpoint of this study is constant throughout its span, but while emphasis in the first two chapters is placed more on the first component of this compound adjective, chapters three and four highlight the second one. In particular, chapter three revolves around the notion of citizenship and by focusing on Northern Ireland and its long and troubled political history interrogates the ways in which theatre can be employed to illuminate “what types of social citizenship might be possible in a political and economic environment that has been trying to move beyond the Troubles, but is still heavily circumscribed by them” (95). McKinnie’s very concise but sound introduction to the history of Northern Ireland serves as the frame for his discussion of the 1998 production of Stewart Parker’s Northern Star by Tinderbox Theatre Company in the First Presbyterian Church, a work which influentially “proposed that the greatest dividend of peace was to be a citizen of Belfast [...]not only [as] a civic subject, or a participant in a theatre event, but [also as] a productive political and economic agent” (99, 103). Taking a decisive leap in all different respects, chapter four revolves around the political and economic corollaries of the very notion and value of security in today’s world by discussing the exceptional case of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House that bridges Rock Island, Quebec and Derby Line, Vermont. McKinnie insightfully explains why and how “the Haskell memorializes a historical period before the US-Canada border was secured to the extent that it is now, and [the ways in which it does] embody gentler and more self-consciously civic forms of international relations that seem possible today” (115). Having established this background for his readers, the scholar manages to argue convincingly that the Haskell building offers citizens on both sides of the border “a place to feel secure, without being securitized” (116), since it facilitates the creation of a “new civic sphere constituted through the operation of the theatrical event (which itself has an extraordinary power to transcend international borders)” (135).

5The significance of this multi-levelled exploration of the ways in which theatre illuminates all different areas of human activity and knowledge, but also inspires and instructs individual minds as well as collective sensibilities in relation to the economic and political demands of any given sociohistorical context becomes thoroughly clear in the final chapter in which the study’s overall objectives and concerns adequately culminate. Interest in chapter five revolves around the notion of confidence, broadly outlined as the value that “encourages investment when concrete knowledge about future political and economic circumstances are uncertain, at best” (141). This time, the monograph’s sensitive lens focuses on a case study that does by no means belong to what is conventionally recognized as theatre. McKinnie inspects purposefully the part from the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games that celebrated UK’s National Health Service and emphatically notes that “Isles of Wonder was theatre: its staging, performances, characterization, and dramaturgy clearly marked it out as such, both in and of itself” (139). Supported by a brief yet enlightening subsection on the austerity policies that were implemented in the UK in the period following the 2008 economic crisis and which characterized the moment in which the London Olympics took place, the discussion attracts attention to an all-revealing comparison between 1948 – the year NHS was established – and 2012: “Like 2012, 1948 was a time of economic austerity, but, as Isles of Wonder highlighted, it was one that prompted the creation of new forms of social welfare rather than one that imposed austerity as a pretext for their weakening” (151). It is precisely on this plane of inquiry that McKinnie assesses the value of Isles of Wonder “as an astonishingly confident performance […] an exhilarating show of confidence [that] not only sought to instill a state of confidence that austerity suggested was no longer possible, but also [proved] that live performance was now the best way to achieve it” (141, 142; emphasis in original).

6In essence, this is a study that remains in no respect reticent on the fact that the case studies it focuses on can also be politically ambivalent or ambiguous, with Isles of Wonder constituting a telling example. As McKinnie shrewdly observes, for all its merits and precious breakthroughs Isles of Wonder reinforced, in its own right, the very efficiency of capital, since it did “make the tension between welfare and austerity generative, live and in public, [but] in the process [it also served to] make capital efficient again” (154). Sufficient attention is indeed devoted to the ways in which theatre grapples courageously with the limits and limitations of its own political efficacy and the reader is specifically reminded that theatre is “deeply embedded with the market and other social institutions – especially the state – that help make marketization possible, and [as these case studies] illustrate [it often attempts] to come to terms with that fact” (156). Ultimately, these interrogations of the ways in which contemporary theatre invites spectators to reconsider their understanding of the economic and political coordinates of the world around them are valuable and instructive precisely because the scholar’s enthusiasm about the diverse occasions he examines is combined with skepticism regarding their overall effects and end results. Yet, what has to be highlighted more than any other quality is the promise inherent in all of these separate, engaging discussions that there is always a lot more lying ahead both in theory and in practice. In short, Theatre in Market Economies unequivocally as well as influentially demonstrates that the topics and interests around which it revolves can never be entirely exhausted.

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References

Electronic reference

Konstantinos Blatanis, McKinnie, Michael. Theatre in Market Economies. European journal of American studies [Online], Book reviews, Online since 05 July 2022, connection on 17 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/17970; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.17970

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Konstantinos Blatanis

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