Chapter 2 - Productivity

Summary

Chapter 2 explores the productivity of performance through two adjacent, but very different sites on London’s South Bank: the collection of monumental arts centres clustered along the River Thames – especially the National Theatre – and the tunnels under Waterloo Station that have more recently been refashioned as performance venues. While the South Bank has for decades been defined by its massive, purpose-built vestiges of Britain’s welfare state, since 2009 it has been supplemented by a site only partly repurposed from its former use as a store for railway equipment. As this chapter discusses, live performance has historically been seen as unproductive in classical and contemporary economic thought. But if we observe performance through its socio-spatial infrastructure rather than its labour process, a more productive theatre emerges. This chapter suggests that contemporary London theatre has salved its productivity problems by spatialising and socialising them. And the South Bank suggests that London’s own productivity problems – made significantly worse by the financial crisis of 2008 – might in turn be solved, even if only temporarily, by theatricalising them.