19 - British theatre and commerce, 1979–2000

Summary

We no longer talk of subsidy: we speak of investment. We no longer justify the theatre on grounds of spiritual nourishment, intellectual stimulus or communal pleasure: we talk inevitably of ‘an important strand in our export drive’ and of ‘quick and sizeable returns’ that will follow an increase in arts funding.

As Michael Billington indicates here, some of the main developments in British theatre since 1979 did not originate with aesthetics but rather with ideology and economics. Theatre has been a business for centuries, of course, even if its institutional and financial basis was often invisible in the discussion of performances, but it is unlikely that Billington could have written this any earlier in the post-World War Two period. He registers a process of commodification, in which the relationships between plays, practitioners, writers and audiences have become defined by the terms of free-market economics. As a result, from about the early 1980s justifications for theatre as a cultural practice became increasingly determined by its value as a commercial activity, with profound consequences for the kinds of theatre that were produced in the final decades of the twentieth century.

The processes considered here are complex, and to discuss them will involve looking first at the political context for the changing relationship of theatre to commerce and the state, in a climate dominated by government intervention to introduce monetarism and major structural changes to the British economy. This included the forging of a new partnership between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sources of funding. The kind of theatre that was produced as a result will then be considered, as will some of the most significant political and cultural consequences of commodification.