Introduction - Show Business

Summary

The introuduction lays out the book’s main concerns, core arguments, historical, theoretical and theatrical scope, and interdisicplinary and materialist approach. It argues that the theatres analysed in the rest of the book, when taken together, deliniate a theatre that is increasingly taking up the mantle of the mixed economy: to combine economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy. This has occured during a period when the mixed economy has been in electoral and ideological decline. This introduction also argues that the theatres examined in subsequent chapters play three key roles within their market economies: as enactments of the real economy in economic contexts that have become increasingly dominaed by finance capital and rent-seeking; as spatial fixes to productivity problems arising both within theatre and in the wider political economy; and as localisation machines, as apparatuses that render otherwise intangible of remote political and economic relations concrete and proximate.