Overview
- Takes a methodological approach to the study of contemporary drama by combining rigorous textual analysis with materialist examinations of production and performance
- Delivers comprehensive, detailed studies of significant plays
- Offers a frank and balanced approach to theatre criticism that both celebrates the theatre’s potential to effect social change while simultaneously acknowledging its political limitations
Part of the book series: Contemporary Performance InterActions (CPI)
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Table of contents (5 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book examines contemporary English drama and its relation to the neoliberal consensus that has dominated British policy since 1979. The London stage has emerged as a key site in Britain’s reckoning with neoliberalism. On one hand, many playwrights have denounced the acquisitive values of unfettered global capitalism; on the other, plays have more readily revealed themselves as products of the very market economy they critique, their production histories and formal innovations uncomfortably reproducing the strategies and practices of neoliberal labour markets. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London thus arrives at a usefully ambivalent political position, one that praises the political power of the theatre – its potential as a form of resistance to the neoliberal rationality that rides roughshod over democratic values – while simultaneously attending to the institutional bondage that constrains it. For, of course, the theatre itself everywhere straddlesthe line of capitulating to the marketization of our cultural life.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Alex Ferrone is an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of World Literatures and Languages at the Université de Montréal, where his teaching includes modern and contemporary drama, theatre history, and performance studies.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London
Authors: Alex Ferrone
Series Title: Contemporary Performance InterActions
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63598-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-63597-8Published: 22 January 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-63600-5Published: 22 January 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-63598-5Published: 21 January 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-5870
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5889
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 264
Topics: Contemporary Theatre, Theatre History, Political Science, National/Regional Theatre and Performance