Reviewed by:

• Theatre in Market Economies by Michael McKinnie
• Alex Ferrone

In his lucid and insightful book Theatre in Market Economies, Michael McKinnie pulls no punches, something immediately evident in his pithy opening sentence: “Keynes was wrong” (1). In the five chapters that follow, McKinnie gathers case studies that reveal a theatre industry increasingly taking up the mantle of the “mixed economy”—i.e., the practice of “combin[ing] economic efficiency with social security, while promoting liberal democracy”—a shift that has coincided with the decline of center-left social democratic politics while “the tools of the welfare state have been used to regulate ever more closely the lives of citizens rather than the operations of markets” (2). The book covers the late 1990s to the present day, a period that McKinnie identifies as a “key transitional phase” in the Western political economy, between “the ascendancy, and then unravelling, of the centre-left ‘Third Way’ and the subsequent emergence, and then entrenchment, of the age of austerity (with the 2008 financial crisis as the linchpin connecting them)” (4).

McKinnie’s central argument is that the theatre is not merely a subject of the political economy but an active agent and performer of political economy itself. What makes his analysis so compelling is his sober, even-handed approach: he avoids those sometimes uncritical maneuvers—not uncommon in our field—that romanticize the theatre by glossing over its more politically ambiguous practices. He points out, for instance, that the production of theatrical ephemera dovetails rather neatly with a neoliberal labor market whose output has become increasingly immaterial, wondering if “theatre—as a key player in the creative industries—has helped exacerbate the defects of an economy that speculates rather than produces actual things” (5). The theatre, ultimately, “is neither heroically resistant nor bluntly instrumental—it is a much more complicated picture than that” (23).

This ambiguity is vertebral to McKinnie’s book: the theatrical political economies he discusses reveal that the theatre is able successfully to “capitalise upon the processes of marketisation, while resolving (or at least managing) the social antagonisms that marketisation leaves in its wake” (6). Part of his methodology involves widening the scope of what constitutes the economic. For this reason, so-called economics plays—David Hare’s The Power of Yes, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money—are not the focus of McKinnie’s study. He explains that the genre “can sometimes treat the economy . . . as something that is external to theatre rather than something in which theatre is deeply imbricated,” an angle that ultimately “contrast[s] an ostensibly disordered and amoral political economy with an eminently sensible and incorruptible theatre” (11–12). In his book, McKinnie gives no such free passes.

In the first chapter, he offers a reading of the blocking notes from a 2012 West End revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and makes a compelling case for blocking as an industrial practice that reveals “the nexus of labour relations on which much theatrical production today has come to depend” (24)—after all, what blocking and its notation demonstrate is theatre’s ability to “reproduce its labour power over time and space efficiently while maintaining managerial discipline” (37). McKinnie extends this reappraisal of the theatre’s productive capacity in chapter 2, where he suggests new metrics for theatrical productivity that move away from the conventional view that the “good” produced by theatre is the show itself: “Instead of focusing on theatre’s labour process, and highlighting what happens onstage, what if we pay more attention to forms of productivity generated by other parts of its infrastructure?” (25). He looks to the brutalist architecture of the varied arts venues in London’s [End Page 122] South Bank as an example of “fixed capital” (61), their (literal) concreteness “increasingly reassuring in a financialised urban economy predicated on flows of capital” (76).

Where these first two chapters consider the national and even global dimensions of political economy, chapters 3 and 4 zoom in on local case studies (though no less applicable to broader contexts). Chapter 3...

 审阅者：

• 
  迈克尔·麦金尼的《市场经济剧场》
•  亚历克斯·费罗内

迈克尔·麦金尼 (Michael McKinnie) 在其清晰而富有洞察力的著作《市场经济中的剧场》(Theatre in Market Economies) 中毫不留情，从他简洁的开场白中可以立即看出这一点：“凯恩斯错了”(1)。在接下来的五章中，麦金尼收集了一些案例研究，揭示了戏剧业越来越多地承担起“混合经济”的责任，即“将经济效率与社会保障相结合，同时促进自由民主”的实践——这一转变与中左翼社会民主政治的衰落同时发生，而“福利国家的工具已被用来更严格地监管公民的生活而不是市场的运作”（2）。该书涵盖了 20 世纪 90 年代末至今，麦金尼将这一时期视为西方政治经济的“关键过渡阶段”，介于“中左翼‘第三条道路’的崛起和随后的瓦解之间”。紧缩时代的出现和巩固（以 2008 年金融危机为纽带）”(4)。

麦金尼的中心论点是，戏剧不仅是政治经济学的主体，而且是政治经济学本身的积极代理人和表演者。他的分析之所以如此引人注目，是因为他冷静、不偏不倚的态度：他避免了那些有时不加批判的做法——这在我们的领域并不罕见——通过掩盖政治上更加模糊的做法来使戏剧浪漫化。例如，他指出，戏剧蜉蝣的制作与新自由主义劳动力市场非常吻合，后者的产出已变得越来越非物质化，他想知道“戏剧作为创意产业的关键参与者，是否加剧了经济的缺陷”推测而不是产生实际的东西”（5）。戏剧最终“既不是英勇的抵抗，也不是直率的工具——它是一幅比这复杂得多的画面”（23）。

这种模糊性对于麦金尼的书来说是至关重要的：他讨论的戏剧政治经济学表明，戏剧能够成功地“利用市场化进程，同时解决（或至少管理）市场化留下的社会对抗”（6 ）。他的方法论的一部分涉及扩大经济的构成范围。因此，所谓的经济剧——大卫·黑尔的《是的力量》、露西·普雷布尔的《安然》、卡里尔·丘吉尔的《严肃的金钱》——并不是麦金尼研究的重点。他解释说，这种类型“有时可以治疗经济……” 。 。这种观点最终“将表面上无序和不道德的政治经济与极其明智和廉洁的戏剧进行对比”（11-12）。麦金尼在他的书中并没有给出这样的免费通行证。

在第一章中，他解读了 2012 年伦敦西区重演迈克尔·弗雷恩 (Michael Frayn) 的《噪音关闭》(Noises Off) 的封锁笔记，并提出了令人信服的理由，证明封锁是一种工业实践，揭示了“当今许多戏剧制作所依赖的劳资关系的联系”。变得依赖”（24）——毕竟，分块及其符号所展示的是剧院“在保持管理纪律的同时有效地在时间和空间上复制其劳动力的能力”（37）。麦金尼在第二章中扩展了对剧院生产能力的重新评估，他在其中提出了戏剧生产力的新衡量标准，摆脱了剧院产生的“好”就是演出本身的传统观点：“不要关注剧院的劳动过程，并强调舞台上发生的事情，如果我们更多地关注基础设施其他部分产生的生产力形式会怎样？” (25)。他将伦敦南岸各种艺术场馆的粗野主义建筑视为“固定资本”的例子（61），它们（字面意思）的具体性“在以资本流动为基础的金融化城市经济中越来越令人放心” ”（76）。

前两章考虑了政治经济的国家甚至全球层面，而第三章和第四章则重点关注当地案例研究（尽管同样适用于更广泛的背景）。第3章...