Comment

"Capital (a): chief, principal, . . . , fatal
Capital (sb): chief city of a country, . . . ;
accumulated wealth of an individual, company or community."

--Oxford English Dictionary

"Comrades­let us discuss property relations"

--Bertolt Brecht, Speech at the International Writers Congress, 1935

Although the term capitalism enters the English language only in the middle of the nineteenth century with the full-blown absorption of an industrialized economy into a social system permeated by the cash nexus, capital shifts from its medieval associations with head and death to a modern association with the city, with wealth and especially with credit, with the establishment of the Bank of England (1694) and the introduction of paper money (first issued not by Britain but by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690). The name and the idea of the capital city thus emerges from the circulation of credit as well as from the accumulation of wealth. In the case of Britain, first capitalist state and first modern empire, the capital city is also the center of capital in the form of credit for war, expansion, and imperial investment abroad. But the national authority of capital cities is grounded not only in their economic power but also in their cultural prestige. This prestige has historically rested on and in theatrical performances, the architectural and institutional structures that house them, and the nation-states that subsidize or patronize them. In the present era of transnational capital and international traffic, cultural and otherwise, it has become harder to track relations of property, ownership, and entitlement and to identify the national identities, affiliations, or obligations of theatres, their producers and audiences, but there is continuity nonetheless. Despite apocalyptic or euphoric evocations of postmodern rupture with the "old" modernity of classic capitalism, the world is at present more rather than less capitalist.

The articles in this special issue on theatre and capital demonstrate this continuity as well as the transformation of the culture industry over the course of the soon-to-be-concluded twentieth century by analyzing the mutual imbrication of theatre and capital, of entertainment and retail sales and consumption, of economic and dramatic performance. In addition to the direct impact of capital on theatre through the provision and, more likely, the withholding of credit, these article examine the display of capital and commodities in and on theatres, especially those in major metropoles, while showing how transnational capital flow both exploits and empties the national assets of capital cities.

"The Architecture of Conspicuous Consumption," the opening article by David Schulz, lays the groundwork for the analysis of theatre as capital as well as theatre and capital. His account of Her Majesty's Theatre (built 1896) in London's Haymarket highlights its function as a "monument" not only to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, "the actor-manager who built it," but also "to the fusion of conspicuous consumption and the prestige of the ruling bloc, the Society audience and taste-makers, for whom Tree and his brother managers posed as a gentlemen-hosts." By examining the West End location of the theatre in the context of a burgeoning consumer culture represented by the new department stores, and its opulent interior in the light of its patrons' aspirations to Society association if not aristocratic membership, Schulz shows how the theatre in high imperial London both excited and contained these aspirations through conspicuous consumption.

Focusing on British drama, theatre, and economics near the end rather than the beginning of the twentieth century, the next two essays by Baz Kershaw and Linda Kintz revisit--and revise--the sites and terms of the first essay, as they explore the intersection of theatre, commerce and finance capital in an undoubtedly if reluctantly postimperial London: the location and relocation of this intersection in sites associated with commerce and the culture industry (the West End) and finance (the City) as against a partially (and increasingly beleaguered) [End Page iv] subsidized national theatre, and the complex and conflicting interpellation of an audience as simultaneously and severally affirmative and critical. In "Performing Capital in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money," Kintz uses new work on transnational economies, the postmodern asocialism of the figure Jean Baudrillard calls the "Neo-individual," and the globalization of a symbolic order identified as American and unrelentingly macho to recontextualize that play's dramatization of the dislocation of economic performance and the men and women who attempt to ride it out. Kershaw's essay, "Discouraging Democracy: British Theatres and Economics, 1979­99," documents the 1990s reality that enacts and even exceeds the fiction depicted in Churchill's 1987 play; he argues that the Conservative government's withdrawal of state subsidy for developing new audiences as well as new kinds of theatre in the name of market freedom has favored corporate sponsorship of mostly metropolitan theatres and the diffuse tastes of their customers, especially intra- and international tourists, rather than the development of a democratic culture that might be at once diverse and locally grounded.

The last two articles in the issue pick up on Kershaw's analysis of the impact of tourist capital on theatre but shift the terrain from the original capital of capital to its erstwhile colonies turned "global cities." Maurya Wickstrom's discussion of the fusion of retail commerce and theatre in the production and consumption of The Lion King places the performance in New York's Times Square the better to analyze its effective displacement in the simulated environment of "Toon Square" and its transnational sponsors. The concluding essay, by Jennifer Harvie and Erin Hurley, similarly begins by "locating Québec" in the performances of Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil, companies that receive substantial subsidy and publicity from the provincial--but internationally aspiring--government of Québec, so as to scrutinize the dis- and relocation of the companies who play mostly to metropolitan audiences abroad while gesturing towards the role of cultural representative that the government would like to ascribe to them. By juxtaposing the claims of the Québecois government to international prestige by association with Ex Machina's and the Cirque du Soleil's savvy manipulation of national and transnational capital, the essay challenges the pervasive veneration of international theatre celebrities such as Lepage (whose recent work is reviewed in this issue) with crucial questions about property relations and the performance of capital.

Apart from Ex Machina's La Géometrie des miracles, performance reviews include Brecht and Weill's opera about the excesses of capitalist culture, The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny, in Chicago, as well as internationally touring productions of plays in translation, from classical Greek drama to Edward Bond. Book reviews include Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England, The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty, and other books on theatre from the English Renaissance to the contemporary United States.

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The reading list for this special issue spotlights, in the articles by James Peck and Richard Paul Knowles, the economics of theatre from the emergence of capitalism and the British Empire to the transnational present. It also includes Tracy Davis's program for an economic history of the theatre and James Lyon's reading of Brecht and money:

James Peck, "Anne Oldfield's Lady Townly: Consumption, Credit, and the Whig Hegemony of the 1720s," 49 (1997): 397­416.

Richard Paul Knowles, "From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade, and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism," 47 (1995): 19-41.

Tracy C. Davis, "Reading for Economic History," 45 (1993): 485-503.

James K. Lyon, "Brecht and Money," 39 (1987): 487-97.

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This is my last issue as editor of Theatre Journal. My thanks and best wishes to those editors who came before--Bill Worthen, Janelle Reinelt, John Rouse--those who come after--Susan Bennett and David Román--and those who shared the journey--John, Susan, Allen Kuharski, Jo Lee, Denise Walen, Charlotte Canning, Vicki Olwell, Jon Sachs, Harriet Wald, Sabine Haenni, and to all the authors and readers without whom there would be no Theatre Journal.

-- Loren Kruger

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