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ToolsSix, Tom (2025) A Background of Slog: Work and the British Theatre, 1950-99. In: Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Theatre. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 233-244. ISBN 9781003046691
Abstract
This chapter proposes that work should be more widely used as an analytical framework within theatre studies, with attention paid to its historically specific and material social conditions, and its crucial function as a site of political contestation. It argues that the second half of the twentieth century saw British theatre production subsumed to capital accumulation in numerous ways. These included rentierism, and the creation (partly through state subsidy) of a co-ordinated theatre sector, whose managerialist tendencies were accelerated by the shift, in the late 1970s, to neoliberal capitalism. This chapter charts various consequences of these modes of subsumption for British theatre and its workers, including the gendering of work and the proletarianisation of theatre workers, with the consequence that their work was widely de-skilled and their labour devalued. It also shows that the organisation of work functioned as a means of racialising theatre production and thereby contributing to the maintenance of white supremacy in culture, initially by excluding racially minoritised workers, and later by offering them forms of conditional inclusion in a theatre that remained structurally racist. For all of these reasons, this chapter argues that work is a crucial heuristic for theatre historians.
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