Reviewed by:

• Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London by Alex Ferrone
• Alessandro Simari

Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London begins with a story. The book's author, Alex Ferrone, recounts his spectatorial experience of attending Matilda the Musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London's Covent Garden. Ferrone tells us that his booking of a West End show was an "unlikely" occurrence and that, although he took his seat as a [End Page 122] "resolutely sceptical" audience member, the "sheer pleasure" of his spectatorial experience resulted in his leaving the theatre with an "affective rush," as well as an enthusiastically purchased program tucked under his arm (1). Ferrone grounds his affective response to Matilda in its perhaps surprising political potential: that a mainstream West End show, packaged and sold as benign family-friendly drama, should "contain" (in both senses of the word) the capacity to interpellate child spectators as "active subjects with the ability to challenge and disrupt oppressive structures of power" (29) through the deployment of the dramaturgical mechanisms of the musical theatre.

This opening anecdote, and the materialist semiotic analysis of several moments of performance from Matilda in the book's introductory chapter, neatly exemplifies both Ferrone's hopeful approach to his subject matter, as well as his methods for critical examination. Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London locates and disentangles a perceived tension observed in commercial theatrical productions of an array of contemporary English plays, which are found to give voice to critiques of neoliberalism even as the theatre industry is itself financially reliant upon and "invariably enmeshed in networks of neoliberal capital and labour practices" (187). The single greatest contribution that Stage Business offers to the study of performance and political economy is its insistent attention, by way of richly detailed and incisive readings, to what Ferrone invites us to think of as "capitalist dramaturgy" (115), or the ways in which contemporary English drama visualizes, articulates, and critiques neoliberal policies and ideologies in its dramatic structures and stagings. Each chapter is organized around semiotic readings of performance in one or more significant London theatre productions, attending to how dramaturgical forms, theatre aesthetics, or performance and production practices articulate an opposition to neoliberalism. Ferrone's analyses are united by the adoption of an altitudinal approach to theatre that asserts a claim toward "the analytical and political viability of ambivalence" (5): to deliberately and optimistically conceive of theatre that, while conditioned and constrained by its position within market economies, nonetheless through its form, content, themes, and collaborative labor practices might resist if not rupture the "ethos of capitalism that fundamentally structures cultural life" (4).

If there is one downside to this structured approach, it is that the meticulously compiled readings of playtexts, performances, and performance histories that Ferrone weaves together in his individuated assessments feel unmoored within the monograph. The absence of a conclusion to Stage Business—in which the author might have drawn an argumentative through-line between his case studies, drawing connections that provide a clearer insight as to how theatre's position within neoliberalism might instantiate instances of "capitalist dramaturgy" as a method of expressing the tension so aptly articulated in the monograph's introduction—seems something of a missed opportunity.

The most striking and successful of Ferrone's readings is found in chapter 2, which focuses on theatre and corporate finance. Ferrone interrogates the dramaturgical concretization of financial instruments in stagings of Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987), attending also to these productions as transatlantic theatre commodities with mirrored performance histories whose commercial successes and failures were determined less by artistic considerations than by the market imperatives that both plays work to critique. Ferrone makes the compelling case that these plays, in their production histories and stagings, "dramatize capitalist logic's infiltration of every aspect of social and cultural life at the turn of the century" (76), including if not especially the performing arts.

In chapter 3, the spatial-temporal dislocations in Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica (2013), debbie tucker green...

审核人：

• Alex Ferrone的舞台商业和伦敦新自由主义剧院
• 亚历山德罗·西马里

舞台商业和伦敦新自由主义剧院从一个故事开始。该书的作者亚历克斯·费罗内讲述了他在伦敦考文特花园剑桥剧院观看音乐剧《玛蒂尔达》的经历。费罗内告诉我们，他预订西区演出是“不太可能”发生的事情，尽管他以[End Page 122] “坚决怀疑”的观众身份入座，但他的观看体验的“纯粹乐趣”导致他带着“情感冲动”离开剧院，胳膊下夹着一个热情购买的节目（1）。费罗内基于他对玛蒂尔达的情感反应在其可能令人惊讶的政治潜力中：作为良性家庭友好剧包装和销售的主流西区节目应该“包含”（在这个词的两个意义上）将儿童观众质疑为“具有能力的积极主体”的能力通过部署音乐剧的戏剧机制来挑战和破坏压迫性的权力结构”（29）。

这段开场轶事，以及在本书的介绍性章节中对玛蒂尔达的几个表演时刻的唯物主义符号学分析，巧妙地体现了费罗内对他的主题充满希望的方法，以及他的批判性检查方法。Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London定位并解开了在一系列当代英国戏剧的商业戏剧作品中观察到的紧张感，尽管戏剧业本身在财务上依赖并且“总是陷入新自由主义资本和劳动实践的网络”（187）。Stage Business的最大贡献对表演和政治经济学研究的贡献在于，它通过丰富详细和精辟的阅读，持续关注费罗内邀请我们思考的“资本主义戏剧”（115），或当代英国戏剧形象化的方式，阐明并批评新自由主义政策和意识形态的戏剧性结构和阶段。每一章都围绕一个或多个重要的伦敦戏剧作品中的表演符号学解读进行组织，关注戏剧形式、戏剧美学或表演和制作实践如何表达对新自由主义的反对。费罗内的分析通过采用一种高度的戏剧方法来统一，该方法主张“矛盾心理的分析和政治可行性”（5）：

如果说这种结构化方法有一个缺点，那就是费罗内在他的个性化评估中精心编排的对剧本、表演和表演历史的解读在他的专着中感觉不固定。缺乏对舞台商业的结论——作者可能在他的案例研究之间划出了一条有争议的线索，绘制的联系提供了一个更清晰的洞察力，即戏剧在新自由主义中的地位如何将“资本主义戏剧”的实例实例化为在专着的引言中如此恰当地表达张力的方法似乎是一个错失的机会。

费罗内最引人注目和最成功的读物出现在第 2 章，该章侧重于戏剧和公司财务。Ferrone 在 Lucy Prebble 的Enron (2009) 和 Caryl Churchill 的Serious Money的舞台上质疑金融工具的戏剧性具体化（1987 年），也将这些作品视为跨大西洋的戏剧商品，具有镜像的表演历史，其商业成功和失败与其说是由艺术考虑决定，不如说是由市场需求决定，两者都发挥作用以进行批评。费罗内提出了令人信服的案例，即这些戏剧在其制作历史和舞台上“戏剧化了资本主义逻辑在世纪之交对社会和文化生活各个方面的渗透”（76），即使不是特别是表演艺术。

在第 3 章中，露西·柯克伍德的《 Chimerica 》（2013 年）中的时空错位，黛比·塔克·格林……