Introduction: Institutionalising English Play Development

In 2014, in the foyer of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre, I encountered a banner that said ‘we think art is not a commodity’. The slogan was the third principle of the Secret Theatre Company’s six-part manifesto and referred to their principles of practice. It was also an approach to marketing; six performances made in succession were programmed and would tour without the usual copy. The plays’ blurbs had been replaced by a series of questions and titles had been replaced with tags – ‘Show 1’ through to ‘Show 6’. When I noticed the banner, however, I had just purchased tickets to the shows on my credit card for £75. It wasn’t just the irony of the commodity exchange that made this encounter memorable – it was the slogan in relation to my personal debt, my personal debt in relation to the cost-of-living crisis, the government austerity programme, its reductions in welfare spending, local funding, the library cuts and closures, the food banks, immigration sanctions, ‘big strategic moves’ such as National Health Service (NHS) healthcare provision falling five times more per person in Blackpool than in Surrey. Theatre’s infinite jest was having an actual laugh. What would it be to remain under this slogan for a decade, drag the confused outrage into theatre production after production, into theatre class after class? It is to appreciate that in England, in the development of a new performance in the twenty-first century, everyone involved is wondering, privately, at what mast they can fly that flag.

My career has been in what Steve Waters (in Luckhurst Reference Luckhurst2006: 213) and Lyn Gardner (Reference Gardner2006) refer to as the ‘culture of play development’. In the mid 2000s, when I was an undergraduate creative writing and English literature student, a few theatres with ‘new writing’ repertoires took interest in my playwriting. Later, I did an MPhil in playwriting studies at the University of Birmingham and received a handful of engagements and commissions from English and American theatres and companies, including Hampstead Theatre, Soho Theatre, and Paines Plough Theatre Company in London; Origin Theater in New York; and Georgetown Theater Company. Later, I undertook reading placements at theatres and script services including Script in Birmingham and Tobacco Factory Theatres in Bristol. A group of friends and I established a theatre company and, in 2010, I started a post teaching playwriting at the University of Gloucestershire. There, I introduced students to the culture of play development, arranging live briefs and commissions with the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, and Dreamshed Theatre Company. Commencing wage labour in higher education was slightly lost on me in my naiveté. Like English play development, I lacked an understanding of the (experientially toxic) culture into which I entered and remained.

During the same period, I was politically active, engaged in organising, agitating, and grassroots community building. I was involved with Solidarity Federation (SolFed) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). During my annual leave, actions took me on journeys across Europe to explore and engage with sites of historic and ongoing resistance and revolution – all of it with ‘one of this country’s most important left-wing fiction writers’, D. D. Jonston, who was committed to ‘bringing light to a dark world’ (Barbican Press 2021). Once or twice a week, we would attend study groups with comrades to analyse political economic texts. Meanwhile, I wrote plays about Soviet cells and anarchist Spanish Civil War organisations, and I refused my vote in UK party political elections. The University and College Union was a means through which some of these ideas could meet my new wage labour. I struggled, however, to find intersections between the culture of the academy and English play development and the kind of class consciousness that held my attention in my twenties. In London, the people and places and cultures I sought out politically seemed worlds apart from the commodified theatre I also (somewhat secretively) consumed.

In 2016, I took up a new position at the University of Reading, where, in my role as Associate Professor of Performance Practices, I continue to create an interface between play development and the academy. For instance, alongside John Luther, Artistic Director of South Street Arts Centre, I organise an Arts Council England–funded project, Work in Progress, that seed-funds and facilitates the play development of emerging and mid-stage artists and companies of national and international acclaim. My experience of the culture of English play development supported this later work, but my politics – other than the humility I felt in receiving public money – did not. As time went on, I became less and less involved in political activity and more and more involved in playmaking. I remained amazed, however, by the liberal consensus I found in the culture of English play development. People there, I felt, were friendly, mellow, and repetitively but pleasantly vociferous about two things: Tory governance and identity politics. If there was ever an attempt to interject further socio-historical political-economic thought, however, it would be one step too far: an abrupt contradiction to the gentle, somnambulistic vibe and a bit rude. The critique of the culture of English play development in this Element, however, rudely eschews concerns about middle-class manners and the solipsistic identitarian pathologies that occupy many English theatre makers, to advance instead a class-conscious critique with the discourses, atmospheres, and angers of the radical left.

In my twenties, I assumed that ‘play development’ referred simply to an exquisite solitary state: a closed theatrical phase in which the playmaker generates raw material and early strategies for text or performance at home or in studios. I imagined all playwrights as gentle souls weeping about the state of things. When I entered the industry, however, I saw that play development was not an isolated preliminary activity. Play development, I would understand, was the sometimes literal space of ‘literary management’ departments staffed with ‘literary managers’, ‘literary associates’, ‘readers’, and later ‘dramaturgs’. It was also a set of meetings undertaken between these roles and playmakers in front-of-house coffee shops, then studios. It was also the somewhat trippy time–space matrix in which playmakers were suspended (or not) when ‘on attachment’.

Play development resourcing such as I experienced in the early 2000s had been formalised only in the preceding decade; in the 1990s, English play development as an activity in buildings started to increase. As Jacqueline Bolton (Reference Bolton2012) finds, ‘in addition to the proliferation of companies who regarded new writing as a core activity, very few producing houses could now exclude it’ (219). A field of institutionalised ‘literary management’ emerged, undertaken at first by what Aleks Sierz (Reference Sierz2011) calls ‘the big six’ new writing theatres: the Traverse in Edinburgh, Live Theatre in Newcastle, and the Royal Court, the Bush, Hampstead, and Soho in London (29). The Royal Court’s Young Writers’ Programme (as observed by Bolton Reference Bolton2012; Love Reference Love2015; Holden Reference Holden2017) was a key model for other buildings and companies inclined to expand their writerly offering. In the 2000s, as Catherine Love (Reference Love2015) puts it, there was ‘a surge of interest and investment in the developing of new plays by British theatres and companies’ (319–320). English play development continued to be instated at English theatres until it might be defined according to what Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1993) describes as a ‘field of cultural production’. This field comprises a space of ‘relational thinking’ within arts and literary production (29 (original emphasis)). By 2019, play development continued to be advertised as a central activity at the majority of the twenty-nine theatres Sierz (Reference Sierz2011) noted as engaging in play development practices in 2011 (32–37).

As a field of cultural production, play development today has an artistic and institutional vocabulary that it takes time to learn. For example, in artistic terms, it is often used interchangeably with ‘research and development’ (‘r&d’). In a theatre building with a new writing repertoire, play development activity is usually undertaken by theatres’ literary management strands. For Sue Healy (Reference Healy2022), literary manager of London’s Finborough Theatre, the central role of literary management in Ireland and Britain is writer development (5). ‘Writer development’ and ‘play development’ are subtly differentiated by the significant economic differences the terms conceal; the latter might refer to plays by an established playwright which a theatre may commission, whereas the former suggests a broader concern with supporting a larger number of would-be or emerging playwrights in honing their craft. In addition to their pseudo-left-wing stance, play development spheres in England are often culturally conjured as anarchistic ‘free states’ – the last bastions in an otherwise commodified world (e.g. ‘we think art is not a commodity’). In this Element, I submit to you the opposite: that these spaces are entirely – devotionally – determined by the political-economic status quo.

By the mid 1990s, play development was becoming increasingly standardised in a valorising process predicated on meeting the consumer demand for new writing’s continued exchange value. Play development had become a regulated process, or, to use Marx’s (Reference Marx1990 [1867]) term, development now had ‘a socially necessary labour time’ (129). Scholars working on English theatrical modes of production were already attuned to this. As Bolton (Reference Bolton2012) notes, new writing programmes advocated ‘conventional principles of drama’ that resulted in ‘a raft of new plays [that] proved indicative of characteristics that would become familiar as the decade progressed’ (217). Moreover, play development had also selected its ideal labour power: young and often first-time playwrights. For Bolton, this was observable most in ‘the Royal Court’s “strategic and purposeful” targeting of commercially unknown playwrights’ (217). The ideal labour power of play development ‘encouraged, moreover, a widespread shift in theatres’ priorities from new writing to new writers’ (217; emphasis original). At the end of the 1990s, play development practices had revealed their potential as a commodifying process that could effectively valorise plays and playwrights (see also Inchley Reference Inchley2015). The economies of scale generated in play development structures translated effectively to subsequent stages of production. As Bolton notes, ‘the sheer number of new plays, produced in shorter runs of only two weeks, itself indicated revised attitudes towards the debut play as a cultural event’ (217). As Literary Manager Jack Bradley attested, ‘the policy was “stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap”’ (217).

By the 2000s, English play development was accelerating into, to coin David Harvey (Reference Harvey2006), an ‘uneven geographical development’ across England. The number of theatres engaging with development practices had expanded into a network of nearly thirty building-based theatres, the majority of which were in London. As Sierz (Reference Sierz2011) notes, this ‘meant new buildings, new staffing levels and new regulations’ (30). Arts Council England has produced a range of studies relating to play development at subsidised theatres in England during this period. Emma Dunton, Roger Nelson, and Hetty Shand’s New Writing in Theatre 2003–08: An Assessment of New Writing within Smaller Scale Theatre in England (Arts Council England 2009c), for example, explores a sample of organisations engaged in play development. The same authors’ Writ Large: New Writing on the British Stage 2003–2009 (Arts Council England 2009b) offers a data set on the most statistically significant producers of new writing between 2003 and 2008. According to their report, these theatres were West Yorkshire Playhouse (now Leeds Playhouse) (5.6%), Plymouth Drum (7.7%), the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (8.5%), the Mercury Theatre (4.2%), the Liverpool Everyman (5.1%), the Royal Exchange Theatre (5.2%), the Royal Shakespeare Company (3.1%), the Royal Court (4.9%), and the National Theatre (5.1%). Other theatres (51%) made up the rest of the new writing produced during this period (55).

Two additional Arts Council England reports shed more light on English play development as a mode of capitalist production. In 2000, Arts Council England published two reports arguing that new writing was in decline. Peter Boyden Associates’ The Boyden Report (Arts Council England 2000a) argued that text-based theatre was failing to attract audiences and advocated a shift of policy that promoted new, collaborative methods of play development (Arts Council England 2009b: 4). The following Arts Council England (2000b) report of the same year, The Next Stage: Towards a National Policy for Theatre in England, accepted The Boyden Report’s argument, and the three subsequent reports – National Policy for Theatre in England (Arts Council England 2000c), National Policy for Theatre in England (Arts Council England 2002a), and Theatre Policy (Arts Council England 2007) – all encouraged the production of ‘new work’: ‘new ways of working’, ‘experimental’ and ‘interdisciplinary practice’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 35–36).

‘New work’ refers to theatrical approaches that do not centre around the playwright and dramatic play text, including performance-based, devised, ensemble, and Live Art approaches. As Rosalind Haslett (Reference Haslett2011) defines it, ‘“new work” tends to occur in non-traditional forms and spaces’ whereas ‘“new writing” is seen to refer to a literary process which takes place in a conventional theatre building’ (358). This definition, as I will show, is suggestive of the significance of Arts Council England’s stipulation that theatre organisations should embrace new work and, as a consequence, diversify their play development structures. The shifts in mainstream play development to accommodate new work occurred throughout the 2010s, but, as we will see, have posed some challenges. Furthermore, despite Arts Council England’s emphasis on the mainstream development of new work during the 2000s, Writ Large noted that ‘the Art Council’s 2003 Theatre Writing Strategy promoted initiatives that presumed a traditional relationship between individual freelance writers and producing companies’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 36). In other words, play development practices would continue throughout the 2000s to be undertaken on the established terms at new writing theatres, as Love (Reference Love2015) evidences in her examination at the Royal Court.

Encouraged by Arts Council England in the aforementioned reports (and in the Traverse’s case, the now devolved Creative Scotland), producing theatres and companies started to deploy a set of artistic and literary management methods, pioneered at ‘the big six’, for engaging new playwrights and their work. These working methods, according to the Writers’ Guild (2012), a trade union representing professional writers since 1959, comprised script reports and feedback, building and maintaining creative relationships, mentoring, attachments, seed commissions, workshops, rehearsed readings, scratch nights, treatments, pitch sessions, and collaborative development relationships. The economies of play development during the early 2000s were productive; as the authors of Writ Large noted, ‘in 2001–2, productions of new commissions and other new work represented 67% of the repertoire …, in 2002–3 66%, in 2003–4 and 2004–5 71%, in 2005–6 70% and in 2006–7 75%’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 40).

The rise in commissions may also be due to the major innovation to literary management during this period: the formalisation of the dramaturg’s role in English theatre. The introduction of the dramaturg and dramaturgy to English literary management has been assessed by a number of scholars (Turner and Behrndt Reference Turner and Behrndt2008, Reference Turner and Behrndt2010; Turner Reference Turner2009; Luckhurst Reference Luckhurst2010; MacDonald Reference MacDonald2010; Bolton Reference Bolton2011; Radosavljević Reference Radosavljević2013a; Trencsényi and Cochrane 2014; Trencsényi Reference Trencsényi2015). While the early 2000s saw an upturn in new commissions, the austerity measures of the 2010s saw a downturn in play development practices, observed in the empirical data collections of play development. In 2014, Fin Kennedy and Helen Campbell Pickford (Reference Kennedy and Campbell Pickford2013) produced a ‘Delphi study’ as a follow-up to their report ‘In Battalions’. ‘In Battalions’ offered a ‘snap-shot of play development at the start of 2013’ (1) and the follow-up Delphi study intended to continue to assess the effects of Arts Council England cuts on those practices.

A final evolution of play development in the 2000s is the field’s inducting of ‘new work’ and playmakers into the commodifying structures of mainstream play development, which previously had been focused on valorising text-based plays and playwrights. Partly spurred on by Arts Council England’s aforementioned interventionist decision to remove new writing from its funding priorities and to advance the cause of new work in The Boyden Report (Arts Council England 2000a), theatres started to diversify their play development models and, in some cases, organised parallel development structures for new work. Liz Tomlin (Reference Tomlin2013c) notes that ‘the text-based/non-text-based binary revealed itself in the UK theatre industry in the choice that emerging theatre-makers were constrained to make between the development of opportunities offered by “traditional” new writing flagship theatres … and those offered by the growing proliferation of arts centres’ (9–10). The selection between two stratified play development models artificially disaggregated theatre practice and put pressure on artists to define (and thus to commodify) their projects according to these terms.

In the mid 2010s, however, changes occurred in mainstream play development structures. For example, in 2015, the National Theatre combined its studio, which dealt with writers and devisers, with its literary department, which dealt exclusively with writers. Furthermore, a range of regional theatres, such as the West Yorkshire Playhouse (now Leeds Playhouse), became more engaged in pre-production work with companies and ensembles as noted in Section 2 of this Element. Such changes in English play development have had the effect of diversifying the methodologies of traditional new writing theatres, but they have not always been well received. As Radosavljević (Reference Radosavljević2013a) and Love (Reference Love2015: 122–123) both note, the British Theatre Consortium and Arts Council England found that writers – the traditional consumers of play development – felt threatened by the diversification. As Radosavljević argues, however, ‘the gap between new writing and devising was potentially being perpetrated by political and economic rather than aesthetic and methodological factors’ (86). What provokes theatre-makers in play development to decry ‘we think art is not a commodity’ when scholars counter? What are the political and economic factors determining play development in the twenty-first century?

If ‘neoliberalism’ broadly describes the approach to governing capitalism in the mid-to-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its ideologies obviously determine the state-subsidised English play development. As Harvey (Reference Harvey2005) notes, the administrations of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and Ronald Reagan (1981–9) played a central role in aligning UK and US statecraft with capital’s interests (1). For Bob Jessop (Reference Jessop2018), this process was also observable in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand (1730). Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2015) argues that neoliberalism may not have been formulated as ‘a 1980s political rebellion by new Right populists, not as a vision heralded by a specific set of political leaders and economic craftsmen … but, rather as an “emergence” over the second and third quarters of the twentieth century’ (51–52). Brown thus contends that neoliberalism is an inevitable development in the management of capital in the twentieth century. Jessop (Reference Jessop2018) refers to its origins as the ‘post-war Atlantic Fordist class compromise [in which] at least six neoliberal policies were pursued in order to modify the balance of forces in favour of capital’. These policies can be summarised as follows: (1) liberalisation to promote the free market, (2) deregulation, (3) privatisation, (4) ‘reducing the scope for non-market logics’, (5) reductions in corporate income tax, and (6) the promotion of the global flow of goods and services. Neoliberalism has not only destroyed ‘prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes’ (1729). As Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley (Reference Lentin and Titley2011) argue, ‘life is reduced to economics and everything, including individual action, is judged according to its profitability and “rationality’’’ (163). In the UK, the historicisation of neoliberalism is often taken as a totality: with its origin story the neoliberal regime shift during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, or, as Stuart Hall (Reference Hall2011) puts it in the subtitle to his article ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’, ‘Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: The Long March of Neoliberalism Continues’ (9). The crisis manufactured by the Tories referred to as ‘Brexit’ was a significant event in the long march insomuch as it produced a complex reading of the relationality of the historical material moment and English statecraft. For Colin Hay (Reference Hay2018), Brexit was ‘a product of the complex interplay of neoliberalising and counter-liberalising tendencies and counter-tendencies and a combination of neoliberal and neo-conservative reflexes. Put like that, it is hardly surprising that it is likely to prove both neoliberalising and de-neoliberalising in terms of its effects’ (6). Because of this ambiguity, Brexit does not play a central part in this Element’s reading of the interrelationship between neoliberalism and English play development.

Scholarship has already exposed the genesis and persistence of neoliberalism as a totality across cultural forms, especially theatre (e.g. Harvie Reference Harvie2013; Gilbert Reference Gilbert and Gilbert2016; Diamond et al. Reference Diamond, Varney and Amich2017; Ybarra Reference Ybarra2017; Greer 2018; Solga Reference Solga2019). Jen Harvie, for example, focuses on the theatre’s response to the iterations of neoliberalism interpreted by the British governance of New Labour (1997–2010), the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–15), and the recently ousted Conservative government (2015–24). By focusing on the UK’s economic context, Britain is not seen to have priority over any other geographical centre for neoliberalism, but rather because the neoliberal order was first assembled as a coherent package in Britain and therefore state-subsidised English theatre making during this period arises from specific material conditions. The features of neoliberalism that will be most familiar to the English public between 2000 and 2022 are its austerity, the creep of bureaucracy into public services, the stealth restructuring of life and work activity according to Fordist and post-Fordist principles, the encroachment of entrepreneurialism, and heightened individualism against a backdrop of devastating inequality. It is these conditions of neoliberalism, and their claim on English play development, that this Element attends to.

The most striking feature of neoliberalism is its untameable aggression. Its exclusionary tendencies in England had become so dysregulated that, by the Covid-19 crisis, scores of unnecessary deaths of Black and South Asian people occurred. While social and economic conditions have continued to reveal sharp disparities in living and working standards across the twenty-first century, England also saw successive socially liberal governments each purporting – ironically – an advancement of equality. According to Peter Ratcliffe (Reference Ratcliffe2004), ‘New Labour administrations since 1997 … all espoused the notion of “One Nation” as an inclusive citizenship’ (8). The most significant example of Labour’s social liberalism manifested in the year preceding Mark Duggan’s death, in the 2010 Equality Act. According to the Government, the Equality Act legally ‘protects people from discrimination’ (Equity Act Guidance 2015). Protected groups now include age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, and sex and sexual orientation. Here we see a tussle between neoliberalism as a geopolitical framework that gives rise to enormous global inequalities and individual statecraft policies that seemingly seek to ameliorate some of its effects. How do the arts – or more specifically English play development – respond? As Liz Tomlin (Reference Tomlin2014) notes, ‘New Labour’s social inclusion agenda … was hugely significant in shaping arts policy’ (4). In 2011, under the Coalition, Arts Council England launched a new policy document based on the Equality Act entitled The Creative Case for Diversity (Arts Council England 2011a). The Creative Case was a revised approach for diversity in the arts, including theatre, based around resituating many of the protected categories referenced in the Equality Act into the sphere of English artistic production and consumption under the banner of ‘diversity’. Matt Hargrave (Reference Hargrave2015) uses the term ‘new diversity’ to articulate how ‘The Creative Case indicates a policy shift from diversity as social deficit to diversity as human value’ (83). Hargrave continues by stating that ‘the report enfolds diversity and equality to the point where they both vanish. Excellence (the new quality) is only apparent if relevant; and relevance is (currently) diversity; so to be excellent one must be diverse and everyone is diverse; and so on, until the criteria collapse on themselves’ (85). The criteria of ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ did not so much collapse, but rather became folded into neoliberalism, with new diversity part of the ‘new spirit’ of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2018 [Reference Boltanski and Chiapello1999] (my emphasis)). This was clear during the pandemic when the material conditions of neoliberalism’s inequality inside English theatre were self-evident. Writing for Arts Council England after the death of George Floyd, for example, Darren Henley (2020) notes that ‘it is clear that despite our best intentions, we have so far failed to create the systemic, structural changes needed for our sector to be truly diverse’. Henley continues by arguing that some people are ‘experiencing prejudice, intolerance and racism when interacting with some cultural organisations’ (54). How could this be, given the aforementioned legislation? Arun Kundnani (Reference Kundnani2021) argues that neoliberalism is now ‘haunted by its own failure to universalize its market order; a racial idea of culture is the means by which this anxiety is managed and worked through’ (54). By locating the neoliberal imperative for racial constructs in English theatre, Tom Six (Reference Six2024) refers to a ‘racial regime’ that privileges whiteness through colonial hierarchies in some of the theatres mentioned herein. It is beyond the scope of this Element to follow Six in attending to neoliberalism’s imbrication in any racialised tendencies in the culture of English play development; however, it is possible to nudge towards the invention of new ways of being with new writing and work, new ways of being with each other, and new protocols that foreground artistic agency, relationality, and solidarity. As Denise Espirito Santo and David Gutierrez suggest, in this ‘terminal state of an economic model and a global culture that is responsible for millions of infections and deaths worldwide’, we can embrace our vulnerability (in Bissell Reference Bissel and Weir2022: 33). More than anything, English play development, as it continues through the twenty-first century, requires both expansion of the point of entry and a location of care for those who enter it.

It is the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, that are the subject of this Element. And while this introduction has aimed to establish a foundation for an in-depth analysis of neoliberalism and English play development across the 2000–22 period, the sections that follow attend to much shorter and more pivotal moments within the wider frame: 2009, then 2014–18. Across each section, I draw attention to how a key feature of neoliberalism impacted on English play development. In Section 1, I attend to the increase in bureaucracy in English play development in 2009, when governments were responding to the financial crisis of 2007–8. In order to do this, I analyse two Arts Council England reports published in 2009 – Writ Large and New Writing in Theatre 2003–08 (the second referred to with the shorthand The Dunton Report) – with some analysis of a 2007 evaluation report published by Firebird Theatre about their production of Dr Faustus. In Section 2, I explore how neoliberalism’s emphasis on the transformation and restructuring of modes of production according to Fordist and post-Fordist logics was undertaken in English play development. I do this by analysing interviews with practitioners I conducted between 2014 and 2018. Section 3 is an examination of the reconstituting of artistic subjectivity according to neoliberal paradigms that uses the same methodology of practitioner interviews. The participatory data on English play development was collected by open-ended questions that went through two institutional review processes. In the conclusion, I take a different approach by discussing what I see as a site of resistance to neoliberalism’s insistence on inequalities.

I offer an account of the recent commissioning and play development of Kwame Owusu’s Dreaming and Drowning (2023) at The Bush, a new writing theatre in London. I note a direct engagement to the global racial reckoning and demand for truth, freedom, redress, and reform that has inspired an unprecedented social movement since the 2020 murder of George Floyd. We can observe how racial healing can be integrated – for the first time – into an English play development model as a means to resist neoliberalism’s failure, as Kundani puts it, to universalise its market order. In so doing, I hope to show that, on occasion, neoliberal imperatives can be set aside. Therein, we hold space for non-hierarchical, global, and receptive modes of decentred play development as a future-oriented model. La Lutte Continue!

1 Policing Literary Management in the 2000s

As a reader, my memory of triaging unsolicited scripts in English theatres between 2009 and 2012 is vague. I recollect settings on coastal paths in Cornwall, Mars, a play in a mosque in a post-apocalyptic Walsall, a caravette en route to Calais, the tomb of Tutankhamun. The indeterminacy of these narratives is a telling contradiction to my clear memory of real happenings: the peaceful march to demand information about the death of Mark Duggan, for instance, a Black man from Tottenham, north London – who had been shot dead by the police on 4 August 2011. The riots transformed Britain’s approach to protest policing. A decade later, the experiment in emergency ‘justice’ was once again activated by riots following the police killing of another unarmed Black man, and what the home secretary, Priti Patel, called the violent ‘thuggery’ of those who believed – beautifully – that their embodied challenge to repressive apparati could be both symbolic and direct. For Adam Elliott-Cooper (2011), ‘Neoliberalism, through securitisation, resource reallocation, privatisation of space and the de-racialising of language, has made radical Black activism an increasingly difficult endeavour’ (4). Or, to quote David Cameron, ‘we are making technology work for us’ (BBC 2011). On advising literary departments on triaging unsolicited scripts, Healy (Reference Healy2022) notes ‘evaluating them takes up a lot of time and you will have to consider ways to efficiently manage this’ (29 (my emphasis)). In this section, I show how one feature of neoliberalism, its insistence of bureaucratic excess, infiltrated English play development in the 2000s. In particular, I show how the efficient management of unsolicited scripts in England in the twenty-first century became an activity determined by an increasingly repressive state apparatus – observed a decade later in the police force, in our education settings, and in the NHS. Here, I argue that there was a rise of new public management in English producing houses during the 2000s. I show this by way of exploring a range of documentation identifying the features of new public management in initiatives funded by Arts Council England. On that basis, I proceed to analyse two Arts Council England reports, Writ Large and New Writing in Theatre 2003–08 (the second referred to with the shorthand The Dunton Report). These texts, I show, reveal new play development dramaturgy as bureaucratic. Using scholarship on bureaucracy (e.g. Graeber Reference Graeber2016 [2015]), I move toward a conclusion that thickens this understanding; that, rather, it is impossible for any theatricality, and anything else, to exist outside a realm of bureaucratisation. Or, in banner dérive, we think art (and life) is bureaucracy.

In the twentieth century, new public management was a means to increase the privatisation and marketisation of public-sector institutions via enhanced managerialism. From the 1980s, there was a large-scale human resource expansion across the English education, healthcare, heritage and arts sectors. Peter Dorey (Reference Dorey2015) writes that this process included ‘the parallel imposition of a ‘managerialist’ regime in Britain’s public services [and] the increased role of audits, inspections and other monitoring exercises to measure the performance of public services and their staff’ (33). Labour deployed new public management in the arts in ways the Tories had not been able to. Cécile Doustaly and Clive Gray (2010) find, for instance, that ‘the Labour governments post-1997 have effectively been more managerially interventionist into the arts sector than the Conservatives’ (322). The long-established tradition of ‘arms-length funding’, and the detachment of arts institutions from the centre, meant the Tories had struggled to introduce new public management practices into diverse and remote arts organisations. For the Thatcher government, there was no real confidence in the arts’ value. For example, Arts Council England’s (1998b) report International Data on Public Spending in the Arts in Eleven Countries shows that public funding in the UK in the early 1990s was 0.14% of gross domestic product, much less than the arts spending from comparable countries (5). It seems that New Labour, however, saw economic and social value in the arts. As a result, they placed greater emphasis on implementing new public management.

Labour increased investment in the arts. According to Tomlin (Reference Tomlin2014), ‘not only did New Labour, towards the end of its first term, virtually double the grant-in-aid available for arts funding, but there was a sense that this government understood culture to be central to the country’s status and prosperity’ (2). Tomlin captures the spirit of the moment here, when, initially, Labour’s investment in the arts seemed to be well received. In 2002, the Treasury’s Comprehensive Spending Review promised an annual increase in real terms of 3.5% to the arts for three years. Overall, between 1997 and 2010, not only were Arts Council England resources increased, but a further £3 billion of lottery funds was distributed to the arts (Hesmondhalgh et al. Reference Hesmondhalgh, Nisbett, Oakley and Lee2014: 5).

And, yet, as a pay-off for the increased funding, in order to ensure that arts organisations were demonstrating these values, Arts Council England introduced an intensified use of audit and new public management techniques (Hesmondhalgh et al. Reference Hesmondhalgh, Nisbett, Oakley and Lee2014: 11). I suggest that the integration of these techniques at the drop-down level of individual arts organisations is significant in assessing the potential for increased bureaucracy in the burgeoning models of play development. For example, Arts Council England generated a centralised data management system through which standard measures could be imposed across the arts to empirically evaluate social and economic impacts (Crossick and Kaszynska Reference Crossick and Kaszynska2016: 16–17). The data management system meant that Arts Council England could impose new frameworks through which the arts might be assessed; these included the ‘Generic Learning Outcomes’ developed in 2001 and the ‘Generic Social (Cultural Value) Systems’ that assessed respectively the educational and social impact of artworks. Such changes meant the significant restructuring of organisations, shifts in priorities and resources, and, crucially, a splitting of activities between making art and measuring one’s metrics of making art. The metrics would also include evidence of theatres focusing on generating play development activities. For example, as noted in the introduction of this Element, in 2000, Arts Council England published two reports, The Boyden Report and The National Policy for Theatre in England (2000a, 2000c). The former argued that ‘new writing was failing to attract audiences’ and the latter resultantly prioritised new writing, pledging funds to support growth (Arts Council England 2009a: 5). The funds arrived via the Theatre Review (Arts Council England 2003a) which allocated 25 million pounds intended in part for talent development. The Theatre Writing Strategy (Arts Council England 2003b) included recommendations that all theatre organisations should enhance training and development, their literary departments, their focus on new writing, and their playwright support (Arts Council England 2009b: 4). The writings of David Graeber (1961–2020), an American anthropologist and anarchist activist who played a key role in the Occupy movement during this period, have been influential to my understanding of English theatre’s literary organisation. The aforementioned changes, for example, can be understood as part of what Graeber (Reference Graeber2016 [Reference Graeber2015]) refers to as an era of ‘total bureaucratization’ in The Utopia of Rules (18). Herein, Graeber studies late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Western bureaucracy. His argument follows sociologist Robert K. Merton’s (Reference Merton1957) definition of dysfunctional bureaucracy as ‘an end-in-itself; [where] there occurs the familiar process of displacement of goals whereby an instrumental value becomes a terminal value’ (11). For Graeber (Reference Graeber2016 [Reference Graeber2015]), bureaucracy has become entirely dysfunctional: not a means to production, but, rather an end in itself with pure deadening effects. Graeber acknowledges that in the nineteenth century, ‘bureaucracy was seen as necessary for managing the market, managing democracy and also managing the modern corporation’ (10–11). Over the course of the twentieth century, however, bureaucracy became a dramatically visible part of the everyday. In the 2000s, Graeber argues, there was a move towards the aforementioned total ‘bureaucratization’ of Western life (18). This is described as follows:

Graeber offers a damning critique of the sociologist and economist Max Weber (1864–1920) as an apologist for bureaucracy – who provided a rational argument for bureaucracy now implicitly alluded to in any defence of organisational framework. In a chapter entitled ‘Bureaucracy’ in Economy and Society (956–1006), Weber (Reference Weber, Rother and Wittich1978 [1968]) outlined six characteristics of ‘Modern Bureaucracy’. These rules are rational and growth orientated, useful to any business, private or public sector, and any office great or small. They may form a particularly helpful measure, then, of the ways in which English play development practices functioned in the 2000s as a ‘rational’ bureaucracy that, in the way Weber envisaged, worked efficiently and productively to, as The Dunton Report put it, ‘tackle head on issues of quality’ for maximum participation in the Gross Value Added (Arts Council England 2009c: 18).

Parallel to the upscaling in new public management, in the 2000s, there was also an explosion of pioneering techniques in play development dramaturgy. These included the mass reading of unsolicited scripts, playwrights’ networks, playwrights’ attachments, scratch events, and one-to-one dramaturgical intervention. Writ Large notes an upturn in unsolicited script reading. Unsolicited script reading refers to the practice of theatres reading and perhaps commenting on scripts sent to them by playwrights, agencies, and agents. Writ Large argues that the ‘burden of reading’ at the Bush was then in the region of 1,500 scripts per year; at the ‘Hampstead (1,500+), NT (1,500), Soho (2,500) and even Out of Joint (800–1,000) … WYP (500), Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse (650), the Nuffield Theatre (250–300) … Paines Plough (500+)’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 82). The actual practice of reading scripts is documented with evidence that West Yorkshire Playhouse, for example, ‘reads 300 a year, whittling them down during an intensive reading day where its readers engage in a “triage” process, reading the first ten pages of a play and then selecting those which merit a full reading and a two paragraph report’ (81). The fact that theatres developed such processes is a positive shift that allowed an increased number of participants to access play development. For the first time, unsolicited scripts were receiving recognition. Theatres not only increased their dialogue with emerging playwrights via these processes, but also often used feedback as a starting point to broker new relationships with playwrights. Such mechanisms also introduced parity – for example, transparent reading of scripts limited personal taste being the barometer against which work was assessed. While offering benefits, then, to individual playwrights and to the evolution of play development approaches, the script reading processes demonstrated a number of principles recognisable from Weber’s seminal account of modern bureaucracy (which I introduce in further detail later in this Element) – for instance, a system of standardisation, an adherence to rules, and the existence of a hierarchy with some scripts travelling up the levels of command. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on paperwork with the use of feedback pro formas that, as noted, significantly increase the administration in theatres and fundamentally diminish the quality and substantial commentary offered on single plays.

The Dunton Report also notes ‘the emergence of online social networking sites’ for playwrights as a response to writers’ desires for organisations to provide ‘a network between writers … as well as fulfilling an advisory role, script library and development opportunities’ (Arts Council England 2009c: 13, 17). Writ Large notes how ‘the Bush has an ambitious new digital plan … that will provide networking as well as feedback on new work’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 73). The Bush–Green network provided an online space for playwrights to read and feedback on plays and communicate with each other about industry news. The rise in this kind of networking demonstrated another means through which play development practices were being democratised. Available as a resource to anyone via the internet, networks decentred play development resources from London and produced a range of free resources that satisfied the demand for inclusive and accessible training and peer review. Arguably, however, the networks created another bureaucratic feature. Although he observed improved communication channels, Weber could not have foreseen intranets and online forums; however, these are inevitably part of the mechanisms that Graeber references (again, as explored later in this Element). Bush–Green-type digital networks, as well as script reading services as noted earlier, can be understood as an early expression of play development as an end in itself. In other words, the service, in Merton’s (Reference Merton1957) view, enacts a ‘familiar process of displacement of goals whereby an instrumental value becomes a terminal value’ (11). With playwrights’ networks such as this, the instrumental value of being in development may supersede the terminal value of getting a production. It is my opinion that an increase in development opportunities such as these, by way of their bureaucratic functions, shifted the very meaning of play development from an activity predicated on production to an activity predicated on interminable engagement, towards ‘writer’ rather than ‘play’ development.

Another feature of new play development dramaturgy in English theatres in the 2000s was a rise in playwriting attachment schemes. An attachment is a formalised, often unpaid connection between a theatre and playwright that signals a theatre’s interest in the playwright. Writ Large notes that ‘another notable development apparent from the interviews is the flourishing of novel ways that theatres can engage with writers other than commissioning and production. … At the start of the survey, being under commission or a “writer-in residence” were perhaps the two most common modes connecting writers to theatres’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 83–84). In the 2000s, however, they note a proliferation of attachments: ‘the model derives from the practice of the National Theatre Studio where the writer is offered a two-month relationship with the theatre with no pressure to deliver a play’ (84). Theatres including ‘Hampstead have also started offering attachments’ (73). Such attachments are extremely valuable to the individual playwright. As playwrights note, attachments engender, in some cases, a ‘frustration of constantly being “in development’’’ (15). In this sense, we might regard attachments as potentially beneficial to individual playwrights, but structurally bureaucratic: an interminable, rather than terminal process focused on production.

In addition to networks and attachments, ‘scratch events’ comprised another expression of play development dramaturgy in English theatres in the 2000s. Scratch events, ‘start nights’, or ‘rough cuts’, as they are titled by Hampstead and the Royal Court respectively, comprise public showcasings of new playwriting. The Dunton Report notes that Contact Theatre’s ‘Pitch Parties’ and ‘Flip the Script Nights’ are good examples (Arts Council England 2009c: 84). Writ Large offers an ambivalent reading, however: ‘while most theatres now consider “rehearsed readings” not tied to productions as a misuse of resources, “rough cuts” bring in the public and offer the writer some of the dividends of having work fully staged’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 86). Note that a rehearsed reading and a scratch event are only differentiated by the fact the former is ‘misuse of resources’ since the latter is income generating. Scratch events, Writ Large tells us, are another ‘emphasis on this interim stage between writing and a full production’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 87). Therefore, like script reading, networking sites and attachment programmes, they provided access to industry for a wide range of would-be playwrights. They can, however, be read as mechanisms that emphasise the instrumental value of development, rather than the terminal value of production. That is to say that scratch events may be rewarding to the individual playwright; however, structurally, they shift play development further away from production and closer to bureaucracy.

Finally, let us look at what The Dunton Report calls ‘the arrival of the dramaturg [and] a more interventionist notion’ of one-to-one script feedback with playwrights (Arts Council England 2009c: 80). Trencsényi (Reference Trencsényi2015) defines this approach as ‘professionals engaged in a dynamic dialogue-relationship with a theatre-maker … that is characterised by a high level of communication’ (xxi). Trencsényi’s definition is vague as to what the communication actually encompasses. Luckhurst (2006), however, notes that this dramaturgy relates to ‘the internal structures of a play text and is concerned with the arrangement of formal elements by the playwright – plot, construction of narrative, character, time-frame and stage action’ (10). According to MacDonald (Reference MacDonald2010), ‘the etymology of dramaturgy suggests work, or composition, in relation to action’ (93). The professionalisation of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg constituted a significant turn in British playmaking; playwrights, literary managers, directors, and artistic directors benefitted from the theatrical support of the new role, the democratisation of the playwright’s traditional knowledge base, remit, and, finally, the greater transparency lent through enhanced collaboration.

In Writ Large and The Dunton Report, we can see the exact approaches that correspond to the dramaturgical development of the literary manager’s remit. In a context which, I have argued, reinforced the need to rewrite organisational policy and administrative practices, Writ Large notes that during 2003–9 there occurred in building-based theatres significant ‘shifts in new writing policy’, the growth in ‘the role of the unsolicited script’, ‘the growth of attachments’, and ‘other modes of development’ including treatments and category commissions, multi-authored shows, courses, ‘lock-ins’, scratch events, rehearsed readings, writers’ labs, and studios (Arts Council England 2009b: 71, 81, 82, 86). Where Writ Large focused on identifying the new pedagogical dramaturgies of literary management in building-based theatres, The Dunton Report evidenced emergent production-focused play development dramaturgies in companies including Graeae, Paines Plough, Contact Theatre, and Pentabus Theatre (Arts Council England 2009c: 32–35). The report also examines new dramaturgies at fringe theatres including Theatre 503, the Ovalhouse, and the Bush Theatre (Arts Council England 2009c: 38–39). It notes an expansion of production-orientated channels including new fringe producers such as Hightide (14, 36). It also notes the emergence of pedagogical play development dramaturgies including the establishment of new writing networks such as the Bush’s online forum ‘Bush Green’, writers’ development agencies, new dramaturgy, and forms of critical intervention in a range of theatres and companies (15, 16, 16, 21).

Thus, the once-small office of literary management expanded into a new play development dramaturgy with enhanced institutional significance within individual theatres and companies. The Dunton Report noted that ‘over the last six years there has been a perceived increase in the role of the dramaturg’ (Arts Council England 2009c: 17). And, although they rarely use the word ‘bureaucracy’, Writ Large and The Dunton Report – as well as the aforementioned volumes by Luckhurst, Bolton, Turner and Behrndt, and Trencsényi – connect the dramaturg to a set of administrative activities suddenly underpinning new writing. These administrative activities are seen to have both positive and negative effects on production. The Dunton Report, for example, presents play development dramaturgy as an infrastructure intervening in new writing. At first, the report presents play development dramaturgy in positive terms, then it locates more dysfunctional aspects. Of the eighty-nine organisations and ‘key individuals’ surveyed, ‘it was almost unanimously agreed that there has been an increase in … development opportunities’: ‘most [interviewees] we spoke to were very positive … there was a sense that the investment in development programmes has had a positive effect’ (Arts Council England 2009c: 13, 14). And yet a different reading emerges: writers report a ‘frustration of constantly being “in development”’ and a fear that ‘dramaturgy could be used as an excuse to not commit to production’ (15, 18). The report warns that ‘the investment in development of writers … shouldn’t be at the expense of getting productions on stage’ (14). It reports playwrights describing script intervention as ‘unnecessary and obstructive’ with ‘all sorts of things that aren’t particularly helpful’ (17). It concludes that ‘critical interventions in new writing are of … uneven quality’ and suggests that ‘the development of the role of the dramaturg [requires] further investment in the training and definition of the role’ (31, 18). These readings reinforce the value of more recent works on literary management (e.g. Healy Reference Healy2022), and practice in literary management itself such as those at the Bush Theatre, discussed in the conclusion of this Element.

It is Writ Large that presents the most ambiguous portrayal of new play development dramaturgy, celebrating its proliferation as an indicator of the health of new writing while awkwardly acknowledging its more dysfunctional aspects as an administration. For example, it repeatedly reinforces the idea that increased play development supports production: ‘in general the direction of change is to provide more opportunities for successful production’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 71–72). Writ Large provides evidence to substantiate this: ‘statistical research suggests … that the growth in development work and an increase in commissioning have happened simultaneously’ (120). At the same time, the report notes that the growth in play development dramaturgies has been achieved via ‘lower commitment’ engagements (e.g. script reading, attachments, seed commissions, scratch nights, pitch parties, etc.) that do not necessarily result in production (84). In fact, the report defends these activities arguing that ‘all the companies interviewed concur that writer development is best achieved through experience of production, but inevitably this can’t always be squared with production slots’ (76). In relation to the new emphasis on script feedback, the report notes the new ‘burden of reading’ (82). The administrative load is seen as one to require further resourcing: ‘we recommend that theatres receive targeted help from the Sustain Fund to preserve their literary departments and dramaturgical activity’ (125). The report also notes, however, that playwrights may not value the increased script support that Writ Large paradoxically calls for:

One might wonder why Writ Large does not pursue further interrogation of some of the negative aspects of play development dramaturgy it finds in its consultancy. I suggest this is because, as noted, new public management and its bureaucratising effects (and even its critique) had been naturalised to the extent that any problematising of its inception may have been overlooked. Luckhurst (Reference Luckhurst2006), however, describes new play development as a process in which ‘a new tier of functionaires embed[ed] themselves in institutions and theatre making processes’ – a statement that suggests middle management inspired over-resourcing, focused on the instrumental value of play development rather than the terminal value of play production (205). Like Writ Large and The Dunton Report, Luckhurst has collected evidence from playwrights; quoting Steve Waters, for example, Luckhurst notes that play development dramaturgy is seen to be part of ‘a burgeoning culture of development and a shrinking culture of production’ (213) and writes that:

The weakness of analyses that assess the bureaucratic impact of play development in negative terms – that is, to what extent do literary managers and dramaturgs bureaucratise a project? – is to assume that there exists a starting point beyond the realm of ‘total bureaucratization’. In the final part of this section, I signal a shift in my argument. In the preceding section, I hoped to show how evolutions in new play development were related to parallel shifts in the bureaucratic management of the arts, often observed by scholars. Now, I want to propose, instead, a bureaucracy analysis in which I employ Weber and Graeber’s ideas. Here I show how play development is bureaucratic on Weber and Graeber’s terms. Moreover, I argue that it is also reductive to argue whether or not play development is bureaucratic; rather, I hope to show that the whole process of making a play, from a playmaker’s idea to a company’s evaluation report, from the 2000s, necessarily existed within a set of rules shaped by ‘total bureaucratization’.

From this perspective, an understanding of new play development in the 2000s might begin – apparently paradoxically – by noting the increasing emphasis on post-production audience experience evaluations. So quickly did the demand for evaluative data grow in response to the expectations of New Labour’s agenda that, in 2005, the Independent Theatre Council, the Society of London Theatre, and the Theatrical Management Association commissioned the New Economics Foundation (NEF) to conduct ‘research and create a tool usable across the whole industry to measure the impact of theatre on people’s well-being’ (NEF 2008: 4). As the report states, ‘the theatre sector has witnessed a rising demand for evaluation and assessment of its work, and sometimes in terms of outcomes and impacts that are not directly artistic’ or, as one anonymous theatre professional told researchers, ‘you can make new, exciting work, but you have to dress it up as focusing on some social objective or other’ (8).

The sixty-one-page report proposes feedback templates and advises on quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. It aims to improve the quality of data available in evaluating theatre, noting that some evaluations emphasise ‘the measurement of factors that are (at least relatively) easy to quantify’ and that ‘this kind of evaluation puts pressure on theatre companies to produce work that scores well on these factors – that “ticks the right boxes”’ (9). The report is itself an impressive bureaucratic enterprise that necessitated feedback from ‘participants in our workshop at the 2007 ITC Annual Conference, the circa 2500 people who responded to our online survey and the audience members around the country who helped with our piloting by filling in a little form’ (47). Why this endeavour might – paradoxically – be referenced as a starting point for play development is that it is a mainstay of feedback culture that ‘a successful evaluation … reflects on what went well and what could have been done differently, and draws lessons for the future’ (40 (my emphasis)).

Indeed, it is not hard to find examples from the 2000s that confirm how being ‘future oriented’ had become a necessary part of the bureaucracy of evaluation in all sorts of theatrical endeavours; for instance, in 2007, Firebird Theatre – a company ‘made up of 16 disabled actors, supported by two highly committed workers’ – produced a fifty-one-page evaluation of their tour of an interpretation of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which referenced, in addition to numerous types of feedback forms, ‘a SWOT analysis to guide future work’; a likely condition for that future work, and the concluding point in the opportunities section of the SWOT analysis, is ‘making a “business case” to ACESW for further investment’ (Firebird Theatre 2007: 2, 20). For building-based theatres, then, and for touring companies alike, whatever the next thing might be, it must necessarily exist already in a context defined in part by the realm of ‘total bureaucratization’.

The production and management of this bureaucratic knowledge and the demand for continuity in evaluation and planning have necessitated new specialist roles within theatres. Both Writ Large and The Dunton Report identify ‘with clarity the expansion of those working with new writing in our theatre companies’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 80). The Dunton Report, for example, notes ‘the creation of new posts specialising in literary management/new writing particularly in regional venues’ (Arts Council England 2009c: 26; see also 24). For example, the report notes that at theatre company Graeae, ‘in 2006, a review of staffing structure led to the creation of a new role of Literary Manager’ (32). Similarly, Writ Large notes that all twelve theatres interviewed had a literary office and manager. Furthermore, there was also evidence of a literary office hierarchy: ‘a combination of a permanent member of staff overseeing a larger team’ (Arts Council England 2009b: 80). For example, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, there are ‘two members of staff, the Production Dramaturg (Jeanie O’Hare) and Literary Manager (Pippa Ellis [now Hill]), but also the Literary Associate (currently Anthony Neilson) and at least one of the Artistic Associates (Roxana Silbert) with a brief for new writing’ (80). For a bureaucracy analysis, however, the shifts in personnel reflect an increasing engagement with the terms of a Weberian bureaucracy, including the idea that literary management possesses an office and office hierarchy. There are increasingly clearly defined job roles, a designation of authority and hiring based on skill. For example, by creating literary management hierarchies, personnel can demonstrate ‘special technical expertise’ (Weber Reference Weber, Rother and Wittich1978 [1968]: 958) in literary management – and this includes an understanding of and the ability to engage with the context of ‘total bureaucratization’.

Although I have argued that bureaucracy negatively effects play development dramaturgy by shifting it towards an interminable rather than terminal process, I also have shown that the increase in play development dramaturgy has had, apparently paradoxically, enormous benefits for playwrights, playmakers more broadly, and theatres in general. The aforementioned increase in play development pedagogies had the profound effect of democratising and decentring play development, opening it out to new participants. The rise in dramaturgical practices further ensured collaboration was central to playmaking thus challenging paradigms of isolationist writerly development. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to assume that in deploying their skills these theatre professionals acted negatively on new writing – for instance, as interfering censors – rather, the deployment of their skills is what makes the production of new writing possible within the terms of ‘total bureaucratization’. It is my opinion that the effects can be, at times, strikingly positive. Perhaps, overall, the most significant positive outcome to emerge from the increase in all play development discussed herein was its effect on inclusive commissioning. For instance, in a contribution to Roger Baines, Cristina Marinetti, and Manuele Perteghella’s (Reference Baines, Marinetti and Perteghella2011) Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice entitled ‘Not Lost in Translation’, Jack Bradley outlines his contributions as the National Theatre’s literary manager. In a crucial turn in English dramaturgy, Bradley notes:

Here, Bradley signals a shift towards ‘gently imposing’ metrics into play development. The outcome of such a ‘strategy’ is, in this case, a positive one ‘designed to impact on the diversity of the output’. It is important to note, however, that this positive shift also brings play development dramaturgy closer to the Graeberian definition of total bureaucracy (and thus neoliberalism) since it re-centres the activity as one deploying metrics, bureaucratic vocabularies, and continuous assessment. The problem is that innovative strategies such as Bradley’s do not only exist in the applied knowledge of specialists; rather, they come to be inscribed as institutional policy. As noted, the first principle of Weberian bureaucracy is administrative rules. A new writing policy is a set of rules around a theatre’s engagement with new writing, and it is through establishing and formalising such rules that play development enters a theatre’s operation as a means of policing playwriting. Once the infrastructure is in place it is less receptive to the individual play and thus less effective in dynamically supporting the development of new playmaking. At the Bush (the theatre I return to in the conclusion), there was simply a desire for increasing the capacity of the theatre to identify, advocate for, and ultimately produce new work. The shift in new writing policy at these theatres demonstrates not only the increase in Weberian bureaucracy in literary management, but also that play development dramaturgy is a product of an era of neoliberal bureaucratisation.

2 Dramaturgy Factories in Key English Theatres in the 2010s

This section assesses the ways in which neoliberalism’s emphasis on the transformation and restructuring of modes of production according to Fordist and post-Fordist logics was undertaken in English play development. I do this by analysing a series of interviews with practitioners of play development I conducted between 2014 and 2018. Before turning directly to that period, however, I want to start where Section 1 left off: in 2009, when the UK-based newspaper The Guardian published an article entitled ‘The Drama Factory: How Theatre Scripts Reach the Stage’ (Dickson Reference Dickson2009). It commenced with the rhetorical question: ‘what’s Britain’s biggest growth industry? Playwriting, apparently’. Going on to note the literary management practices of theatres in triaging new writing, the article’s aligning literary management to mass-mechanised industrial modes of production and the growth model is a critical point of debate here. The conflation of dramaturgy and manufacturing – especially at the Royal Court – conveys a certain disregard for the wider material conditions in the UK during this period. The 2008/9 recession hit manufacturing to the extent that output fell by 13% in real terms, compared to a 6% fall for the whole economy, and, in 2020, the manufacturing sector still had not recovered to its pre-crisis levels, continuing on its downward spiral that resulted in the loss of 3 million or 53% of jobs since 1981 (Rhodes Reference Rhodes2020: 5).

Dickson’s aligning of literary management with factory work is interesting in light of Section 1’s claims regarding bureacratisation and standardisation, in the context of austerity as it directly impacted theatre institutions. A little later than Dickson’s article, in the mid 2010s, I interviewed a group of literary managers and associates, dramaturgs, and directors with play development responsibilities about how play development worked in their buildings. As noted in the introduction of this Element, according to Arts Council England’s (2009b) Writ Large, the most statistically significant English producers of new writing between 2003 and 2008 were West Yorkshire Playhouse (now Leeds Playhouse) (5.6%), Plymouth Drum (7.7%), the Birmingham Repertory Theatre (8.5%), the Mercury Theatre (4.2%), the Liverpool Everyman (5.1%), the Royal Exchange Theatre (5.2%), the Royal Shakespeare Company (3.1%), the Royal Court (4.9%), and the National Theatre (5.1%). Other English theatres (51%) made up the rest of the new writing produced during this period (55). What were the ways of working on new plays in these buildings and, furthermore, did they conform to wider paradigms of industrial production?

None of the practitioners of play development I interviewed, unsurprisingly, were in the habit of defining their work in Fordist or post-Fordist terms. And yet, in open-ended interviews, I observed how play development was repeatedly described as having two shared structures. I noticed continuous allusion to a first structure: a ‘standard process’, used at each theatre, in which the development of single-authored plays existed in dialogue with a predetermined model that understood playmaking as a journey of improvement from commissioning to production via showcasing and refinement. The ‘standard process’ was not quite a rigid homogenous template; its application had some flexibility and varied between theatres. A second method, which I have called the ‘bespoke process’, was predominantly used with commissioned artists and companies who were not working towards new writing but rather were producing new work: in this case, devised, spoken word, or alternative forms of performance. Taking the cue from those enacting English play development in the 2010s, this section materially analyses their rhetorical framing of these accounts. While creative labour is often discussed as distinct from broader conceptualisations of production (e.g. Boyle Reference Boyle2017), what was the relationship between English play development in the 2000s and the ‘Fordist’ and ‘post-Fordist’ capitalist modes of production during the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition period (2010–15)? This transition in the economy more broadly is usually identified as reaching its peak in the 1980s, but in what follows I make a case for its relevance in the austerity period in English key new writing theatres. I rehearse both growth models and introduce their relevancy to English austerity economics – before analysing both the standard model of play development and the bespoke method against these principles. Let us return first to an understanding of Fordism.

It was Antonio Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1999 [1926]) who first theorised the burgeoning twentieth-century Fordism; his Prison Notebooks (558–620) advances on chapter 15 of Marx’s (Reference Marx1990 [1867]) Capital Volume One entitled ‘Machinery and Large-Scale Industry’ (492–639). Here, Marx focuses on industrial shifts at the beginning of the second Industrial Revolution in England (which itself ran between 1870 and 1914), when small-scale capitalism was becoming increasingly complex and global, employing machinery and new technologies requiring larger factories and unions. Gramsci expands Marx’s initial study. According to Robert J. Antonio and Alessandro Bonanno (Reference Antonio and Bonanno2000), Gramsci

Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1999 [1926]) not only documented the characteristics of Fordist manufacturing; his core concept of ‘hegemony’ also exposed the impact of Fordism on subjectivity: that it was a process that ‘adapt[s] customs to the necessities of work’ (596). Fordism is not an historic and specifically American mode of production; rather, it became increasingly integral to contemporary global manufacturing. Wayne Lewchuk (Reference Lewchuk1989) provides an account of the importing of American Fordism into British industries in the early twentieth century. More recently, Abigail Hunter (Reference Hunter2016) argues that Fordism remains central to British modes of production – for instance, in its American-imported fast food industry. Moreover, there is an established line of study that contends that the fast food industry’s Fordist processes inspired other British industries that value Fordism’s characteristic efficiency, productivity, calculability, predictability, and youthful workforce turnover. This has been termed the ‘McDonaldization of Society’ (Ritzer Reference Ritzer1996). For Hunter (Reference Hunter2016), McDonaldization ‘draw[s] on Weber’s concept of rationalisation, suggesting that society is becoming increasingly dominated by principles utilised in the fast food industry’ (43). Did the production of new writing in key English theatres in the twenty-first century share any of the characteristics of Fordism or the subsequent mode of capital’s production? Next is a reminder of the conditions of post-Fordism.

Post-Fordism refers to a reorganisation of capital that occurred as a response to a perceived crisis in its ability to continue to accumulate. It signals a departure from the assembly line, and also the dissolution of Fordist consumption practices including the security of ensuring one’s social reproduction through work. Hall’s article ‘Brave New World’ (Reference Hall1988) identified a general shift in global modes of production away from Fordism’s ‘classic large-scale labour processes, division of labour and class conflicts’ towards this post-industrialised form of production. The global economy, Hall contends, ‘has just arrived at the point where it can guarantee worldwide the standardisation of the size, shape and composition of every hamburger and every potato chip in a McDonald’s Big Mac from Tokyo to Harare’. And yet these Fordist paradigms are now superseded by ‘greater work flexibility [and] the maximalisation of individual choices through personal consumption’ (24). Furthermore, Hall argues that ‘most commentators would agree that [post-Fordism] covers at least some of the characteristics’ including ‘more flexible, decentralised forms of labour process and work organisation [and] a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation’ (24). In addition to pointing out the features of post-Fordist production, including rapid and powerful processing of information, the speed of knowledge production, and technological innovation, Michael Rustin (1989) argues that the new social relations require ‘flatter hierarchies and greater lateral communication between members [which] are more functional for organizational goals than bureaucratic command models, in which all communication must pass up and down hierarchies or lines of command’. Following almost a decade of bureaucratic management, would English theatre’s play development practices resonate with such shifts?

In segments entitled ‘McTheatre’, Dan Rebellato (Reference Rebellato2006: 99–103; Reference Rebellato2009: 39–49) argues that the capitalist mode of production – Fordism – entered English theatre’s own mode of production in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s, a new mode of theatrical production emerged for the staging of ‘megamusicals’ (Rebellato Reference Rebellato2009: 40). Megamusicals such as Cats (New London Theatre, 1981) and The Phantom of the Opera (Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, 1986) are staged in multiple venues globally. Because of this, they require efficiency, productivity, calculability, and predictability. Referencing the ‘McDonaldization of Society’ (Ritzer Reference Ritzer1996), Rebellato (Reference Rebellato2009) concludes that McTheatre is ‘the nearest theatre has come to being mass-industrialised’ (40).

In the 2000s, Bolton (Reference Bolton2012) identifies that English play development at the Royal Court has also mimicked capitalism’s modes of production. The Royal Court’s ‘developmental processes are underpinned by particular assumptions regarding the form(s) and function(s) of plays’ (219). Development is not simply the collaborative process of working on the commissioned play; rather it is a standardising process in which the play is structured according to an established pro forma. Bolton argues that this regulation is reproduced through a homogeneous form: as noted previously, ‘the raft of new plays presented by the Royal Court in the mid-1990s proved indicative of characteristics that would become familiar’ (217). In other words, a dramaturgical process was emerging in which plays were reproduced according to certain features. Development structures, however, are nonetheless seen to work according to economies of scale in which a high number of plays could be reproduced in a play development system. Bolton’s reading of play development at the Royal Court shares a resemblance to Rebellato’s understanding of McTheatre and yet there is a crucial difference: play development refutes total replicability since it constitutes a process predicated on producing multiple plays instead of just one in repeated cycles. As Bolton argues, the differences in plays produced at the Royal Court during this period are diminished on the basis of the principles deployed in development. To extend the logic of Bolton’s argument further into the 2000s, it is important to return to the party political conditions shaping long-term growth and profitability, the management of the post-war Fordist economy, the counterposed model that emerged following, and crucially its manifestation in the 2010s.

Succeeding Labour’s administration under Gordon Brown and led by Conservative Party Leader David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg, the coalition accelerated the neoliberal regime advanced by previous British governments. Unlike Labour, however, who advanced an economic neoliberalism based on extending the state’s reach (e.g. via public services including education and the arts), the coalition advanced the neoliberal project by advancing an aggressive individualism that focused on reducing the size of the state and public expenditure. According to Matt Beech (Reference 59Beech, Beech and Lee2015), for example, the coalition ‘liberals were confident that – because of their commitment to a smaller state, market forces, lower taxes, entrepreneurship and less bureaucracy – their hour in British politics had come’ (5). The principal means through which the coalition scaled back public services was via their devastating austerity programme: a set of service cuts justified on the basis that they would reduce the budget deficit in the global recession following the 2007–8 financial crisis. Writing about these shifts in ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’, Stuart Hall (Reference Hall2011) summarises the coalition as ‘the most radical, far-reaching and irreversible social revolution since the war … it is arguably the best prepared … and ambitious of the three regimes that, since the 1970s, have been maturing the neoliberal project’ (718). The effects of the coalition’s public-sector reformism are widely observed, not least in the arts. For example, Harvie (Reference Harvie2015) notes how the coalition’s programme affected English theatre: ‘by substantially cutting state arts funding, and by promoting increased private philanthropic giving as the principle alternatives. These activities demonstrate this Conservative-led government’s neoliberal commitment to cutting public infrastructure and bolstering private competition’ (56).

The coalition’s approach developed in the context of an earlier economic shift from one system of commodity production, Fordism, to another, post-Fordism. In relation to British industry, political economists credit the conservative regime under Margaret Thatcher, from 1979 to 1990, as the era in which Britain moved from a Fordist to a post-Fordist economy (e.g. Jessop Reference Jessop, Gottdiener and Komninos1989: 212; Amin Reference Amin1996: 1). More recently, however, scholars have suggested that, against the twentieth-century global evolutionary narrative, Fordist structures have remained in place into the twenty-first century, often alongside post-Fordist regimes. Indeed, in Britain, the coalition, and in particular its austerity programme, advanced Britain’s passage into a post-Fordist economy. As Patrick Bury and Sergio Catignani (Reference Bury and Catignani2019) put it, under the coalition, ‘the ideological blue-print for re-organising state services was supported by developments in industrial organisation, especially the end of the Fordist mode of production’ (685). With this context in mind, I will now analyse the standard process and the bespoke process of play development as introduced in interview by those practising play development in the 2010s.

3 ‘You Say You Suffer from a Gentle Schizophrenia’: Artistic Subjectivity inside English Play Development in the 2010s

Azunwo Ezwho Emenkie (Reference Azunwo2014) defines playwriting as a ‘scholarly activity engineered by creative imagination. It is the art and techniques of dramatic compositions and theatrical representation. Therefore it is not merely a [text] but a creative one that articulates the vision of the dramatist in a given period of human experience’ (9). In this section, I expand Ezwho Emenkie’s exploration by advancing an analysis of the playwright inside the social, political, and economic environment of English new writing theatres in the 2010s. I am interested in showing the extent to which artistic subjectivity was shaped, between 2014 and 2018, according to neoliberal paradigms. By using the same approach of practitioner interviews, this time with artists, I explore the self-conception of commissioned playwrights in the English structures of play development. Artistic subjectivity is that which Thet Shein Win (Reference Win2014) defines as the ‘idea that what [artists] produce is, in part, a reflection on themselves’ (2). In particular, I ask how artistic subjectivity is structured within the context of English play development during this decade. What is a playwright’s artistic identity inside a commissioning model and the creative labour market determined by the neoliberal project? For this purpose, I make a connection between theorising on artistic and neoliberal subjectivity and testimonies from playwrights commissioned in the mid 2010s at the theatres introduced earlier. I bring together commentary from playwrights and playmakers Amanda Wittington (Saturday Night Sunday Morning, 2014, Mercury Theatre), Oladipo Agboluaje (Immune, 2015, Plymouth Drum), RashDash (We Want You to Watch, 2015, Leeds [formerly West Yorkshire] Playhouse), Lee Mattinson (Crocodiles, 2014, Manchester Royal Exchange), Phil Porter (The Christmas Truce, Reference Porter2014, Royal Shakespeare Company), Tim Price (Teh Internet is Serious Business, 2014, the Royal Court), Daniel Matthews (Scrappers, 2013, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse), Steven Camden (Backdown, 2015, Birmingham Repertory Theatre), and Alexander Zeldin (Beyond Caring, 2014, National Theatre). By interviewing commissioned artists about their experiences of play development at these theatres in the mid 2010s, I focus on artistic subjectivity inside the aforementioned modes of production. How does artistic self-presentation map onto discourses of neoliberal subjectivity? I suggest that the commissioned artist’s subjectivity inside the play development ‘factory’ is a complex amalgamation of artistic and neoliberal subjectivity, where artistic subjectivity is ipso facto imbricated with the neoliberal. First, an engagement with existing accounts of the interrelationship of neoliberal and artistic subjectivity: I provide an extended account of neoliberal artistic subjectivity and map it onto the austerity period in Britain. I bring together different examples of artistic subjectivity to provide a framework through which to analyse the interviews with artists following.

In the context of the coalition government (2010–15), playmakers, alongside all UK subjects, would be under pressure to conceive of themselves as units of human capital. The Cameron-Clegg Anglo-Liberal model for growth was predicated on stimulating further labour power in Britain by using the reserve army of unemployed, but also through broadening the notion of work according to post-Fordist paradigms. For example, the ‘Work Programme’, a nationwide initiative intended to get unemployed people back to work, was a flagship welfare-to-work scheme, instated in June 2011. It was, as Jay Wiggan (Reference Wiggan2015) puts it, ‘ostensibly about securing job outcomes across a diverse body of non-employed labour power using economic rationality to drive performance’ (385). The Work Programme is one example of the neoliberal economic rationality that was characteristic of coalition policy. According to Craig Berry (Reference Berry2014), for instance, under the coalition ‘finding a job – any job – [was] prioritised above all other considerations’ (606). Berry argues that, in response, citizens were compelled to develop rapidly as neoliberal subjects: ‘individuals, therefore, had to be both correctly incentivised to accept available employment opportunities, and capable of adapting to potentially volatile labour market conditions once in employment’ (594). An ideal expression of the neoliberal subject prominent during the coalition period was the entrepreneur – the individual capable of adapting to the volatile labour market by ensuring their own self-employment and taking on their own financial risks. According to Nima Sanandaji (Reference Sanandaji2014), ‘one of the most striking features of the economic recovery has been the record 4.5 million Britons who are now self-employed. Ian Duncan Smith (2014) claimed that this was evidence that the coalition was “reviving Britain’s entrepreneurial spirit”’. Indeed, in 2014, The Centre for Entrepreneurs in Britain released ‘The Entrepreneurial Manifesto’ which celebrated the growth of entrepreneurialism in Britain.

Michel Foucault’s theorising on neoliberal subjectivity is relevant to understanding such biopolitical evolution. In The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, Foucault contended that liberalism’s laissez-faire approach to the market was shifting. The market was no longer based on exchange but, rather, increasingly predicated ‘toward the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises’ (149). As Colette Conroy (Reference Conroy2010) notes, ‘Foucault suggests that the body is used as a way of placing human beings within a regulatory system’ (loc. 463). Since the regulatory system was the market, Foucault (Reference Foucault2008) argues that ‘what is sought is not a society subject to the commodity … the homo economicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production’ (147, 149). What Foucault means by this is that Marx’s concept of capitalist reproduction via physical labour power and its abstraction in exchange has evolved. In the twentieth century, capitalism is embodied. Wendy Brown elucidates Foucault’s conception of the neoliberal subject. When exchange is replaced by competition as the dialectic of capitalist reproduction, human subjects are envisioned not as the labour power which, as Marx’s value theory has it, is congealed in objects through commodity production; rather, humans become human capital by consuming their own labour power. Thus, as Brown (Reference Brown2015) puts it, ‘productivity is prioritized over product; enterprise is prioritised over consumption’ (65–66). Leigh Claire La Berge clarifies Foucault’s re-conceptualisation of work and subjectivity further as ‘the self-narration of a subject as one who is compelled to sell his or her labor under less than free conditions has expired. Now the subject will understand herself as possessor of “human capital” who seeks a return on her investment’. La Berge (Reference La Berge2019) contends that Autonomist theorists, namely Negri (Reference Negri2017) and Hardt and Negri (Reference Hardt and Negri2001), ‘ultimately end up borrowing from Foucault’ in what would become an anti-Marxist trajectory of theorising on subjectivity at the end of the twentieth century (23).

Experientially, artists in English play development evolved dramatically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, becoming increasingly professionalised and entrepreneurial. I suggest that the stories artists told about themselves in public forums during this period can serve as an example of this shift. For instance, I recall a workshop in the mid 2010s with an acclaimed English theatre company. The lead artists were remembering how previously they never used to bother with Arts Council grant applications. At the time, they believed themselves not to be sufficiently organised nor engaged. Instead, they chose to fund their theatre practice by personal credit card debt in advance of Edinburgh runs, hoping to make back the loss through ticket sales (unless, of course, they spent their earnings in other ways). Such transgressive tales of play development in the 1990s were, as was the case in the workshop I attended, a means through which artists paradoxically revealed themselves to be ideal neoliberal subjects in the twenty-first century, in line with Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s (Reference Boltanski and Chiapello2018 [1999]: 139) reading. During this period, artists had become more adept (or were more comfortable with saying they were) at having separate income streams, accounting systems, ‘side hustles’, and grant writing expertise. They told us in subtle ways that they had become skilled at speculation, risk aversion, and proof-of-concept sharing that ameliorated the funding of poor-quality work. They became confident at talking about themselves too – for example, in workshops at theatres on their approach to ‘being an artist’. Harvie (Reference Harvie2013) is known for commenting on the historical material evolution of the artist during this period, whose characteristics made them ‘artrepreneurs’ (62–108).

How did artists get so good at telling people about their new business acumen? Harvie’s critique can be extended to expose the origin story: the careers and employability discourses that were a key critical feature in the neoliberal transformation of higher education during this time (Giroux Reference Giroux2014). Here, in the mandatory modules on ‘careers in the creative industries’, students’ burgeoning theatre knowledge became the vehicle of such self-branding. Knowledge of theatre systems including scenography, direction, and dramaturgy, for example, manifest the visual and typographical pseudo-performance of creativity that any young theatre professional’s personal website might boast. It is important to note that, in becoming more entrepreneurial, however, would-be artists could also become increasingly self-sufficient and generally more ‘employable’ – the aim of universities and, beyond that, the UK Government. While the economic rationality at the heart of the ‘artrepreneur’ is therefore beyond dispute, Harvie (Reference Harvie2013), though, presents the damaging effects of this re-conceptualisation of the artist, the art, and also its development process since this shift ‘obliges art relentlessly to pursue productivity, permanent growth and profit’ (62–63). Artrepreneurial positionalities become both ubiquitous and ridiculous, then, in the same moment. In Sh!t Theatre’s Dollywould (2018), for example, the company members laugh at ‘all the lies we had to tell the Arts Council!’ vis-à-vis the pursuit of funding to actually go to the Dollywood Theme Park in Tennessee, USA (the subject of the performance). This may seem like a reversal to the 1990s and a rejection of the terms of artrepreneurialism. It works in the same way, however, as the story from the workshop. We laugh along because we play/don’t play the game too.

In order to properly resist appropriation, artists must, as Harvie (Reference Harvie2013) puts it, become – instead – craftspeople (97). Craftsmanship displays qualities that challenge entrepreneurialism’s drive to profit. These include an emphasis on working ‘with difficulties, resistance and ambiguity’; to not prioritise ‘efficiency and productivity, but simply quality’; for practice to be conceived as a process ‘not “as a fixed set of things”’; and, furthermore, that ‘craftsmanship is egalitarian’ (92, 97, 98). In signalling the need to move beyond English play development contexts, Harvie’s work aligns with that of Nicholas Ridout (Reference Ridout2013) – who ‘look[s] at the theatre as a place and a practice where it might be possible to think disruptively about work and leisure, about work and love, and about the apparently separate realms of necessity and freedom’ (4). Exploring (predominantly) industrial and post-industrial capitalist European and American contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ridout traces a subversive figure throughout theatre’s history that, paradoxically, resists capital’s claim on artistic subjectivity. Somewhat reminiscent of Harvie’s craftsman, Ridout seeks to locate the personification of ‘passionate amateurs’ in theatre. The figure of the passionate amateur is found in a range of diverse contexts and established as ‘the person, either knowingly or not, in pursuit of … resistance to the establishment of our now dominant understanding of the relations between work and time’ (6). In my experience, English play development continues to enable artists to practise across unforeseen durations, sometimes extending development phases into decades. Arts Council England is also aware of the sometimes lengthy gestation phase of certain creative works – for divergent reasons.

The passionate amateur, however, Ridout claims, is a figure similar to the romantic anti-capitalist who personifies ‘a resistance to industrial capitalism, articulated on behalf of values, practices, and experiences, often those of a premodern, preindustrial, rural life, that industrial capitalism seemed determined to destroy’ (6). Ridout suggests not only that the passionate amateur exists in theatre’s history, but that theatre in general performs what he refers to as a ‘detour’ in the trajectory of capital in which the time stands still and therefore the construct of time that determines neoliberalism is refused entry (9). Will the passionate amateur, and Ridout’s ideal of theatre, be found in English play development during this period?

Bojana Kunst asserts that artists such as this might be tricky to find. Kunst thematically elaborates on similar questions to Harvie and Ridout, but in relation to predominantly (Eastern) European performance, dance and choreography. Artist at Work explores the effects of neoliberalism on artistic subjectivity including examining the ways in which Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage summarises the work of the artist Ina Wudtke. According to Kunst (Reference Kunst2015), Lesage describes what Wudtke actually does when she works as an artist:

Kunst sets out a number of ways in which artists can be ‘disobedient’ to the logic of capital (178). One way is for the artist to re-conceptualise their relationship to work. Is it possible to determine our practice against the flow of post-Fordist constructs including productivity, transformation, and flexibility? Like the Sh!t Theatre example, we can view many artistic practices and ways of working as having an interesting relationship with what Kunst calls non-work: mistakes, minimum effort, coincidence, duration, passivity, etcetera. (183). Diverging from human capital’s focus on entrepreneurialism, competition, and cost for benefit self-care, such terms correspond to qualities of craftsmanship noted by Harvie- in particular, the emphasis on inefficiency and slowness. More obviously, however, they are aligned with Ridout’s description of passionate amateurism. This section follows these cues, complexities, and my own focus on rhetorical and performative presentations to identify the ways artists construct themselves in English play development in the 2010s.

Conclusion: Dreaming or Drowning? English Play Development Today

At the beginning of the play text for Dreaming and Drowning (2023), Owusu cites the opening of Hamlet: ‘who’s there?’. Taken more as a crie de cœur of the demos than the psychological terror of the ruling class, this statement channels a generation’s feeling that it’s time for some historical material home truths. ‘Who’s there’ – in Shepard’s Bush, in London, in English play development? In asking, Owusu becomes, as I see him, one of the luminaries strategising how to kill a zombie – the ghoulish (white) neoliberal pulse, in English play development, at the closing of its eerie and weird era. This Element began with a visit to the Lyric Hammersmith in 2014 and it ends with a visit to The Bush. On 23 December 2023, my partner and I went to a late-afternoon performance of Dreaming and Drowning after a morning spent at the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramović retrospective. The day out was a significant expense in our budget. In 2023, the average Briton was nearly £2,000 worse off, while the average Londoner was nearly £3,400 worse off as a result of Brexit – with almost 300,000 fewer jobs in the capital alone (Mayor of London 2024). The retrospective, with an entirely white audience (during our time), was four times the price of Owusu’s event, at which we were the only white spectators. But at both the Royal Academy and The Bush, visible signs of Christmas were minimal – for which we were grateful. The Bush was peaceful – despite the majority white Southampton away fans walking down the Uxbridge Road, howling in advance of a home match against Queens Park Rangers at the Loftus Road Stadium. Both myself and my partner had read the pre-show ‘self-care’ guide for Owusu’s play – which focused on mental health issues including rising panic and anxiety. Dreaming and Drowning is dedicated to Owusu’s mother, Naluwembe Binaisia, and, in a discussion on the writing of the play, Owusu cited Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme’s powerful Reference Onwueme2016 Wazobia Reigns (see quotation at the beginning of this conclusion). Wazobia Reigns is a feminist drama that focuses on a gender reckoning and power transition which has significant impact on the role and place of women in the Anioma kingdom. By citing this text, Owusu’s models of practice are aligned with the atmosphere of transitions of power. In this conclusion, I speak about Dreaming and Drowning at The Bush because I see it as a critical work of symbolic and direct action levelled against the spectre of neoliberal inequality outed as a feature of English play development, as noted in the introduction. In its address, Dreaming and Drowning invites its audience to answer ‘who’s there?’ with their presence. As a diverse audience sitting quietly together in The Bush’s modest studio space on a night before Christmas, we were there to witness what really matters in English play development now.

Dreaming and Drowning follows young, gifted, Black, and queer nineteen-year-old Malachi, who has just commenced a degree in English literature at the University of Bristol (though it is clear, as a former pretzel eater at the Westgate, he is from this area of London). The play begins with Malachi ‘urgent and anxious’ (2023, 7). He utters, ‘I’m drownin. [space. Space]. Drowning under seas like heavy lava on my skin/ Melting my insides inside out inside/I’m falling fadin down into the damp/From open air to liquid blue, cold hue, where my lungs are/heavy, thick, I’m drownin/Drownin under blue and clutchin my throat fillin up upside down/ I’m turnin, blood rushin to my head/Legs like lead sinkin, thrashin gaspin’ (7). ‘I’m drowning’ is a central reprise in the script, a metaphor of Malachi’s anxiety – the result of the microaggression experienced in a white education system that privileges white, straight folks. It is, I suggest, also an allusion to Eric Garner’s notorious last words, ‘I can’t breath’, which became a crie du cœur of the Black Lives Matter movement. The focus on the body in Dreaming and Drowning, the repeated return to Malachi’s increasingly severe panic attacks, forces a confrontation with the sympathetic nervous system. In each of Malachi’s rising symptoms, we enter his fight-or-flight mode, experience through the allusion to the throat the respiratory system under strain, experience through the allusion to bloods the raised heartbeat, the increasing alertness and tension in muscle tissue, the digestive system shutdown, the sensory and perceptual disfigurements. The rhythm of his speech supports an understanding that this bodily response, however functional, has resulted in a very real danger to his maintaining homeostasis. In other words, if Malachi experiences himself drowning, it is because he is. And yet we watch.

The programming of Owusu’s Dreaming and Drowning at The Bush enables its central institutional critique – Malachi’s embodied response to a white institution – to reflect as much on English play development as on education. The Bush began in a small room above a pub on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green in 1972. Since then, it has produced more than 500 groundbreaking premieres, becoming a world-famous new writing theatre while still retaining its aim to operate locally and ‘reflect our culturally diverse area’ (Bush Theatre 2025a). At the time of writing, the Bush had recently celebrated its fiftieth birthday (2022) cementing its reputation in producing new writing from playwrights ‘from the widest range of backgrounds [who] who reflect the vibrancy of British culture now’ (2025b). Its approach seems to work against the bureaucracy, modes of production, and artistic subjectivities of neoliberal English play development described in the earlier sections. Consider, for example, Benedict Lombe, a Congolese British writer whose debut play, Lava, received its world premiere at The Bush Theatre in 2021. Lombe notes:

Writers such as Benedict Lombe are not simply the recipients of The Bush’s artistic management’s ‘rooting’; in turn, they root for others who engage with The Bush: their Black audiences. Following the death of George Floyd, The Bush released a YouTube series entitled ‘The Protest: Black Lives Matter’ (Bush Theatre 2025d). The description read: ‘If we could we would have opened our building to support and comfort each other during this time. We would have held space together, cried together, and maybe made some art together in order to heal. … Taking a second to speak directly to our Black audiences: we know that this is a difficult time.’ Lombe’s creative contribution, read emotionally to camera, begins: ‘So as I try to write these words, I couldn’t help but wonder about all those times in history when we’ve tried to write these words, about all these times in history where we’ve had to take our pain and our rage and our trauma and turn it into something articulate and insightful and poetic … because this pain and this rage and this trauma is not articulate or insightful or poetic it’s exhausting’ (Bush Theatre 2025e). The departure of The Bush’s management from managerial duties and the Bush’s creatives from central commission duties during Black Lives Matter works against the imperatives of neoliberalism to present, instead, a model of relationality that is neither bureaucratic, Fordist, post-Fordist, nor expressive of neoliberal subjectivity.

The sensitivity and directness with which The Bush created content for its Black community in lockdown had ramifications for the address of its play development model which, during lockdown, was also issued as an open-access suite of videos on YouTube. The description for these videos, which remain available to anyone, reads: ‘Since closing our doors, the Bush team has continued to work hard from home to bring exciting new voices to the UK stage. As part of this work, we are producing a short series of 10 Minute Masterclasses to support anyone who is interested in writing and plays.’ Artistic Director Lynette Lindon and Director Dramaturg Daniel Bailey offer videos from their respective homes. In a masterclass exploring the difference between theme and story, Lindon is home, wearing a hoodie and no makeup. She has a fireplace just visible behind her – with a framed record on it. She commences with:

The register and tone of Lindon’s introduction are markedly distinct from the often intimidating and white literature of playwriting pedagogy (see Tyler Reference Tyler, Adiseshiah and Bolton2020). Furthermore, the proviso that the Bush’s play development videos are ‘going to exist forever’ corresponds to Lombe’s temporal claim that Black people throughout history have been solicited to provide the same insightful, articulate, and poetic responses of their pain. Lindon thus creates a subtle but significant rhetorical and address shift around the terms of English play development.

The subtext of Black creative legacy and ancestral connection is present not only in Lindon’s and Lombe’s discursive contributions, but also in the mode of expression of other creatives at The Bush, such as Daniel Bailey. In an interview with me in December 2022, Bailey described the function of the ‘EWG’ (Emerging Writers’ Group) and the Bush’s ‘secret commitment that those plays end up on stage’. In articulating some wider thoughts on the industry now, Bailey said:

If attunement to Black legacy and ancestry are the conceptual underpinning of a new regime of play development at The Bush, this tenor is what supported writers such as Owusu. During the first lockdown in 2020, Owusu was a member of The Bush’s emerging writers group (Campbell Reference Campbell2020). Dreaming and Drowning, Owusu’s second play, was shortlisted for the Mustapha Matura award in 2022 (an award and mentoring programme for emerging and young Black playwrights of Caribbean and African descent, aged twenty-five and under). Ingrid Selberg, wife of Mustapha Matura, opines that ‘I found Kwame Owusu’s Dreaming and Drowning a powerful and authentic portrayal of a coming of age of a young Black person, which explored anxiety, anger, confusion and joy conveyed in vivid and poetic language. I feel Kwame Owusu is a writer with great promise and deserves to win the Mustapha Matura Award and Mentoring Programme’ (Mustapha Matura 2025).

Represented here in both form and content is an experiential, phenomenological, and sensory account of the systematic oppression referenced in Lombe’s critique of a play development model which ‘take[s] our pain and our rage and our trauma and turn[s] it into something … poetic’. In the 2019–20 academic year, 72.6% of people starting undergraduate study were white, 12.2% were Asian, 8.7% were Black, 4.5% had mixed ethnicity, and 2.0% were from another ethnic group (Government UK 2022). As one of the 8.7%, Malachi is not unique but his rarefied presentation in higher education – and, rarer, the representation of campus plays – demonstrates a fervent rejection of hegemonies cited by Bailey as ‘leaders and gatekeepers who are struggling to keep completely relevant’. Furthermore Dreaming and Drowning is a dramaturgical expression of Bailey’s conviction that ‘our stories will always exist no matter how many schools disengage with drama and the arts’. The drive that is created in uniting the rhetorical position of Lindon, Lombe, Bailey, and Owusu here creates a robust, future-oriented play development model that resists the neoliberal imperatives of bureaucracy, restructuring, and neoliberal subjectivity explored in earlier sections. So, now, as we enter the next phase of English play development: ‘who’s there?’.