This chapter examines the political economy of British theatre – that is, how the state governs and manages the economics of theatre – and British theatre’s often fraught relationship to these arrangements. It considers the place where state funding of theatre has been most necessary but most reluctant: theatre buildings. The chapter first traces the history of capital investment in British theatre since 1945. It shows how the state has taken up its fiscal responsibilities to finance theatre building fitfully, and sometimes inequitably. Against this historical backdrop, the chapter then examines the reconstructed Battersea Arts Centre in south London, which fully re-opened in 2018 after a serious fire. The refurbished BAC, the chapter argues, makes a distinctive and persuasive case for public investment in theatre. Economically, it realises a Keynesian aim articulated at the foundation of the theatrical mixed economy after World War Two: for public investment to increase theatre’s productive capacity. It also puts the value of that investment on show, suggesting an alternative case for public funding, one in which theatre is not simply a ‘good cause’ but a highly credible investment, economically and aesthetically.

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.

This chapter explores the diversity of theatre outside London in the post-war period with a particular emphasis on work produced in the four nations that make up the UK and in the regions of England. It argues that much of this work has been under-examined and undervalued, and that a persistent metropolitan bias has long distorted existing accounts of British theatre in the period. The recent re-animation of distinctive regional and national identities within the context of an increasingly fractured and unstable UK, makes the continuation of this critical approach untenable. The chapter aims to set the record straight, therefore but also to note that metropolitan bias has been similarly at work in cultural policy and the distribution of funding, with the result that audiences in some parts of the country have been much better served than others. My aim is to consider the impacts of this persistent unfairness in its multiple contexts.

British theatre’s post-war cultural impact would be hard to deny, having produced generations of actors, writers, directors, and designers who have populated the world’s stages and screens. This vitality has often been explained in aesthetic terms, in the successive waves of generational artistic renewal in British theatre (from the ‘angry young men’ onwards). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 seeks to outline the discursive and material changes that have made this theatre possible; that is, the economic, infrastructural, and legislative structures that underpin what can and cannot be done in theatre and the structures and habits of discourse that govern what can and cannot be said about the theatre. Hence the book focuses on the working conditions of actors, writers, and directors; the economics of the West End, subsidised sector, and fringe; the theatre’s interaction with the British nation-state at the level of policy, theatre buildings, and in its nations and regions; finally, the book considers the theatre’s civic function, its changing engagement with audiences and the development of Black British and Queer theatre.

This chapter focuses on the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and discusses the post-war history of West End and commercial theatre in Britain. It aims to consider the ways the commercial sector and its proprietors, producers, and productions, have been shaped by, and have responded to, the changing conditions of the industry in this period. Starting and mostly staying in one location – resolutely in the heart of London’s ‘Theatreland’ – creates a tight spatial focus in an industry which in many other ways is characterised by movement: of productions, artists, audiences, and influence. The chapter explores a long-running set of tensions between heritage and contemporaneity, culture and development, and artistic and commercial interests that have played out at both the Apollo and across the wider West End and commercial sector. It argues that the Apollo makes for a reasonably representative study of the wider history and trends in post-war commercial theatre. What emerges from its history is a picture of a sector that, despite extraordinary change in both the industry and the world in which it operates, has weathered or absorbed many of these changes and demonstrated continuity, sometimes surprising, sometimes troubling, sometimes remarkable.

Rather than focusing on dramaturgical or thematic developments in the post-war era, this chapter traces the changes experienced by playwrights in their practical working conditions. It begins by disputing widespread arguments against the prominence of playwriting in British theatre (that it is literary, logocentric, and individualistic). It then explores changes in play publishing, which helped raise the cultural profile of the playwright while also forming a new kind of dramatic canon; the industrial conditions in which playwrights have worked, which were precarious for the first thirty years since 1945 but were decisively transformed in the late seventies by an effective campaign of unionisation and collective bargaining; and the growing culture of play development, which has had mixed results, but which, at its best, helps demystify playwriting as a cultural practice, making it more accessible and helping to shepherd new plays and playwrights into being.

This chapter offers a broad account of two key governmental themes in post-war British theatre: policy and censorship. The chapter’s discussion of these themes is informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which embraces both the activities of the state and the broader discursive regimes that constitute groups and individuals, including self-governing. The chapter examines a range of values that have featured in post-war cultural discourse in terms of continuities, ruptures, and changes between the post-war period and earlier moments in capitalist modernity, and within the period itself. The chapter surveys the expansionist arts policies implemented in the decades following the war, before turning to the effects of neoliberal governmental politics from the 1970s onward, which saw the value of the arts become subject to increasing scrutiny and justification. Next, the chapter addresses censorship and the contours of its post-war cultural politics. It notes overlapping shifts in focus from sexuality and gender to racial and religious identities – shifts which speak to the governmental ‘management of populations’. Finally, it analyses David Hare’s I’m Not Running (National Theatre: Lyttelton, 2018) – a work that responded to contemporaneous governmental crisis.

The various names given to the new theatre movement that emerged in the 1960s to challenge both the West End and the new subsidised theatre sector include ‘fringe’, ‘alternative’, and ‘underground’; each offers different aesthetic, social, political, and other definitions of what this theatre movement means. This chapter traces the modern precursors of the movement and the cultural forces that fed into its concerns, forms, and methods, before examining three companies as case studies: Portable Theatre, the Pip Simmons Group, and Monstrous Regiment. Through close analysis of each company’s history, the chapter explore some key features of the fringe that would contribute to its strength but also its vulnerability: its relationship to the mainstream, its collective ethic, and its experience of arts subsidy. Focusing on the period from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties (perhaps the first wave of the fringe), the chapter asks how far the movement succeeded, whether its radicalism was absorbed by the mainstream or quashed, what contributed to its arguable decline, and what is left today of its legacy of political engagement, artistic experimentation, and much more.

This chapter charts the impact of the establishment of systematic state funding on the nature of the relationship between theatre goers and theatre makers; the forms of theatre available to audiences; and theatre makers’ attitudes towards theatregoers. Citing Baumol and Bowen’s 1960s survey of British theatregoers – which noted their exceptionally elite status – it discusses the social, technological, and cultural shifts which have shaped the opportunities for greater audience interaction, agency, and ownership in recent years. Touching on the building of new civic, repertory, and university theatres in the regions between the 1950s and 1980s, the health and status of touring theatre companies, and efforts to create more accessible and inclusive experiences, the chapter acknowledges that the period since 1945 has seen extraordinary developments in the understanding of what being an audience means, in terms of visibility, conventions governing behaviour, marketing, opportunities for participation, and assumptions about what constitutes an appropriate place for the encounter between performer and spectator. It concludes, however, that twenty-first century British theatre still has some way to go before it can claim to have addressed its reputation for elitism and exclusivity.

This chapter examines the pinnacles of Black British theatre from the 1950s to the 2020s. It attempts to reconstruct the historiography of Black British theatre in a way that emphasises Black practitioners who wielded agency in hostile environments and contributed to reconfiguring what it means to work in British theatre. It builds on existing scholarship that acknowledges the social, political, and economic issues faced by the theatre industry to offer an analysis of how issues of belonging and nation are reflected in work produced. It traces the key historical trajectories of Black British theatre over three generations organised by similar concerns rather than time periods. It begins exploring the first generation of Black playwrights and the impact of the written play text. Its examination of the second generation acknowledges the development of Black theatre companies in the 1980s, focusing on the role state subsidy played in these companies’ deeply uneven longevity. Lastly, its focus on the third generation explores the structural changes pursued by Black makers, performers, directors, designers, producers, and audiences that demand that we renegotiate what is invoked by ‘Black British theatre’.

This chapter examines the newly expanded and transformed theatre ecology enabled by the post-war rise of central government subsidy to the arts. It explores subsidy’s ambitions, achievements, and benefits, but also its turbulence and the ideological risks embedded in its deeply ambivalent objectives to foster elite arts but also democratise the arts. The chapter begins by giving a history of British theatre subsidy and considers its contribution to the development of theatre as one of Britain’s great cultural assets through its visionary promotion of such things as artists’ independence, the expansion of theatre infrastructure, and a conception of theatre as a civic right. The chapter then considers some of the hazards arising from how theatre subsidy has been practised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (and successor organisations), especially its tendency to reinforce elite privileges of metropolitanism, class, and whiteness. The chapter critiques the elitism of British arts subsidy’s legacy and proposes transformation of its practices to become more accountable, more democratic, and more dispersed, helping to make British theatre and culture more diverse and better informed by a greater variety of imaginations.

This chapter presents a history of directorial practice in the post-war British theatre to argue that directors have been able to assert their authority over the sector thanks to their operation at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity. This analysis of the work of directing owes a great deal to Ric Knowles’s development of ‘materialist semiotics’, and to Stuart Hall’s readings of the politics of cultural production and reception. The chapter extends Knowles’s and Hall’s insights into theatre production through three parallel accounts of theatre directing in the post-war period. These focus on the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples include Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, Paulette Randall); ‘auteur’ directors who create theatrical ‘performance texts’ (Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice), and directors whose artistry is to be found in social production, the shaping of relations between people in public space (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey, Lois Weaver). Through this analysis of a wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to concretise the multiple forces and interests that govern the theatre sector, and thereby expose the social relations that shape its creative practices, and the political interests that govern them.