Property and Finance on the Post-Brexit London Stage We Want What You Have

A guide to the contemporary London stage as well as an argument about its future, the book walks readers through the city?s performance spaces following the Brexit vote.

Austerity-era London theatre is suffused with the belief that private ownership defines full citizenship, its perspective narrowing to what an affluent audience might find relatable. From pub theatres to the National, Michael Meeuwis reveals how what gets put on in London interacts with the daily life of the neighbourhoods in which they are set.

This study addresses global theatregoers, as well as students and scholars across theatre and performance studies?particularly those interested in UK culture after Brexit, urban geography, class, and theatrical economics.

Acknowledgement

Introduction

Chapter 1 Typical Girls; or, the Privately-Owned Punk Squat

Chapter 2 Brexit’s Dispossessed

Chapter 3 Transnationalism

Chapter 4 Village Feel

Chapter 5 Croydon vs. the World: Malteaser Threesomes and Entrepreneurial Sweatshirts in the Shadow of Grenfell

Chapter 6 Yerma on the Internet

Conclusion: Wanting More

Afterword: Estate of the Nation, Jerusalem to Albion

Index

Michael Meeuwis is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK. He is a literary historian of the British eighteenth through twenty-first centuries, with an ongoing interest in theatre and performance; or, a theatre historian with a side hustle in literature.