This is an extraordinarily lucid and erudite book in which Michael McKinnie builds on and extends his existing work on the ways economic forces encroach on theatre – for instance in City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (2007) and Space and the Geographies of Theatre (2007) – to consider the political economies operating within the material practices of theatre itself. McKinnie is particularly interested in the ways theatre, or at least some types of theatre, have continued to hold out and to some extent embody the possibility of a successful mixed economy during a period of unparalleled economism. The theatre, as he notes, is ‘an enduring cultural institution that has historically been caught up with larger forces of economic development’ (p. 9). Consequently, it is a useful prism through which to view the relationship between the market, marketization and other social institutions in the time of neo-liberal hegemony. Drawing on examples from the last two decades in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and focusing his attention on theatres and theatrical events that in one way or another benefit from state subsidy, McKinnie locates his study within the tradition in political economy that includes John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx, and which broadly speaking seeks to resist the abstraction of the economy from other social and political spheres. He follows these thinkers and others, including Ellen Meiksins Wood and Judith Butler, in viewing this abstraction as one of capitalism's most effective defence mechanisms, and as essentially a con trick. Such abstraction, McKinnie argues, has served capitalism well insofar as it allows economic imperatives to appear disinterested and akin to some kind of advanced common sense, and indeed one of the successes of this book is its interdisciplinarity: its sophisticated use of the critical tools made available by performance studies, political economy and urban studies to problematize this abstraction. The result is an extremely engaging study that will doubtless be of use to scholars working in political economy and urbanism, as well as those interested in approaching theatre and performance from materialist perspectives.

In making the case that theatre does not so much challenge the market economy head on – he struggles to imagine a theatre that could do this effectively – McKinnie is less concerned with the content of individual shows than with the subtle ways in which theatre can mobilize its resources to compliment, redirect, recast, administer and appropriate the market, often in surprisingly effective ways. His discussion of Danny Boyle's Isles of Wonder, which was the centrepiece of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, is just one example. At ninety minutes long and featuring a cast of 7,500, Isles of Wonder was a wildly ambitious and audacious piece of theatre. Staged against the backdrop of austerity imposed by the then Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, it reached an estimated audience of 900 million worldwide. McKinnie acknowledges that the show was remarkably eclectic in its performance modes and styles and fantastically confident in its execution, and he concedes that this accounts for some of the excitement it generated. He also argues persuasively, however, that its peculiar affective power – which was widely commented on – derived from ‘the sharply divergent political–economic scripts … it attempted to interpolate’ (p. 141). On one hand it celebrated a determinedly Keynesian version of English social history, especially in its valorizing of the NHS. On the other, it ‘successfully mobilized infrastructure (the Olympic Stadium and the Olympics’ building estate as a whole) that was a travesty of that Keynesianism’ (p. 142). It is theatre's capacity to productively stage this dialectic, however fleetingly, that captures McKinnie's attention.

Elsewhere, McKinnie's focus – in thematic chapters covering industry, productivity, citizenship, security and confidence – is consistently on the material practices and structures that reveal similarly productive tensions. He notes, for instance, how far London's post-war South Bank development articulates the ‘ascendency of the British Welfare state and the role of the arts and the state in spatially securing it’, while simultaneously shunning its immediate neighbours in economically deprived areas of south London (p. 69). In his account of the 1998 Tinderbox production of Stewart Parker's Northern Star in the First Presbyterian Church in Belfast, he argues persuasively that ‘the production temporarily conjoined politics with economics more effectively than the state or the market could’ (p. 99). McKinnie is nonetheless wary of exaggerating theatre's potential to challenge the forces of marketization, and equally careful to detail the myriad ways in which theatre is grappling with it. His book is thus a most welcome, mature and sophisticated example of the engaged materialist analysis that has been a particular strength of his earlier work. It is an important addition to international debates that have moved economics out of the containment of its own field into the disciplinary centre of theatre research. It will doubtless inspire other scholars to examine systems of artistic authority as they have developed, and continue to develop, in response to the neo-liberal policies and ideologies which, to a greater or lesser degree, characterize the field of contemporary Western theatre production.