Susan Bennett's recent work develops her germinal Theatre Audiences: Towards a Theory of Production and Reception (1990) to consider late capitalism's grand public spectacles, from The Lion King to theme parks, urban and rural. This ‘provocation’ (p. 8) identifies ‘a twenty-first-century consensus, that theatre and museums are crucial to a city's vitality and appeal’ (p. 3), signalling from the outset the centrality of ‘global city’ branding imperatives to her approach to the interpenetration of curation, exhibition and performance. She seeks ‘broader frameworks’ to examine ‘narrativization and performativity’ in museum settings, interrogating the ‘increasingly complex relationships between creative productions and their consuming publics’ (p. 8). Within the limitations of a short volume, Bennett succinctly summarizes key perspectives from materialist critique (Tony Bennett: p. 15) to endorsements of theatre in museums as enabler of ‘a service economy ideal’ (p. 21). Beginning with Marina Abramović's 2010 retrospective, The Artist Is Present, Bennett traverses a wide and varied terrain, including, in a portmanteau category of ‘experiential museums’, a lengthy account of the Experience Music Project (Seattle, inspired by Jimi Hendrix), alongside ‘altogether more serious endeavours’ (p. 49): the Jewish Museum (Berlin), the Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles) and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC). This classification struggles to accommodate both the former's privileging of ‘activity’ over ‘exhibit’ (p. 45) and the latters’ ‘ethical depth’ (p. 51).

Acknowledging that museums’ pedagogical claims may be little more than a ‘legitimating end point for . . . “soft values” of consumption, distraction and spectacle’ (p. 21), Bennett nonetheless hedges her bets on whether ‘visitors’ or ‘consumers’ – terms used interchangeably – are ‘emancipated from or encumbered by the economics of late capitalism’ (p. 77). It is perhaps this insouciant pragmatism in the face of the reach and impact of neoliberal market culture that is ultimately most provocative about her provocation. Charting a trajectory from nineteenth-century civic projects to twenty-first-century state and corporate co-production of ‘art and social order’ (p. 23), Bennett is an experienced and erudite guide to multiple sites where understandings of performance, history and culture collide in what appears at times a frenzied renegotiation of terms. Her deployment of Rebecca Schneider (2011) and Diana Taylor (2003) to provoke insight into the politics of memory, representation and performance is especially rewarding. However, her engagement with her subject is almost completely decoupled from consideration of policy trajectories that erase the original addressee of museum practice: the citizen. Her well-chosen suggestions for further reading – a valuable feature of the Theatre & . . . series in general – include one companion volume: Jen Harvie's Theatre & the City (2009). Taken alongside Bennett, Harvie's contrapuntal reading of cultural materialism alongside studies of urban performativity provides an equally provocative reminder of the reality and potential of performance as civic agency countering discourses of ‘branding’ and ‘visitor preferences’, which, Harvie argues, damage the city by ‘limiting its cultural variety and utopian potential’ (p. 49).