Searching back through the archives of major theatre- and performance-studies journals it is hard to uncover articles that deal explicitly with the issue of class disparity in relation to theatre and performance. Where the issue is discussed it is usually in relation either to playwrights or to practitioners who overtly foreground class politics in their work or parenthetically in relation to a principal focus on race or gender. The recent economic debacle has revealed the bankruptcy (sour pun intended) of an overreliance on the laissez-faire approach to socioeconomics, and arguably calls for a reconsideration of class, capital and social hierarchies.Footnote ¹ Indeed, given the impact of that debacle and the potentially severe implications for the future of research in the arts and humanities, there is a pressing need to re-evaluate class and performance in this age of global capitalism.

During the course of the twentieth century, tectonic shifts occurred in terms of how race and gender were understood in Western society and academia. The historical legacy of the European colonization of practically the rest of the world, combined with the legacy of slavery and the impact of the civil rights movements, resulted in the reconfiguration of how race is conceived. Concomitantly, the long struggle by feminists and the LGBT movement for equal rights led to a slow but inexorable transformation of the framework of gender politics. While these factors led to changes in how race and gender were comprehended, the parallel transformation of how class was understood or how it could be reconfigured as society changed was curtailed by the impact of the Cold War. The economic development of the USA along laissez-faire capitalist lines intensified during the ideological conflict with the USSR after the Second World War, which led to the Cold War and its aftermath, post-1989, in the form of America's hegemonic status as the sole superpower. The impact of the Cold War on American society resulted in the increased derogation of class-based analysis in politics and academia.Footnote ² From the McCarthyism of the 1950s to the Reaganism of the 1980s, the polarization of East–West relations led to a caricaturing of Marxism qua Soviet communism and the self-fulfilling prophecy that Western liberal democracy and economic neo-liberalism were the veritable end of history.Footnote ³ Countries inside the American sphere of influence, and many outside who were drawn by the apparent success of the laissez-faire model advocated by economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, went along with the consensus that privatization of public services and deregulation of financial markets was the panacea for social inequality and the way forward.Footnote ⁴ In the late twentieth-century rise of global capitalism and its attendant zeitgeist of neo-liberalism, Marxism and its vicissitudes were generally dismissed.

The conflation of Marxism with Soviet communism is understandable, particularly from the perspective of those who endured the misery of Stalin's brutal regime, and of those whose lives were blighted by state totalitarianism in the former Eastern Bloc countries. Nonetheless one must be wary of this conflation in a general sense and be very careful not to throw the Marxist baby out with the Soviet bathwater. It does not necessarily follow that by criticizing class disparity one is automatically endorsing state totalitarianism. Sociologists, scholars and philosophers have variously provided rigorous critique of Marx's writings, but the point that cannot be ignored is that neo-liberalism has not solved the problem of class disparity, but rather has led those countries who have embraced it to the edge of bankruptcy.

The regretable conflation of Marxism with totalitarianism occurs to some extent in a recent article in Theatre Research International which, in regard to the ‘socialist systems of Eastern Europe over the past decade’, states that ‘Marx's theory belongs to the past, as history has shown that its realization failed’.Footnote ⁵ However, it is as well to remember that first and foremost Marxism is a critique of socioeconomic hierarchies, and to say that Marxism has failed makes about as much sense as saying that feminism or anti-racism has failed. As Terry Eagleton argues with customary brio, ‘what perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian’.Footnote ⁶ During the course of the last century, peoples around the world have variously endured the extremes of the socioeconomic spectrum: on the far left dwelt the Scylla of state totalitarianism; on the far right lay the Charybdis of unbridled capitalism. The charges of economic fundamentalism typically levelled at Marxism are more accurately the preoccupation of capitalism in its unrelenting obsession with the bottom line, regardless of the consequences for society in the medium or long term.

Theatre studies and the occlusion of class

In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson documents the evolution of theatre studies, noting in particular that ‘the class dimensions of theatre and performance studies debates are even harder to assess’.Footnote ⁷ This, Jackson observes, ‘is especially difficult since class analysis returns us to the role of higher education in a democratic state, to the cultural and economic capital upon which it relies, and to the different professional structures occupied by humanists, artists, and their students’.Footnote ⁸ Referring to the ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and their impact on ‘canon’ formation in the academy, with concomitant questions about the role of academics in sociocultural analysis, Jackson further states, ‘It was precisely by ignoring rather than addressing these questions that something like a “canon” could be figured as a site of activism. The symbolic inclusions and exclusions of cultural capital could be debated while the class politics of culture's pedagogical location could remain unremarked’.Footnote ⁹ Jackson refers to the ‘generation of 1960s dissidents who became 1980s academics’ who could ‘cast a suspicious eye on the content of canons while remaining obliviously blind (or self-hatingly in denial) of the professional undercurrents of humanist intellectualism’.Footnote ¹⁰ One of the consequences of this myopia was a kind of political quietism regarding class politics that led, in part, to the virtual elision of class-based analysis during a period when the evolution of that form of analysis was needed desperately. In his critique of the musical Rent, David Savran argues that it is

Identity politics has proven attractive to those concerned with race and gender emancipation, where identities, variously old and new, can be celebrated as sites of resistance to oppression and as ways of living. Class politics operates in a crucially different manner insofar as the point is not to increase but to reduce class disparity and ultimately dissolve class identity, especially in terms of economic difference. Those who disavow class difference and maintain that class is no longer an issue often benefit the most from that difference, insofar as their seeming disinterest in class conceals their very real interest in the material advantages to be gained from class disparity. During the ascension of identity politics, its attendant theoretical counterparts in deconstruction and post-structuralism became axiomatic as they displaced New Criticism, formalism and structuralism to become hegemonic in the arts and humanities.Footnote ¹²

Shannon Jackson's recent Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics contains a rare example of class-based analysis in performance studies.Footnote ¹³ In the chapter ‘High Maintenance’, Jackson uses the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles to ‘demonstrate the earlier feminist and class-conscious innovations that preceded the conceptual gestures of “relational aesthetics”’.Footnote ¹⁴ Jackson goes on to examine Ukeles as ‘a figure whose “maintenance Manifesto” and body of work address the unrecognized labor of domesticity and sanitation . . . her solo and collaborative experiments with New York's Department of Sanitation demonstrate how the so-called inter-subjective substrates of relational art simultaneously interact with systemic substrates of material support’.Footnote ¹⁵ Jackson's analysis in this regard is valuable not only for its intelligent articulation of the complex interrelations between performance art, feminism and class-consciousness, but also for its rarity in theatre and performance studies. Even as recently as the 2006 edition of Richard Schechner's Performance Studies: An Introduction, class is conspicuous by its absence. The chapter focusing on ‘Performativity’ relates this multivalent concept to a number of categories, including constructions of gender and race, but with no equivalent focus on constructions of class. In the subsection ‘Poststructuralism/deconstruction’ Schechner maintains that ‘Postmodernism and poststructuralism are the bases for academic theories of performativity’.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet while this philosophical basis has opened up new ways of understanding the performativity of gender, for instance in the work of Judith Butler, or of race and ethnicity in the work of Homi Bhabha, the same cannot be said for the opening up to new ways of understanding the performativity of class.

Given Schechner's assertion and the relative lack of emphasis on class in performance-studies research, it is worth pondering for a moment the consequences of postmodernism and deconstruction in terms of the fate of class-based analysis. As a historical epoch, postmodernity paralleled the dynamics of late capitalism but offered no serious criticism thereof.Footnote ¹⁷ In terms of cultural politics postmodernism was, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, the cultural logic of late capitalism.Footnote ¹⁸ Jean-François Lyotard's definition of the postmodern as ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ in The Postmodern Condition dismisses the ‘emancipation of the rational or working subject’ along with the ‘dialectics of Spirit’ or the ‘hermeneutics of meaning’ as grand narratives that are woefully undifferentiated.Footnote ¹⁹ In his advocacy of micro-narratives, Lyotard effectively fetishizes marginalization, thus undermining the ethical premises of arguments for such key issues as universal suffrage or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a sweeping gesture, Lyotard concludes his tract by denouncing all metanarratives as totalizing monstrosities: ‘Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name’.Footnote ²⁰ So to follow Lyotard's exhortation, how, then, should one honour class difference? Is capitalism a totalizing metanarrative that one should ‘wage war’ on? If so, then how should it be done? Lyotard's analysis, typical of much postmodern thought, seems impressive in the area of discourse analysis but has little to offer scholars engaging with social issues like class disparity.

The same could be said for deconstruction insofar as it became effectively the New Criticism of the postmodern generation, in its preoccupation with semiosis and pretentions to social engagement under the aegis of an all-embracing intertextuality that, in the final analysis, proved to be politically evasive. Deconstruction appealed to bourgeois baby boomers who could withdraw from political engagement with issues of social justice under the excuse that political positions were somehow more complex and equivocal than the mere rational observation of social hierarchies would imply. At the risk of deconstructing the deconstructor par excellence and using marginalia to reveal an aporia in Jacques Derrida's general approach, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides a note to her translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology which explains why

Indeed it took Derrida nearly two decades before he presented the world with Spectres of Marx, in which he stated that his deconstruction had always operated in a certain ‘spirit of Marxism’, but offered nothing in terms of significantly reconsidering Marxism or offering new ways of analysing class politics.Footnote ²² Derrida's unease with structure per se led to a form of textual radicalism that simply could not translate into social radicalism without effective planning, organization or policy – all of which require some form of consensus and, ultimately, structure. Outside the text (where there definitely is something, in spite of Derrida's earlier pronouncement), deconstruction proved to be politically futile, not least in terms of its sheer incapacity to reaccentuate class-based critique.

A version of post-structuralist philosophy that has had a significant impact on the academic understanding of performativity and that offers some potential for reconsidering the performative aspects of class is Judith Butler's theory of performativity in relation to gender and identity. In her influential book Gender Trouble Butler adopts a Foucauldian approach to assumptions that sexuality and gender categories are naturally given, arguing that they are culturally constructed through the repetition of particular acts and gestures that give the appearance of an essential, a priori gender identity.Footnote ²³ The performative possibilities of such acts are delimited by regulatory discourses and disciplinary regimes which restrict the range of performance to particular styles, typified in the heteronormative matrix of binary masculine and feminine roles and the reproduction of that structure in the traditional family unit. Butler's analysis is informed by the post-structuralist writings of Foucault and Derrida, as she deals with gender performativity in terms of discursive construction and linguistic indeterminability that allow her to accentuate the cultural dimension of gender over the restrictions of biological determinacy. While Butler's theory of performativity works well on the level of discourse and language, it would need to be significantly modified to deal with the performative dimension of class as cultural practice. Indeed the notion of class as performance must be considered in relation to the wider sociological aspects of class in terms of the relation between cultural and economic capital that I will now turn to.

Theatre and sociology

In terms of scholarship on the relationship between theatre and sociology, Georges Gurvitch's perceptive 1956 essay ‘Sociologie du théâtre’ was based on the premise of a ‘profound affinity’ of the theatre with society, from which one could engage in mutually informing studies of the theatrical in society and of social dynamics in the theatre.Footnote ²⁴ Similar to the observation made by Jacques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Gurvitch suggests that during the course of their life an individual plays several different ‘roles’, including their occupation, their social class, or their role as a parent, a friend, a member of a sporting or political organization. By corollary, the theatre involves individuals and groups performing actions that are social in nature, which is in turn part of a broader context in a social space with a public audience. Within this framework Gurvitch proposes six avenues for a sociology of the theatre: the variegated nature of the public audience, the theatrical style of a production and its reception by the interpretive community in relation to its social context, the structure of the acting profession in terms of its relationship with other industries, the relationship between the content of a play and its wider social context, transformations in the interpretation of plays in terms of relative transformations in social structures, and the social relevance of theatre in different societies. Similar perhaps to Goffman's emphasis on roles in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the most significant aspect of Gurvitch's approach for the purposes of this essay is the observation that an individual plays multiple social roles.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed this notion can be expanded upon to inform our understanding of the complexities of class, which I will return to later in relation to Bourdieu's approach to class.

In Sociologie du théâtre,Footnote ²⁶ Jean Duvignaud effectively picked up the baton from Gurvitch in his analysis of the relationship between theatricality and society, particularly in terms of four main types of theatre, each relating to a different social structure and historical epoch. In societies with an established tradition, such as the Middle Ages, theatre represented the general sense of social stability, typified in the characterization of Mankind in relation to the wider Judaeo-Christian universe. In societies that had undergone significant technological innovation or socioeconomic transformation from a previous status quo, such as the Renaissance, theatre emerged that manifested the anxieties of those threatened by change and also those who embraced it. Duvignaud refers to a third type of theatre as the ‘Italianate stage’, where a social elite utilizes cultural practices in order to legitimate the conditions of its dominance over other classes, to which dramatists respond by adopting subtle strategies to reveal the processes by which the elite manufacture consent for their rule. The fourth type of theatre belongs to the modern or even postmodern period, where theatre practitioners seek to convey the fluidity and complexity of advanced societies. In each case Duvignaud insists that theatre does not merely reflect society or offer solutions to social problems; rather theatre offers a critique of the status quo with the continually open question of how society should be structured.

Inspired by Gurvitch's approach, Maria Shevtsova published a series of three articles in successive issues of New Theatre Quarterly in 1989, each entitled ‘The Sociology of Theatre’, with the subtitle alluding to different aspects. ‘Problems and Perspectives’ analyses five main blocs of problems based on alleged misunderstandings that have hampered sociological approaches to theatre and offers a ‘proposed schema’ incorporating a non-exhaustive compilation of fourteen different areas of enquiry, from ‘Theoretical Bases’ to ‘Merging Theatrical Genres’.Footnote ²⁷ ‘Theoretical Achievements’ explores two elements of the fourteen listed in the earlier article, namely the sociological interpretation of dramatic theory, particularly in terms of the emerging discipline of theatre anthropology, and approaches to dramatic texts and genres.Footnote ²⁸ ‘Performance’ concludes the triptych with some practical examples of productions that highlight Shevtsova's framework for a sociology of theatre.Footnote ²⁹ Where Shevtsova indicates the possibilities of a sociological analysis of performance, it is disappointing to note that in the decades subsequent to her enhancement of Gurvitch's approach, little has been done to engage with the issues she raises, least of all the matter of class and performance.

Class as performance

In the introduction to a 2001 edition of Theatre Research International,Footnote ³⁰ Shevtsova advocates Pierre Bourdieu's emphasis on the cultural dimension of sociology for the study of theatre, and is echoed by David Savran in 2007, who also recommends Bourdieu's approach as well as a re-engagement with Raymond Williams's notion of a ‘sociology of drama’.Footnote ³¹ Working independently but in parallel with each other, Bourdieu and Williams variously reconsidered the relationship between culture and materiality in the era of late capitalism. From his early ethnographic fieldwork in Algeria, Bourdieu became preoccupied with the significance of culture in social relationships, developing such influential concepts as ‘symbolic capital’, ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ in order to stress the multidimensional nature of class and to expand the focus of sociology beyond what he saw as economic reductionism.Footnote ³² Where Bourdieu was a sociologist engaging with culture, Williams began as a scholar of drama who engaged with the sociological dimension of culture and pioneered the field of cultural studies and the approach known as cultural materialism, in particular enhancing Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony in his development of the concept of ‘structures of feeling’.Footnote ³³ The legacy of these two luminaries for theatre scholarship has been much vaunted but rarely taken forward, especially in the evolution of class-based analysis. Shannon Jackson has reviewed the development of this legacy in performance studies, particularly in terms of the significance of Williams's reconfiguration of culture, and suggests that ‘drama's decidedly embodied bodies . . . continue to occupy a blind spot in critical theory, cumbersomely literalizing cultural studies principles, cumbersomely exceeding social formalist analysis’.Footnote ³⁴ Presumably Jackson would agree that the classed body and, for that matter, class analysis in general are included in that ‘blind spot’ in critical theory, not least in terms of performance studies, which, by its interdisciplinary nature, arguably offers potential for a sophisticated reappraisal of class and performance.

One way to reconfigure class-based analysis is to reconsider class as performance, not so much in the way that Butler reconfigures gender but more in the way that Bourdieu emphasizes the multidimensionality and relationality of class. The traditional way in which social stratification is analysed is in terms of occupation, be that upper, middle or working class and all the variants within such strata that change over time.Footnote ³⁵ That one's occupation involves the performance of roles in order to obtain economic capital on a quotidian basis is evident enough. Yet when one takes into account the homologous cultural dimension of class in terms of the particular acts, gestures, tastes and consumer choices that distinguish one class from another, as Bourdieu does in Distinction, then one can appreciate class as practice and performance rather than as an identity predicated solely on economic stratification.Footnote ³⁶ Such an approach would examine the emergence and consolidation of class strata in a way that gives due consideration to the role of agents as performers in the cultural as well as economic dimension, in terms of the emphasis on the lifestyles of individuals and groups regarding their relative access to cultural and economic capital.

Meticulous examination of how one class distinguishes itself over another and how certain performances elevate individuals and groups in social hierarchies can facilitate a critique of hegemony particularly in the era of global capitalism where cultural capital is increasingly significant. By focusing on the performative aspect of class one can discern how it is reproduced on the quotidian and also generational level, thereby enhancing Williams's concept of structures of feeling in relation to the hegemonic cycle of dominant, residual and emergent.Footnote ³⁷ Reflexivity is a key aspect insofar as class is as much a perception and representation by one class of another, be that by the artist, sociologist or scholar, as it is the consequence of the social struggle over limited resources.Footnote ³⁸ Where such an approach implies an enhancement of the sociology of theatre, it also extends the methodology of theatre and performance studies to the discipline of sociology through the multivalent notion of performance. The rest of this article attempts to apply such an approach to the production of Declan Hughes's play Shiver of 2003, which dramatizes the consequences of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s for ambitious members of the Irish middle class.

Performances of class and Declan Hughes's Shiver

Few countries have experienced the economic rollercoaster of boom and bust during recent decades in quite the same manner as the Republic of Ireland. Often referred to by public intellectuals and scholars alike as a First World country with a Third World memory, Ireland's socioeconomic transformation during the early 1990s, during which time it became known as the Celtic Tiger, was nothing short of meteoric. For most of the colonial period Ireland was left to languish in a largely premodern agricultural economy, while its colonial overlord Great Britain surged forward in the Industrial Revolution. During the twentieth century, Ireland experienced tumultuous political change but little economic development until, unencumbered by the postindustrial malaise affecting many of its neighbours, it plunged into the service-led ‘new economy’ of the 1990s predicated on the IT and banking sectors.Footnote ³⁹ The Irish middle class expanded by several tiers, particularly in the emergence of an upper-middle-class elite with unprecedented wealth and political influence.Footnote ⁴⁰ The cultural shift that took place especially in the major cities was equally profound as an upwardly mobile, designer-label-flaunting consumer culture of brasseries and business suits displaced the general sense of despondency as generations of Irish youth emigrated in search of work. For the first time in Irish history economic migration flowed in reverse, as manual workers from Eastern Europe flooded into Ireland to serve Guinness in bars, change sheets in hotels, build houses and motorways, whilst aspiring Irish teenagers studied at universities and institutes of technology in pursuit of white-collar careers in the new economy. However, what seemed like a brand new day for Ireland turned out to be a false dawn of epic proportions, as the dot.com bubble burst in 2000 and the construction and banking industries collapsed in 2008.Footnote ⁴¹

Notable, if perhaps somewhat predictable, in the expansion of the Irish middle class during the 1990s and 2000s is the overt display of class distinction manifest in lifestyles and consumer choices, particularly in the tacit aim to distinguish their new status from past generations of relative poverty and also from different class strata in their own generation.Footnote ⁴² What is more striking, however, is the concentrated nature of that expansion, with new class fractions emerging in the space of barely more than a decade, only for them to be virtually eliminated shortly afterwards. Hughes's play Shiver managed to portray this reckless speed and inevitable crash in the quickly overlapping scenes which Lynne Parker's direction enhanced to near rollercoaster speed.Footnote ⁴³ There is a Brechtian aspect to the dramaturgy insofar as the actors are effectively narrators reflecting on their intertwining destinies, alternating between moments of naturalism and direct address to the audience. As Patrick Lonergan notes in a review for Irish Theatre Magazine: ‘It's assumed that that the characters and audience share the same values and social status, so that when one couple tells us they're expecting a child, we're supposed to greet this news as if we're socialising with friends, rather than watching a play’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The sense of a shared habitus is key insofar as the contemporaneity of both characters and audience enhances the reflexive awareness of the shared situation, which is in turn accentuated by the proximity of the audience flanking both sides of the centrally situated performance area. In this setting the audience witnesses the action in the performance space and also the response of the audience members sitting on the opposite flank, all of which serves to materialize the common habitus of Dublin middle-class agents performing both on- and offstage in the shared social space.

That the characters are aware that they are part of an emergent class whose status renders them distinct from the previous generation is made clear in Marion's (Cathy Belton) question: ‘Is it too much to want, if not to do better than your parents did, then at least do as well?’Footnote ⁴⁵ Fintan O'Toole notes that ‘this self-awareness can't prevent the characters from being somewhat schematic, for they are representative social types before they are individuals’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Far from being a weakness, the use of social types in this regard affords greater reflexivity on the part of the audience in order to gain the necessary distance from what is relatively immediate in terms of the conditions of their own social and temporal context. Marion is a graphic designer with a trendy company that has recently been taken over by a multinational corporation and her new salary allows her to purchase one of the hallmarks of an upper-middle-class lifestyle, a larger house with ‘open-plan, big plate-glass windows, sprawling garden’. Marion's elevation to creative director sets her several tiers above her husband Kevin (Paul Hickey), a former teacher and frustrated writer turned stay-at-home dad. The economic disparity between the two becomes the source of mounting tension, as Marion is increasingly irritated with Kevin's lack of aspiration. She organizes for the features editor of the Irish Times newspaper to meet Kevin with a view to publishing one of his stories and continually encourages him to try and get his poetry published in one of Ireland's chic magazines, but all to no avail. Marion's desperation here is more than just the attempt to re-energize her depressed husband, in that it constitutes her desire to see him gain in cultural capital what he evidently cannot achieve in terms of economic capital, specifically so that he can achieve social elevation to a class fraction that more closely approximates her own status.

Concomitant with her class transition Marion internalizes the logic that governs the field of corporate bureaucracy, as she oversees successive redundancies enforced on her company by the parent company, NPK, in the drive for greater profit. That the corporate field imposes on Marion a specific kind of performance is rendered in the different style she formerly engaged in when she was a member of the design cooperative Better Ways, where they did work for small non-profit organizations, produced flyers for benefit nights and protest marches, all of which brought in limited economic capital. Marion justifies the logic of ruthless corporatism she has adopted by explaining it as part of a necessary maturation from youthful naivety: ‘you get older, you get married, you're ready to sell out’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Marion's entry into the corporate field thus involves tacit acceptance of the rules that require a callous disregard of the consequences of profit-driven decisions on the lives of those affected by such hardnosed calculations. Marion's tolerance of the corporate field lasts only as long as her position is legitimated within that field, which is soon rendered illegitimate as NPK and its holdings are liquidated following a series of bad investments. Marion's downward class transition has disastrous consequences for her family as Kevin cannot find work as a teacher and they face looming poverty. Eventually Kevin succumbs to his depression by committing suicide, but in a manner that is ambiguous enough to seem like an accident in order to convince the insurance company to pay up. What may seem melodramatic in another context is rendered tragic during a time of real despair, as borne out by statistics recorded at the time that demonstrated an alarming rise in suicide rates.Footnote ⁴⁸

In parallel with Marion's rise and fall, her friends Jenny (Cathy White) and Richard (Peter Hanly) are entrepreneurs recently returned from the USA to start an Internet company called 51st State, in the form of an online magazine targeted at fashion-conscious members of the expanding middle class. It is clear from the start that it is Jenny's dream to build the company and that she has persuaded her accountant husband to join her on the journey up the social ladder. Jenny's form of class distinction is clear in the style of deportment which distinguishes their pseudo-bohemian lifestyle from that of corporate executives such as Marion, whom Jenny labels ‘executrons’. The distinction is materialized in the clothing style Richard adopts, as he changes from his accountant's suit to combat trousers and short-sleeved shirt, with laptop bag and backpack, shirt tails hanging below his soft zip jacket – the very model of the new class of IT entrepreneur. Richard's unfamiliarity with this new class style is revealed in the heavy black shoes he almost wears to the business meeting until Jenny's keen eye picks up the inconsistency and tells him to put on trainers. The casual, seemingly disinterested attitude towards mercantilism which the overtly casual dress sense projects is typical of the image of the ‘new-economy’ dot.com entrepreneur, exemplified perhaps in the understated style adopted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg or Apple founder Steve Jobs. This seeming disinterest conceals the very real interest in product development and profit margin that Richard knows little about and, as is later revealed, nor does the alcoholic and financially incompetent Jenny.

Richard and Jenny head to the Horseshoe Bar in Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel, the well-known rendezvous for politicians and plutocrats, celebrities and social climbers, and aspiring members of the middle class looking to mix with and hopefully become a member of Ireland's social elite. Richard pitches their business plan to what he calls ‘Camel-hair men’, accountants and solicitors who are former acquaintances that have made money from businesses they inherited from their fathers and are cautious about investing in the new Internet phenomenon. Jenny buys a new dress and will ‘flirt’ and ‘laugh at their “jokes”’,Footnote ⁴⁹ happily using her sexuality to garner their favour and eventually their investment. In spite of their best attempts to play the role of the IT entrepreneur by adopting the appropriate costume and reciting the relevant lines in the correct intonation that their targeted businessmen will understand, they are unsuccessful and Jenny starts to spend their mortgage repayments on their business rather than maintain their home. Even when Richard persuades an old friend to invest $500,000, his unfamiliarity with the field of entrepreneurial business and lack of requisite knowledge of effective strategy results in the failure of their business. Unable to return to accountancy due to the damage to his financial reputation Richard starts up a new website called ‘Suppertime’, based on Jenny's culinary ability, which she sardonically calls ‘an upmarket pizza delivery service’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Unwilling to accept their déclassé status, Richard stubbornly insists ‘we've bounced back’ into the upper echelons of the middle class, in spite of the fact that he offers little more than a delivery service for their dinner parties, at which he is unlikely to be a guest in the near or distant future.

Alternating as it does between moments of naturalism and Brechtian-influenced narration of events to the audience, Shiver enables a reflexive consideration of habitus both of and for the Irish middle-class audience members. The characters’ ability to perform the roles appropriate to their respective field of endeavour determine their success in those fields, whether corporate or entrepreneurial. The style of dress, choice of housing, complicity or not with the ethos of laissez-faire capitalism and determination to obtain the consumer goods indicative of a certain aesthetic sensibility all serve to distinguish their membership of particular class strata.

In this necessarily brief analysis it is nonetheless possible to see the performative dimension of class as practice rather than as identity predicated solely on economic stratification. As Bourdieu shows in exquisite detail in Distinction and related works, class is fundamentally complex, operating in multiple intersecting dimensions incorporating cultural, economic and symbolic aspects that variously determine the performance possibilities for an agent in a given context. To reconfigure class as performance in all its manifold complexity rather than as an identity predicated on a single aspect arguably is to engage more comprehensively with the problem of class disparity as it is manifest in theatre and society. Given the havoc wrought by the wholesale adoption of neo-liberalism in countries across the world, the time is ripe for mature reflection on socioeconomic structures and their very real impact on people. To dismiss class as a hangover from a bygone age is to disavow class disparity in our very midst and to ignore those who endure social injustice on a daily basis. Just as the advent of feminism and anti-racism has had a profound effect on theatre studies, by reconfiguring class as performance it becomes productively possible to move away from the naive simplicities of economic reductionism and towards a fundamental reconsideration of theatre and performance.