Louise Owen (Birkbeck College, University of London):

"Constructing crisis: gender and finance in new writing for the stage".

How has new writing in the theatre addressed financialisation and the crisis that emerged in 2007-8? This paper explores a selection of productions staged at the height of the boom and after: David Eldridge's Market Boy (National Theatre, 2006), Dennis Kelly's Love and Money (Royal Exchange, Manchester & Young Vic, 2006), Lucy Prebble's Enron (Theatre Royal Chichester & Royal Court, 2009) and David Hare's The Power of Yes (National Theatre, 2009). Comparing these works demonstrates an interesting commonality between them: that their mediations of credit, debt and market society all critically turn on contemporary constructs of sexuality and gender. To consider ideas of economic rupture, each piece in different ways revisits the past, but all have recourse a post-feminist politics specific to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The paper argues that these plays' stagings of sexuality and gender are intrinsic to their construction of narratives of self-actualisation, corruption, the 'knowledge economy' and the class distribution of the consequences of economic crisis.

Louise Owen works as a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines contemporary theatre and performance in terms of economic change and modes of governance. She has written articles for TDR, Performance Research, frakcija and Contemporary Theatre Review.  Recent publications explore crisis and nationhood, site-specific performance, forms of immersive art and theatre, performance and post-feminism, and histories of community theatre in London.  She co-convenes the London Theatre Seminar.

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