governed by purchasing power . . . in short not everyone has the same objects, just as not everyone has the same . . . chances.”40 As a counterpoint to competition, Michael Rothberg advances the principle of multidirectional memory—suggesting that through solidarity and connectivity, memory culture can create enhanced platforms for multidirectional articulations of remembrance. This is a powerful way of understanding the solidarity that can be produced between different kinds of witnesses and, in the theatre, between the performer and the audience (and, indeed, between audience members). Rothberg’s multidirectional model of memory culture, however, does not fully acknowledge the role of market forces in both production and consumption. Financial investment—whether it’s the money to buy the land that a museum stands on, the backing to create a play, or the disposable income to purchase a theatre ticket—propels, shapes, and limits the articulation of remembrance. Likewise, audiences have to be selective—they cannot attend everything—and marketing departments are well aware of the need to capture their attention, investing financial and cultural resources in building audience share. If a play about twenty-first-century refugee memories, which also evokes the post–World War II migration crisis, cannot find a company to produce it, or a theatre to back it, or a grant to support it, or a catchy advertising campaign, or audiences to attend it, then its articulation and enactment of multidirectional remembrance is shut down because of its failure to accrue either economic or social capital. Competition is thus inherent within the market, whether it is competition for limited economic resources or for equally limited audience attention. Inequality in capital and the disproportionate power of certain social groups are thus major barriers in the cultural memory marketplace, undermining, just as in the social and political marketplaces, ethical principles of equality of representation and access. Indeed, as we will see, plays embody this competitive dynamic, often staging the competition between victims and perpetrators for both cultural and symbolic capital. Gatekeepers—whether funders, theatre makers, or witnessing audiences—are thus key in adjudicating how those competitions play out.
The Audience Consumer vs the Audience Witness
Given the role of social and political capital in shaping and mediating the marketplace, how can it avoid becoming a reflection of the desires and outlook of only an elite band of gatekeepers and consumers? The role of the consumer is key here—if the marketplace is not simply a space of top-down practices, but is driven by consumer demand and bottom-up practices, then there remains the possibility for consumers—who are not a homogenous group, and who are marked by power differentials themselves—to direct or counteract top-down investment and practices.
Lizabeth Cohen outlines distinctions between types of consumers, identifying two general types: the “customer consumer” and the “citizen consumer.” Cohen argues that the customer consumer is motivated by the desire to consume, and their activity and output are summed up as “shopping” (pure economic capital). In contrast, the citizen consumer is motivated by the desire that their consumption can generate a social good, so that their activity may be consuming (or shopping), but their output is consuming plus social impact (the transferral of social capital).41 Cohen’s model is an important development in understanding how consumers operate, and a necessary move away from the view of consumers as “passive human resources.”42 In terms of the specifics of how memory performances are consumed, I deploy Cohen’s binary and add two more terms relevant for discussing theatre: the “audience-consumer” and the “audience-witness.” The audience-consumer is there to watch and enjoy the show, to have a good time, to expend their economic power investing in cultural performances that make them feel good. The audience-witness is driven by many of the same motivations, but with the added dimension of a sense of performing a public duty—this is less joyless than it sounds; as I explore in the following chapters, there is a feel-good dividend for audiences who invest in performances that make the world a better place.
The recent explosion in authenticity in culture (marking not only theatre but, notably, the whole heritage sector), may be read as a way for consumption and ethical witnessing to intersect, through the creation of more spaces for bottom-up initiatives and unheard stories. Though arguably this has the potential to make the marketplace a fairer place, it is doubtful that consumption in itself can change the structural imbalances of power within either the memory marketplace or the larger society. The philanthropic consumption model, embodied by initiatives such as Fair Trade, may set up the consumer, and the act of consumption, as a force for social good, but it can be ameliorative at best. It’s also not the case that all audience consumers will invest in an ethical model of consumption, and it is thus far from automatic that all audience members attending a show that brands itself as ethical will become witnesses. We must assume, then, that plays will always have an audience made up of both consumers and witnesses (and all those in between).
Even in a marketplace full of citizen consumers/audience-witnesses, the marketplace is not necessarily a fair or stable place. Indeed, fluctuation and instability are inherent features of the market. After all, the market is driven by constant renewal, through a process of “creative destruction” (innovation),43 whereby old narratives are discarded and new narratives introduced. The downside, then, of assuming a model in which the consumer has power, is that consumer trends will always change—and since novelty and competition are defining features of all consumption, access to the marketplace for minority voices is therefore always dependent on changing demands. Though creative destruction can lead to the overturning of oppressive narratives, for example in the case of the emergence of a new collective memory of institutional child abuse by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s, just as quickly, the market can move on to yet another story, again limiting the space available to particular memory groups and disempowering those who are not currently in demand.
Often the individual consumer and the mass market are driven not by the principle of social good but by the allure of authenticity. As Gilmore and Pine put it, authenticity is what consumers really want.44 Authenticity is a tricky object—on the one hand it suggests a veracity that cannot be bought or sold, yet on the other hand the “authenticity brand” is a driver of major commercial trends. This brand has multiple meanings that consumers attach to it, including the ability to secure identity through the careful curation of their consumption of authenticity, and the attraction of making consumers feel safe while simultaneously in contact with “the real.”45 Yet authenticity is not a stable concept, indeed both authenticity and the demands that shape it shift with market trends (creative destruction, again). As Christopher Howard states, “both the age of authenticity and consumerism centre on a restless individualism and the value of choice in an ever-changing market of consumable objects and experiences.”46 Indeed, as this book argues, even when a theatrical show is highly “authentic” this does not guarantee attracting an audience to make it commercially viable (which is vital even when a show is subsidized). Market awareness thus always mediates the kinds of aesthetic and performance strategies used to engage and satisfy an audience—and authenticity, while a major branding device in itself, is just one element of marketing theatre. Other strategies include the promise of novelty, the performance of trauma, creating a space for catharsis, marketing the show as culturally prestigious and/or as satisfying a social or political need (e.g., for knowledge or public accountability), and downplaying the potentially negative impacts on audiences by limiting the narrative or creating an uplifting ending.
As behavioral economics has demonstrated, consumers make decisions led by their emotions rather than purely based on rational calculations47—in the case of plays that witness painful memories, the promise of emotional expression/catharsis/fulfilment is combined with the expectation of social engagement, thereby suggesting that this form of theatre can deliver on both grounds, in theory being doubly attractive to consumers as a powerful mode of identity-signaling.48 I make this point knowing at the same time that the reactions of many friends when I suggest going to see one of these plays—“sounds a bit depressing”—means that the double hit of emotion plus politics is not necessarily attractive to all consumers. When consumers do buy into the cultural trend for witnessing memory, then we see the full impact of consumption as an active influencer of market trends. Audiences are the
