Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life

Modern drama begets a peculiar economic paradox. While many socially minded dramatists aim to elucidate modernity’s ills or discontents on stage, they nevertheless do so within a revenue-driven mode of production. This insight is at the center of Alisa Zhulina’s 2024 book, Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life. Written from the perspective of both a scholar and a practitioner, Theater of Capital examines the ways in which capitalism set the stage for marketable new developments in European fin-de-siècle drama. Offering more than just a new lens through which to read major theatrical texts of this era, Zhulina impressively harnesses the dramas of our past to demonstrate how we might better address inequity in the theater industries of today.The capital in Zhulina’s title derives from Karl Marx, who famously understood capitalism (though he would not call it that) as a model of economics rooted in ideological contradiction. However, Zhulina’s theater of capital addresses key connections between modernist theater and economic life, understanding that economics and life are now impossible to delineate. Drawing practical insights from plays like A Doll’s House (1879), Miss Julie (1888), and The Cherry Orchard (1904), Zhulina explores the thematic complexities that arise when we start to view theater as business, artists as beneficiaries, and drama as collateral. In this regard, we can begin to see that, like capitalism itself, theater of capital comes with it a series of irrefutable contradictions.Most of Theater of Capital reexamines the work of those whom Zhulina calls the “bourgeois playwrights of modern drama” (5), including Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, and George Bernard Shaw—all of whom influenced US practitioners of realism, including Eugene O’Neill. With such playwrights at the center of this analysis, Theater of Capital focuses almost exclusively on turn-of-the-century realism. While Zhulina is a self-proclaimed defender of realism in this regard, she is nevertheless attuned to its most substantive criticisms, most of which point to the influence of white bourgeoise politics on this movement’s primarily male writers. Tactfully navigating possible counterarguments, Zhulina demonstrates how the realists were among those playwrights most intimately affected by capitalism and therefore those most inclined to its critique. Zhulina classifies this approach as a form of “imminent critique” (22) or the act of locating contradictions from the inside before turning outwards. She adds that this methodology for reading theater became possible only with the rise of the bourgeoisie.Chapter 1, “Finance Capital: Henrik Ibsen and the Invisible Hand,” draws a clever parallel between Adam Smith’s idea of the invisible hand with one of the oldest theatrical tricks in the book: the deus ex machina. Ibsen being the focal point of this chapter, Zhulina examines themes of domestic labor, bankruptcy, and commerce in his plays. Like the deus ex machina (referring both to its modern literary usage and its origins as a scenic device dating back to Euripides), Ibsen’s reliance on market logic is an illusionary but nevertheless effective means to an end. Zhulina rightly observes, however, that the invisible hand is more than just a device for Ibsen’s milieu; the ideological tenets of labor and profit underpin the financial realities of theatrical production and must therefore be made visible to the audience as well. Although this chapter focuses on A Doll’s House and An Enemy of the People (1882), Zhulina does not neglect to show how Ibsen’s “hidden structures of alienated labor” (44) are still relevant today. She specifically examines how Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand (2014), Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House: Part 2 (2017), and Thomas Ostermeier’s 2012 staging of An Enemy of the People evidence the continued exploration of Ibsenian social critique.With chapter 2, “The Dowry versus Erotic Capital: The Drama of Courtship in Strindberg, Shaw, and Benedictsson,” Zhulina addresses a somehow even more invisible form of monetary transaction: the turn-of-the-century marriage economy. This chapter looks closely at Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), and Victoria Benedictsson’s Money (1885) and The Enchantment (1888) to address what she calls the “inherent contradiction of courtship and the love marriage in the age of capital” (84). This chapter likewise addresses how dowry as a form of legal security for women conflicts with a more liberal form of “sexuo-economic exchange” (96) that holds a stronger sway in the marriage economy later on, but that is no less relevant to the politics of monetary exchange. Drawing from sociologist Catherine Hakim’s neoliberal theory of “erotic capital” (85)—or, when sex and sexual pleasure become viewed as personal assets—Zhulina juxtaposes interdisciplinary principles of economics with insight about the postmelodramatic love plot to better demystify the woman question that plagues so many modernist historians. With this chapter, Zhulina carefully builds on her discussion about women in A Doll’s House to address the riskier nuances at stake when delving into themes of sex, love, and other forms of erotic capital.Chapter 3, “Casino Capitalism: Anton Chekhov and Gambling,” moves out of the domestic sphere and begins to look big picture at the compounds of industrialization relevant to Chekhov’s theater. Identifying a Chekhovian impulse toward speculation, Zhulina considers how “bets,” “risks,” and “near wins” infiltrate each character’s motives and development. Beyond Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1903), Zhulina draws from the archive of Chekhovian one-acts and short stories to trace the lineage of his thinking and contextualize this against major economic changes taking place in Russia at the time. Chekhov’s penchant for world-building is compared to the social politics of casino where one person’s win is always another person’s loss. Despite this “when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em” mentality, Zhulina recognizes that the greatest gift of Chekhov’s theater was to carve out a safe space for those most devalued by or made disposable by industrialization—the artists, the servants, and the laborers.Zhulina’s fourth chapter, “Labor and Strike: Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers and Its Legacy in German Expressionism” is the shortest and sweetest provision in a wide-reaching analysis. Drawing less from Hauptmann’s text than she does from its varied social histories, Zhulina uses The Weavers (1892) to remind the reader that theater can still be revolutionary. As this chapter also demonstrates, theater of capital deals first and foremost with the role of human labor in the making of theater, and that theater is not immune to the limits and expectations of social productivity. With Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920), Georg Kaiser’s Gas trilogy (1917–20), and Ernst Toller’s The Machine Wreckers (1923), Zhulina ultimately shifts her focus from self-appraising social drama to cynical and self-destructive expressionism—a dreaded reminder that humanity may come to end before capitalism does.For those without an extensive background in economics, Theater of Capital remains remarkably accessible. Zhulina circumnavigates academic jargon with clear and direct language to illuminate rather than simplify the many layers of her contribution to modernist studies. Metatheatrical in and of itself, the book transcends mere script analysis and offers a newly realized vision of modernist theater that is hopefully resistant to but nevertheless gridlocked by the free market from which it is borne. While Theater of Capital focuses almost entirely on European drama, its extensions into modern drama in the United States are well within reach. What further insights might be unlocked, I wonder, when we look at Arthur Miller’s corrosive dream of Americana or, better yet, Eugene O’Neill’s Darwinian nightmare through the lens of theater of capital?Zhulina gestures all the way back to Aristotle when she points out a form of pleasure to be found in theater at the expense of another’s suffering. Still, her analysis is confined to a moment in which, there is no doubt, theater has fully divorced itself from ritual and embraced a new raison d’être—one that is “bound up with capital, and spectacularly so” (16). Therein lies Theater of Capital’s most valuable consideration: “what can theater, with its ineluctable stain of commerce, say or do about capitalism?” (16). The book concludes somewhat pessimistically, without a definitive answer to this question one way or the other. Zhulina admits, “without a substantial change in the economic system, reforms—such as individual attempts at redistributing income in the theater world—are not enough to revolutionize contemporary theater, which still maintains an intimate and perverse relationship to capital” (210). If there is any hope to be found in Zhulina’s study, it is that only when we understand what the stakes truly are that we begin to learn from and appreciate the struggle of practitioners who came before us.