Carlson, Marvin

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

COMPTERENDU / BOOKREVIEWMICHAELMcKINNIECity Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City.Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007. xii +179 pp.MARVIN CARLSONMcKinnie’s new book is a very important contribution to thegrowing body of research on the inter-relationship of the theatreand the modern city. He further provides a valuable new perspec-tive within such research by a more detailed and sophisticated useof the methodology of cultural materialism than any of his prede-cessors in this field to illuminate some of the major economic,social, and cultural forces that have significantly contributed to thelocation, organization, and image construction of a range ofimportant theatres in Toronto since the late 1960s.The book is divided into twomajor sections, both building uptheir arguments and conclusions from in-depth materialistcase studies of particular theatres. The first section, “CivicDevelopment,” is primarily concerned with the utilization oftheatre in the process of civic self-fashioning that markedToronto’s repositioning itself as a world city during this period.The St. Lawrence Center for the Arts and the Ford Center for theArts are examined as alternative models for the theatre’s contribu-tion to the transition from a national to a transnational economywhile the development of the Entertainment District is consideredfor what it can reveal about the relationship between space and thecommodification of play in the modern global city.The second section, “The Edifice Complex,” considers therecent history of several important small companies,Theatre PasseMuraille, Toronto Workshop Productions, Necessary Angel, andBuddies in Bad Times, suggesting how their physical locations (insome cases shifting ones) can be related to larger patterns of urbanchange. Previous studies of theatre buildings and their urbancontext have generally called attention to the fact that a theatre’slocation in a certain part of a city is an important part of the publicimage of that theatre, but McKinnie explores this phenomenon insome detail and from a fresh perspective, emphasizing suchmatters as the effect of considering the theatre as real estate, of theTRiC / RTaC • 30.1-2 (2009) • Review / Compte rendu • pp 175-176 • 175disappearance of inner city industry, of shifting demographics,and of gentrification.Obviously this well researched and engagingly written studymakes an important addition to the rather sparse field of Canadiantheatre history. To the best of my knowledge only Ric Knowles’s2004 Reading the Material Theatre,which includes some Canadianexamples, has attempted any analysis of the Canadian theatrewhich even remotely resembles McKinnie’s project. This naturallyleads to the question of what interest this detailed analysis oftheatre in a particular (if major) Canadian theatre city might havefor readers who may not be familiar with this approach. AsMcKinnie himself points out in several places in the book, at theheart of his methodology is the assumption that every theatre is aunique venture, shaped by a particular convergence of spatial andtemporal forces that McKinnie studies through their materialmanifestations.The answer is that while each of these cases illuminates veryconvincingly particular aspects of the developing post-Fordist erain the Toronto theatre, and thus will not have exact parallels else-where, they represent typical forces and dynamics found in differ-ent combinations in theatre everywhere today. This is especiallytrue of course in the new global cities,which are increasingly inter-twined in their urban structures and the functioning of thesestructures. Although not one of McKinnie’s examples exactlyparalleled the forces at work in any specific theatre I know in NewYork, London, Paris, or Berlin, not one of them exhibited forces atwork that I do not recognize as important phenomena operating inparticular theatres in those cities.Thus not only in the phenomenahe is discussing, but perhaps even more important in the still notwidely utilized materialist methodology that he brings to bear onthis discussion, McKinnie has created a study that should have awide, and well deserved readership in and impact upon the field ofmodern theatre studies.176 • TRiC / RTaC • 30.1-2 (2009) • Review / Compte rendu • pp 175-176

Michael McKinnie. City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City

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Michael McKinnie. City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City

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