Stage Managing Wasted Time: The Temporality of the Theatrical Workplace

This article develops an analysis of the relationship between work and time in theater through a reading of onstage and backstage activity in the National Theatre's As You Like It (2015), drawing on on E. P. Thompson's seminal description of workplace time-discipline and Sarah Sharma's more recent work on how multiple experiences of time can overlap or coincide within sites of production and circulation. Shakespeare's play draws attention to the shifting political significance of time in the late sixteenth century, providing insights into the demands of the emergent capitalist economy, and the 2015 production takes up this theme by staging the action in a precisely time-disciplined corporate office environment. The article reads this interaction of text and staging in terms of the historical development of capitalist time discipline, creating an implicit dialogue between early modernity and late capitalism. It brings the process of theatrical production into view through the Stage Management reports and Front of House reports, which, though generally neglected by scholars, testify to the ways in which the industrialized production of theater is structured by capitalist temporal imperatives. From here, this article discusses theatrical production from the point of view of the latecomer, arguing that late admittance grants the audience member a brief glimpse of the industrial apparatus of stage management which is normally concealed from them. This breach exposes the relationship between the time pressures of daily life, as experienced by the late audience member, and the pressures of industrialized theatrical production, as experienced by the front of house staff who must get them to their seat.