Volunteer Labor and Theatrical Community in Emma Rice's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2016)

This article is concerned with the politics of theatrical labor surrounding Emma Rice's decision for her 2016 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream to recast the Rude Mechanicals as "volunteer ushers" at Shakespeare's Globe. What assumptions about theatrical labor are used to underpin the production's depiction of amateur performance? What theatrical labors are made visible or invisible, and to what end? I contend that the labor policies and performance practices at Shakespeare's Globe combine in A Midsummer Night's Dream to engender a blurring of volunteer, amateur, and professional theatrical labors, the result of which is a production that participates in problematic discourses around precarious theatrical employment and gendered theatrical labor. Further, I will suggest that Rice's production invites the audience to interpret the Rude Mechanicals as a community that has been formed upon a shared passion for theatrical amateurism. This community's theatrical labors, specifically because of its amateur status, are conceived of as a refuge for participating members from their expropriated position in capitalist production. However, the article suggests that the decision to cast the Rude Mechanicals as volunteer ushers at Shakespeare's Globe necessarily imbricates the politics of capitalist theatrical production onto this romantic notion of community. Following Miranda Joseph's critique of community, I argue that A Midsummer Night's Dream deploys a romantic conception of theatrical community as refuge from capitalist production, and that this representational strategy elides community's embeddedness within capitalist production. Although Rice's production begins with one of the Rude Mechanicals delivering the Prologue from Henry V, an assertion of the transformative power of theatre, this community of theatrical amateurs becomes a vehicle through which each worker is only able to re-perform their professional labors and class positions.