There is general agreement now that culture is capitalism. Whether their value is financial or symbolic, the processes and products of cultural expression are widely acknowledged as submitted to an advanced network of capital transactions. The processes of global capitalism have long since invaded the sphere of artistic production.

Cynical as it may seem, this assertion has never been acknowledged by artists themselves. From the cut-up paintings of the early avant-garde to the degradation of the body in contemporary performance, art has always challenged the ideological concept of its own autonomy: the idea that aesthetics is secluded from the processes of commercial and cultural production. In the early 00’s, the scrutiny of art’s socio-economic and ideological premises that the nineties knew as postmodernism, has led to the development of a new aesthetics, based on a deconstruction of boundaries between aesthetic, political and intellectual experience, and on the consequential cultural interchange between artists, intellectuals and political activists. Be it publications, exhibitions or concrete pieces, traditional institutions of modern art have become vehicles for political as well as aesthetic discussion, allowing these discourses to interweave.

Despite repeated efforts to recycle its political relevance, no similar development can be said to have taken place in European theatre. There is little critical discourse surrounding the traditional institutions, and aesthetic experimentation as well as political discussion is left to off-off companies, operating in the margins of both subsidy and publicity. Theatre in Europe seems not to have undergone the same deconstructive process as that of the visual arts, and one might ask whether theatre is still protected by the modernist illusion of artistic autonomy that once governed the art institution as a whole. The answer to this question is yes, but only insofar as artistic autonomy is a viable currency; an appropriate means to increase theatre’s market potential in the symbolic economy of culture.

Theatre in Europe has never reached the visual arts’ level of aesthetic autonomy. More than artistic presentation, theatre has always been a re-presentation: a more or less pertinent display of something prior to it. For this reason, governing principles of theatre have always been sought beyond the borders of the theatrical event. Theatre’s own worth has been examined only in its ability to conform to an ‘exceeding logic’ ( i.e. a logic that goes beyond the boundaries of the specific discourse in which one is operating). Consequently, there has not been much of an autonomous discourse to deconstruct in theatre.

Historically, theatre has played an important part in the nation building of young countries throughout Europe. And although its ambitions may no longer seem so lofty as establishing a supreme national essence, theatre still holds a primary function in representing national identity. This identity, however, is not an imagined common ground for the citizens of a particular nation, but rather an indicator of the nation’s cultural prosperity, its assets in the circuit of the symbolic economy.

European theatre today works mainly as a provider of symbolic capital, not only to the respective countries in intra-continental competition, but also to Europe itself as a continent and economic union. Through a high level of high culture, the challenges to European identity presented by the culture industry of Asia and the US are kept at bay. As are the challenges raised by contemporary aesthetic and political theory, which have long since left these ideological notions of art and culture behind.

Based on the assumption that commercial interest is an impediment to artistic excellence, theatres throughout Europe are sustained financially as autonomous institutions. However, this simulated autonomy actually becomes destabilised, as theatre simulates its own submission to the market economy!

This tendency that emerged in the early nineties has been central to the cultural politics of small countries like Norway and Denmark. Demands are made of the heavily financed theatre institutions of these countries to exercise a certain amount of hard-headed economic competence, in order that they regain some small share of what they have been given through public subsidy. And so, with a paradoxical twist to classic culture consecration, European theatre simulates market submission, to render its own withdrawal from the market legitimate.

All this has meant that Theatre has become a showcase of successes from other media. It has submitted to the circulation that renders the products of other media as trademarks, and, because it has withdrawn from the same circulation, it is deprived of the possibility of producing similar trademarks of its own. Which might explain last year’s production of Jerry Springer: the Opera at Britain’s Royal National Theatre, and the movie star Emanuelle Seigner playing Hedda Gabler in Paris, not to mention the many state-financed re-stagings of movie blockbusters on national theatres in Scandinavia, such as A Clockwork Orange, The Celebration and even The Full Monty.

Withdrawn from the circulation of cultural capital, theatre is deprived of the discussions governing contemporary aesthetics. Nevertheless, as a result of demands for its economic self-sufficiency, it is submitted to the same circulation. Through this double strategy, European countries maintain their theatres as impotent institutions, without commercial potential, but with strictly commercial boundaries. This mixture of withdrawal and submission ensures that theatre is kept alive as a symbol of cultural prosperity, while a discussion of theatre’s aesthetic, political and socio-economic premises is kept at bay. Now, as this discussion has been crucial to the proceedings of contemporary art, there is good reason to insist that theatre, not least from an aesthetic viewpoint, should be its next object of scrutiny.

The year is 2005. By means of a toxic revolution, the United States of America have been toppled by a right-wing fundamentalist regime by the name of Gilead. Driven by religious doctrine, women have been denied of the most basic human rights. Most couples have been rendered infertile and those women able to reproduce, but only those with a sexual history of anything other than marital fidelity to one man, have been taken away to the ‘Red Centre’. Here they will be trained to become Handmaids, otherwise known as surrogate mothers. The struggle of Offred, a woman who attempts to flee across the border to Canada with her husband and child, is at the centre of this two hour and forty-five minute long epic.

It seems puzzling that a piece so highly acclaimed in one country should be received so indifferently by another. The production certainly goes off to a very promising start. Lined by action style film music, dramatic and currently very controversial newsreels demonstrate the collapse of the American republic. This could get interesting… The set clearly spells 1984 and we are kindly guided into the understanding that green costumes mean evil and red stands for the suppressed but essentially good side in the female species. This rather superficial reading of a characteristic would be excusable, were it not for the fact that the audience is meant to sympathise with the main character, Offred, sung by Stephanie Marshall, also dressed in red robes. Unfortunately there are so many women dressed in red robes on stage at any one time that we quickly loose sight of our heroine. Even when she takes off her red hood, she sports the same blonde short haircut as at least two other ladies in the choir.

Visually striking, the clinical and regimented set serves as a multitude of locations. Designer Peter McKintosh makes full use of the revolve on stage. However, where at first we are taken by the successful marriage of the lighting and the white furniture on wheels, the scene changes are far too quick and soon become nigh on soporific. It is when you begin to pay more attention to the correct positioning of a roll-on bed than to the libretto, that you know there is something lacking from this production.

Poul Ruders’s music score is intimidating at first, but soon blends into a bulk of a-tonal sequences, only occasionally giving the listener glimpses of melodies in samples of Amazing Grace. The heavy orchestration drowns out any hope of catching a part of the dialogue, which in turn has unfortunate effects on the understanding of the piece as a whole. Subtitles are sorely missed. We soon lose the plot in seemingly random images of crossed-over storylines and you’ll be lucky to catch any character’s name, let alone what they are doing on stage in the first place. Some potentially stunning musical opportunities are missed, especially in the note-sharing duet between Offred and her mother.

Margaret Atwood’s novel deals with themes of a futuristic nature, which, whilst they appear far-fetched at the moment, still make you ponder over what may become of the human race in years to come. To shape this work into a musical score is no mean feat. You would expect to feel stimulated and excited on leaving the London Coliseum, but all in all The Handmaid’s Tale does not hit the mark. Drowned by uniform costumes and complicated notes, the story leaves us feeling thoroughly drained and disappointed. Let us hope that The Handmaid’s Tale finds better reception at its next destination…

Calixto doesn’t show images of war in Macbeth – an intensely relevant theme today but one which is, however, apart from the daily lives of most theatregoers. Instead the world he creates is domestic. The home of the Macbeths is the centre of the action and it is a gaudy and materialistic home that embraces the fruits of global capitalism. Coca Cola is the drink of choice when this extended family of Scottish nobility is not swigging wine from the bottle; and one of the Macduff children (who seem to be ever present on the stage – feeding the envy of the childless Macbeths) is bludgeoned to death with a Coke bottle. These images speak to us directly. They may be comically exaggerated but the excesses they portray are surely familiar to a large proportion of young theatre-goers, and the audience I saw at the Barbican was not the usual mix of retired season-ticket-holders and American tourists.

Materialism concerned William Shakespeare’s society as well as our own. After the first murder, Macbeth – like Claudius – becomes increasingly preoccupied with the payoff between worldly power and the loss of the soul, and it is a theme that the poet explores enigmatically in Sonnet 146: ‘Why so large cost, having so short a lease, / Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?’. In the era of fantastic courtly masques costing one thousand times the salary of an actor, and ridiculously extravagant fashions in dress and lifestyle, the question ‘why?’ was left to the poets.

If modern productions of Renaissance plays are to be more than museum-pieces, then it befalls the directors to work as cultural translators. They must find ways to reveal those meanings that would otherwise lie buried, beneath four hundred years of changes to the cultural charges attached to ideas and things. It is not that the stories, characters or even the language of William are particularly impenetrable to us today, but simply that we are blind to those issues that were most important to people who went to the theatre in early Jacobean London, and blind to the assumptions that they brought with them. Even if we have a scholarly understanding of those cultural differences, we cannot embrace them as our own.

Working in translation, Calixto is liberated on more than one level. He is free to make the play and its language immediate. For Anglophones, the familiarity of William Shakespeare’s poetry often heightens our pleasure in its music but it can also obscure its meaning. Speaking famous lines in another language refreshes them and renews the potency of their literal significance. Hearing Macbeth (Mingo Ràfols) contemplate the interminable future of ‘mañana y mañana y mañana’ I was struck by the emptiness he faces and his dilemma seemed to me to be a new one; one that had been forged in the previous two hours and not one that I had truly empathised with before. I did indeed feel that I had never seen this play before.