Promoting a theatre in crisis: poster design and the marketisation of culture on the Madrid stage

This article examines a paratextual element of stage productions, the promotional poster, a detail often overlooked in analyses of theatre. I show that, far from being of minor importance for academic approaches to the subject, the study of posters sheds light on many of the concerns of the industry, and can reveal more about such matters than the study of a play text or performance. The industrial concerns at the heart of this article are the recent economic crisis in Spain and the austerity measures taken by successive governments to resolve it. I focus on the specific case of Madrid, where the three tiers of government (state, autonomous community, and municipality) overlap to the greatest extent in the domain of publicly-owned theatre, where there is a prominent private theatre industry, and where I have been able to investigate and evaluate in person the question of the visibility of theatre publicity. My analysis of the posters of a number of publicly-owned theatres reveals a burgeoning culture of branding in response to falling audience numbers and ticket sales, a commercial initiative at odds with the perception of culture as a public good in the 1978 Spanish Constitution. I also show that economic hardship in the capital’s private sector is manifest in the aesthetics of publicity for productions at such theatres. Poster design, I argue, is an element of theatre in which the broader move, in both public and private sectors, towards the corporatisation of Spanish culture and its devaluation as a means by which to edify the population, are not merely explicit but also contested.