Making a Civic Spectacle: Towns for rent

This chapter explores theatre and civic culture in towns, focusing on the Old Courts, an arts organisation that plays a key role in the regeneration of Wigan town centre. Centring on a production of Rent Party in Wigan in 2021, the chapter presents theatres in towns as venues for civic spectacles that express imaginative, pragmatic, and critical responses to socioeconomic challenges. The chapter discusses the legacies of colonialism that shape Wigan's civic pasts, drawing on this historical frame to problematise present-day advocacy for a civic role for the arts. Taking its cue from Rent Party’s innovative touring model, collaborative process, ethic of care and unruly aesthetic, as well as the policy of community wealth building in Wigan, the chapter traces an alternative modality of civic theatre. The networks of solidarity, celebration, identification and recognition that the production materialised evoke what feminist scholar Gayatri Gopinath (2018) calls a ‘queer regional imaginary’, at one and the same time anchored in its locality and dispersed across geographical space and historical time, highlighting how theatre might occupy a place inside but also unsettle the exclusionary frames of civic culture.