Notes on a theatre commons: Common Wealth’s The Deal Versus the People (2015)

The Deal Versus the People was a theatrical response created by people in Bradford (UK) to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). A controversial trade deal between the European Union and United States being negotiated at the time of the production, TTIP threatened to deepen trade liberalisation, with potentially negative impacts for communities on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article, I examine the ways The Deal Versus the People critically engaged with TTIP, and the neoliberal economic paradigm that it is an expression of, by mobilising a ‘commons’ across the theatrical and social landscapes of its production.