piThe Dark Theatrei is an indispensable text for activist communities wondering what theatre might have to do with their futures, students and scholars across Theatre and Performance Studies, Urban Studies, Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Social Ecology.ppThe Dark Theatre returns to the bankrupted warehouse in Hope Sufferance Wharf in London's Docklands where Alan Read worked through the 1980s to identify a four-decade interregnum of 'cultural cruelty' wreaked by financialisation, austerity and communicative capitalism. Between the OPEC Oil Embargo and the first screening of iThe Family iin 1974, to the United Nations report on UK poverty and the fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, this volume becomes a book about loss.ppIn the harsh light of such loss is there an alternative to the market that profits from peddling 'well-being' and pushes prescriptions for 'self-help', any role for the arts that is not an apologia for injustice What if culture were not the solution but the problem