Internalizing production costs and changes of tastes: More recent theatre plays feature fewer roles

ABSTRACT

This paper shows that the number of roles in theatre plays has decreased over time. Playwrights seem to internalize the costs of producing plays by downsizing the number of roles. This downsizing is not a recent phenomenon: it already started a long time ago. This is not surprising, since production costs increase over time and the Baumol cost disease is obviously one of the reasons, though one cannot exclude that fashion has changed given the time elapsed between William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett.

KEYWORDS:

• Number of roles
• Cast size
• Baumol cost disease
• Playwrights

Notes

¹ We draw a distinction between “number of roles” and “cast size” The number of roles is decided by the playwright, the cast is, however, chosen by the producer of the play, who frequently takes the artistic liberty to eliminate some (minor) roles, or have the same actor playing several roles. See Werck et al. (2008).

² This example is provided by Baumol and Bowen and has become classical to explain the cost disease in a few words.

³ We are grateful to one of our referees for these considerations.

⁴ One of the referees mentions that he saw “Macbeth being performed without Macbeth”, though “this happened in an experimental international theatre festival.”

⁵ Available at http://https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com.

⁶ This model may, however, lead to biased results, since the number of roles is a positive integer (1, 2, 3, ...) and does not take continuous values. Therefore, we also used a technique that allows for integers only. The results that we obtain are qualitatively similar to those obtained with ordinary least squares (OLS), and we only give the OLS results, which are easier to interpret.