Towards an Ecocritical Theatre

Playing the Anthropocene

Mohebat Ahmadi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000583977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world.

To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world's iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.

1 Where ecocriticism meets theatre in the era of the Anthropocene

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048749-1

Despite the importance of reconsidering theatre in the framework of Anthropocene events, dramatic works about global warming and mass extinction have been scarce. According to Julie Hudson, in spite of the apparent dramatic appeal of the climate-change debate, theatre has been distinctly silent on the subject of anthropogenic climate change and its implications for the social, psychic, and cultural life of humankind (260). Hudson contends that, when Kristen Shepherd-Barr listed “no fewer than 82 science plays written between 1992 … and 2004 without directly discussing climate-change science” in the Appendix to her Science on the Stage in 2006, “the presence of climate change and its science on the stage was barely visible” (260). Furthermore, in “Staging Climate Change: The Last Ten Years” (2014), Bradon Smith investigates theatre’s delayed creative process in discussing climate change. However, as he argues, “the all-encompassing nature of the implications of climate and environmental change” makes it “a compelling subject for drama” (n. pag.) while theatre also has the potential to suggest innovative ways of thinking about the reality of climate change.

Why have representations of the global ecological crisis been rare in theatre? The urgency of the issue prompted the Ashden Directory of Environment and Performance established by Wallace Heim to convene a round table in 2005 to discuss the question, “Why are there no plays about climate change?” (Smith, “Climate Change in Performance” 9). There are many possible answers for such questions. In his 2008 blog post “Why Theatres Don’t Touch Climate Change” on Ashdenizen, Robert Butler writes that it is hard to see how the spatial and temporal impact of individual actions can be represented within the conventional patterns of cause and effect in dramaturgy. He argues that theatres resist engaging with climate change because they “think climate change is about science,” rather than about “drama’s core themes: human relationships, the way we live, what we value” (Heim and Margolies 166). The theatre scholars Wendy Arons and Theresa May also expand on a key challenge playwrights face in telling compelling stories about disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and volcanic eruptions, as well as about glaciers, rivers, and species. According to these scholars, such stories go beyond the human scale of time and space, and “so even when a playwright strives to foreground ecological issues on stage, the stories are hard to contain” (Performance and Ecology 4). While materialist theoretical approaches to the nonhuman world are effective ways to think about how theatre engages with global ecological changes, they face challenges of complexity and scale given Anthropocenic alterations. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon characterises global ecological changes of environmental toxicity, climate change, and extinction as “long-dyings” and slow forms of violence that occur “gradually and out of sight” and are “dispersed across time and space” (2). While we live in a world that is attuned to immediate and spectacular experiences, Nixon wonders “how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making… . How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention?” (3). These key questions in relation to the challenges of representational strategies are in sync with concerns about the barriers that theatre and performance encounter in representing the complexity of slow-moving ecological disasters.

To explain why climate change is not amenable to traditional modes of representation in art and theatre, I refer to eco-theatre scholar and pioneer Una Chaudhuri’s recent collaborative “Ecocide Project” (2014) co-authored by Shonni Enelow. In it they argue, first, that theatre deals with more concrete and comprehensible topics. These include narratives of family and domestic issues and representations of sensational and dramatic forms of terror, rather than abstract global threats such as climate change (23–4). Second, dramatising climate change, with its “particular temporalities,” in theatrical space poses an intellectual challenge in terms of both what it means to be human and knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences. The problems caused by the phenomena of climate change are, in particular, related to the “time scales” and “conceptualizations of human agency” (25). The final barrier to climate-change representation, for Chaudhuri and Enelow, is the fact that climate change is “the aggregate result of countless dispersed behaviours and practices” (27). In other words, the “Anthropo” in “Anthropocene” is not singular but “a collective that is in some fundamental and scary way in excess of each of us and all of us, a collective that acts outside our control” (27). This point calls for a non-anthropocentric approach that presents a new version of humankind in entanglements with other humans and nonhumans. In spite of such conflicts between the urgency of climate change and the aesthetic challenges it offers, I argue that a critical understanding of theatre as a broad and collaborative field of art – with the capacity to embody and perform imaginative, immediate, and affective possibilities and to present new epistemological and ontological frameworks of thinking, feeling, and viewing our place in the world – articulates an ever-evolving connection between art and science in the context of a changing environment.

Proposed in 2000 by Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, the term Anthropocene designates a proposed new geological age that follows the Holocene. This new geological age, characterised by dramatic and extensive human-induced changes in the Earth’s biosphere, underlines the pervasive, decisive, and “central role of mankind in geology and ecology,” the impacts of which “will continue over long periods” (Crutzen and Stoermer 17). Such impacts include anthropogenic carbon emissions, widespread levels of pollution, altered ocean chemistry, and changes in global temperature and climate along with increasing extinctions of plant and animal species. The complex challenges and perceptual shifts that arise from this new version of humankind whose ecological footprints are inadvertently left on all human and nonhuman bodies in the biosphere prompt a paradigm shift in the arts and humanities, requiring scholars to radically rethink common conceptions of human subjectivity and the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene aims to make a timely intervention in theatre studies by addressing theatre’s humanist bias and extending existing scholarship that has situated theatre within an overarching narrative of the Anthropocene. The book engages with major new approaches in environmental humanities and arises out of the need to address how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus is capable of embracing and rising to the representational challenges of the current global ecological crisis and changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world. Although considering environmental issues in performative terms can be challenging, the book celebrates this intersection and models imaginative and informative ways of communicating about our environmental future.

This book identifies important drama that has not been fully analysed. As a body of plays and performances, the works I examine reflect how theatre is informed by, and informs, problems of scale and agency in an era of human-induced alterations to the environment. In exploring these points of tension, the book is grounded in a close and in-depth reading of international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from a human-centred focus to an Anthropocenic focus within the emerging field of ecocritical theatre. I categorise the works as examples of ecocritical theatre that I define as a new approach reflecting on how theatre – as the most anthropocentric form of art – might represent the nonhuman world by challenging the anthropocentrism that underpins the Anthropocene; dramatising the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the environmental crisis; and integrating with new materialist and eco-global thinking. I show that the plays and performances are themselves ecocritical – rather than just ecological or environmental – as they embody the interactions between the performing arts and science, between human cultural expression and environmental concerns, allowing an interdisciplinary consideration of new material and multispecies agencies that involve the problem of scale that the Anthropocene entails. In doing so, this book draws on critical theories to engage in textual and performance analysis of the selected theatrical works. While the context of performance is addressed, this study primarily focuses on the close reading of plays and dramatic literature rather than on performance theory – except for Matreyek’s performances in Chapter 5. As my project connects to literature and cultural theory, it has potential to fill an important gap in the literature and theatre studies and reach readers widely across the humanities.

While the number of plays and performances that examine Anthropocenic concerns such as climate change has been growing around the world and in different cultures, I primarily focus on a broad spectrum of ecocritically oriented theatrical works written and performed in Anglo-centric contexts in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The works were written during the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries: precarious times of escalating conditions for global ecological crises. Western countries’ dominant contribution to global emissions and, consequently, to the global climate crisis and mass extinction informs my choice of national contexts.¹ Critiques of Western countries call for close examination of their theatrical production in order to get a new cultural and ecological conception of human-nonhuman relationship in the context of a rapidly changing world. Therefore, I have selected plays and performances from Western, Anglophone countries that shift the focus from the anthropocentric perspective that has conventionally dominated Western theatre and performance to one that defines humans in mutual interaction with the nonhuman world. This shift also gives new insights into cultural and political ideologies that form the basis of some of the most important environmental concerns of the past and present (Richmond 123). Hence, although these theatrical works respond to information, images, and discourses that are circulating in English and respond to environmental change in the context of particular Anglophone cultures, my principle aim is to lay the groundwork for discerning a genre of Western plays and performances that posit a global and inclusive perspective through a radical rethinking of some of the principle assumptions made about human-nonhuman relationship. I will discuss the environmental contexts particular to each set of works in more specific terms and provide focused contextual discuss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Where ecocriticism meets theatre in the era of the Anthropocene
• 2 Setting the stage for the material turn and agential bodies: Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker and Far Away
• 3 Setting the stage for the end of the world: Stephen Sewell’s It Just Stopped and Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling
• 4 Setting the stage for material expressions across planetary boundaries: E.M. Lewis’s Song of Extinction and Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila
• 5 Setting the stage for possibilities of collaborative survival: Jordan Hall’s A Brief History of Human Extinction and Miwa Matreyek’s This World Made Itself and Infinitely Yours
• 6 Conclusion: Anthropocenic theatre: a stage for living in the present and imagining the future
• Index