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Learn more about the climate crisis as represented and explored in theatre through Vicky Angelaki's exclusive new essay. Subscribers can also read (or listen to) the following book and play content:
'Greening the Absurd' chapter by Clare Finburgh and Carl Lavery; Crown Prince by John Godber; The Heretic by Richard Bean; Extinction (audio version) by Hannie Rayson; Matt Henson, North Star: Act One by Mojisola Adebayo; A History of Water in the Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz
As we make our way deeper into the third decade of the twenty-first century, theatre and performance are displaying an emphatic, most welcome turn towards environmental concerns, broadly conceived. Of course nature, the environment, science and ecology have always been present in theatrical performance, since ancient times. They are factors embedded in the architecture of theatre: from the spaces in which it is performed, to the titles and setting of a play, to the thematic concerns that a given piece of theatre takes on. But they were not, necessarily, foregrounded in theatre research and criticism, nor were they as prominent plot priorities as they have become in the recent period. The environmental turn in theatre that we are currently witnessing is, therefore, urgently needed, as the planet itself is experiencing a crisis more pressing, arguably, than ever before.
As Clare Finburgh and Carl Lavery reveal in their volume Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015), to discover and discuss contemporary pieces of theatre that deal with the environment and climate is as significant as ‘greening back’. To reclaim the canon from an environmental perspective may appear as a daunting and perhaps infinite task, but, as Finburgh and Lavery show through an approach that is systematic and poetic at the same time, it is as essential as it is manageable. Their volume serves as a paradigm in its entirety, but the introductory chapter, “Greening the Absurd”, is particularly valuable due to its wide applicability and provision of a methodological approach, as well as a rationale for conducting a greener business when it comes to theatre studies. Finburgh and Lavery begin by addressing historical readings of theatre and performance as emphatically anthropocentric. Regardless of differing assessments of such matters, it is extremely valuable to appreciate the shortcomings of the medium as well as its attached scholarship, as Finburgh and Lavery accomplish here from an informed and dialectical perspective. Moreover, as Finburgh and Lavery demonstrate in their volume through their reconsideration of a seminal tool for theatre analysis and pedagogy, Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), it is important to revisit and reassess not only theatrical practice itself, but, also, the critical paradigms that have made a formative impact towards its understanding – all from a newly sharpened environmental angle.
As this essay began by stressing, the past and future of theatre – and theatre studies – ought to be thought of as a flow. This does not mean losing the historical plot; but it does mean appreciating that the environment has been, and always will be, present as concern and consideration; and, beyond this, as determiner. As the title of this essay shows, it is the climate that emerges as the key focal area of today’s plays and performances. First staged in 2007, John Godber’s Crown Prince provided an early indication of how the quietest of everyday settings could be combined with the dystopian to probe the effects of climate crisis. In the playtext, we may be surprised by how little is verbal and how much is visual, as per Godber’s stage directions. They emphasize movement and interaction with landscape and its elements as games of crown green bowls unfold. When spoken dialogue comes in, it gradually reveals disconcerting events that have already transpired and are continuing to unfold, all in the context of rising temperatures as a result of human transgressions, amply dropped into the dialogue. As, in the final parts of the play, time jumps ahead (eventually to 2027), it is revealed that the environmental crisis has escalated considerably, with an – increasingly radical – erosion of landscape and community.
In 2011, Richard Bean’s The Heretic brought to light the conflicts brewing in different ways of reading the research around climate change. Like Godber’s play, the text takes on a vast amount of climate crisis related information while retaining a humorous, if also menacing and disturbing core. At the centre of the action is a female academic, Earth Scientist and climate change sceptic, taking what the play portrays as the unpopular view to the climate emergency: that it is not sufficiently provable. She is receiving death threats for her stance; the institution she works for is unable to support her, an act depicted as not so much ideologically motivated as self-preservational in the context of a changing tide. For all its intricate and perhaps also contentious politics, Bean’s play is a frontrunner in environmentally-themed contemporary playwriting, and therefore important to engage with.
In a different geographical and cultural context, as well as playwriting style, Hannie Rayson’s Extinction (most recently performed as an audio play by L.A. Theatre Works (2020), also places a female scientist operating within an institutional framework at the centre of the plot. Here, it is a zoologist working to prevent the disappearance of a species through an unlikely ally – which is also the source of the problem itself. Questions regarding the ethics of science – and especially its sources of funding – are posed, specifically regarding the extent to which one might allow for morally dubious support as a means to an end. Can institutional structures ever be flexible, Rayson’s text, like Bean’s appears to ask, and is it ever a matter of genuine discovery and intervention towards preservation, or is there, by default, an agenda to be served greater than the individual and her best intentions. Moreover, as in the protective structures concerning the environment, in these gendered dialogues concerning women in science, Rayson, like Bean, appears to be probing to what extent the female subject at the core of developments is more exposed, and, herself, less protected and as vulnerable as the natural world that she seeks to preserve through her research, not least when the personal and professional blend in entangled ways.
In some of its strongest iterations, the theatre of environment and climate crisis has functioned to highlight concerns intersectionally, as in the work of Mojisola Adebayo and Sabrina Mahfouz. In her play Matt Henson, North Star (2009), Adebayo theatricalizes history, drawing, as the title of the play reveals, on the life story of explorer Matthew Henson, the African American Arctic expedition pioneer. Set in 1909, Henson’s defining year, the play takes on the historical figure, delivering him to a theatre performance. Other historical and literary figures interact with Henson, in the process exploring different forms of racial and gendered transgressions, both among humans, and directed by humans towards the environment. The play’s meta-theatrical element creates some humorous moments, but, mostly, establishes a sombre tone towards its wide-reaching subject matter, building links between humans’ scientific progress and the errant ways in their relationship with nature.
Ten years later, Mahfouz’s play A History of Water in the Middle East, formally adventurous, like Adebayo’s but in different ways, combines modes of delivery ('gig time' with lecture mode, for example), to return to the question of humans’ discovery and exploitation of resources for the purposes of cultural and colonial hegemonies leading to uneven financial growth and resource depletion. In so doing, the piece takes on one of the fundamental concerns of our time: climate justice through historical elucidation. Clarifying in its production notes that it is a work of fiction, Mahfouz’s text blurs the boundaries between play and performance piece to narrativize public as much as personal fact, probing concerns of identity and land, interwoven in individual and collective experience. History, like natural elements (here water) are subject to narrativization – as is their exploitation, the piece tells us. Mahfouz’s mixed narrative piece, including sections where she is vetted as a spy, captures the development of new modes of storytelling in the theatre alongside the elucidation of major concerns as means of engaging more diverse – including younger – audiences, while re-imagining the possibilities of theatricality, alongside the possibilities of history, and of agency.
Examples such as the above are indicative and not exhaustive; thankfully, the environmental theatre canon is growing as required by the dramatic times in which we live as concerns the climate emergency. It is a canon that is exciting, bold, experimental. In its probing of scientific fact through the growing displacement of the human at the core of the story (not in the sense of instigator, which remains, but of sufferer of the effects of climate crisis – versus nature itself) as an essential device this theatre stands to offer significant ways forward. These concern the undermining of anthropocentrism while, at the same time, recognizing that humans are, through their production and consumption habits, agents of primary significance towards the climate crisis. Whether we can take sufficient action – locally and globally – to work towards an effective management of the cataclysmic event remains to be seen. Yet, we are seeing, emphatically, that theatre is claiming the role it rightly deserves as a live art with potential for extraordinary impact in the public debate, in which it is increasingly pitching itself as an interventionist gesture.
