Mid Sweden University

 In the last two decades, as the climate crisis has accelerated, and as our collective vocabularies for addressing the issue have evolved from the early days of “global warming” to the more direct “climate change” and the even more literal “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”, theatre, as both text and performance, has been making considerable strides in addressing the issue. It has done so by incorporating the environment, nature and climate – and cross-combinations of these concerns – as a primary theme, as we have been noticing in the work of numerous contemporary playwrights, companies and directors. It has also developed more ways of incorporating sustainability and responsibility not only to the plot of the play, but, also, to the very staging methodologies that are increasingly often curated with the guiding principle of reducing footprint and emissions, and generally offsetting the environmental impact of performance through the tools available – as well as formulating novel ways of staging, seeing and engaging. I propose that an incentive towards such developments is not only the capturing of the emergency, but, also, the imperative to provide, for audiences who are of course also citizens experiencing shifting ecologies, arguably with a degree of complicity, a site for reflection, community and, indeed, recognition and consolation in the face of crisis.

            The paper will concentrate on a selection of Anglophone plays and performances from the past five years which have prioritised the environment, and the non-human world broadly conceived in such ways, promoting active agency amongst spectatorial communities and highlighting the interventionist role of performance. I will discuss the function of theatre in creating interspaces, which may be defined as sites of possibility that operate within the dramaturgy of the play, but, also, within the site of encounter of the audience. I will especially concentrate on plays by female-identifying authors, who have reconceptualised the eco-feminist creative framework in the twenty-first century.