This chapter engages with the process of greening the theatrical canon by taking on the example of a significant play within the Ibsen oeuvre and within naturalism more broadly, Rosmersholm. As this chapter contends, productions such as those that Rosmersholm received at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London in 2019, adapted by the playwright Duncan Macmillan and directed by Ian Rickson, can serve well as paradigms for how the greening of the canon can work in practice, and how, similarly, we might recalibrate our critical reading to allow environmental concerns to emerge as primary while, at the same time, recognizing these as profoundly intertwined with issues relating to community, justice, politics, and social progress.
This article reflects on the sociopolitical, cultural, and health landscape(s) of our current moment in time, addressing how intersecting crises have delivered us to an unprecedented moment for drama, theatre, and performance. As communities across the world have had to dispense with staples of everyday life – attending live theatre performances being one of these –, so art, in all its forms, has never been more significant in its capacity to bring us together, even if modes of togetherness have shifted in their referentiality and locationality. As the article proposes, we need to take an intuitive approach to the appreciation of how our ecologies – in their broadest iteration – have been impacted and realigned by the COVID-19 pandemic in such ways that we can expect that our future scholarship(s) on plays, place, and landscape will and, indeed, ought to reflect this experience. Dialogues on theatre and environment, which are already intersectional, are now receiving yet another focusing lens through the pandemic.The article also suggests that our understandings of how our ecologies have been adapted invite a consideration of new modes of engaging with the environment in our discourses – and of the very term itself and what it might encompass – and new economies in calibrating our discourses to reflect our radically redistributed individual and collective experiences. The text offers examples of categories that emerge particularly strongly where spatial liminality is key; in so doing, it asserts that in-betweenness is a central element towards understanding our contemporary role and responsibilities: from collapsing binaries (environment/economy) to the unmoored experience of our times.
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