‘If You Want to Be Green Hold Your Breath’: Climate Change in British Theatre

Abstract

With a rich mix of theatrical material to bring to the table, the climate-change debate playing out in the public domain would seem well adapted to the stage, and has often been presented in docu-dramatic form, as in Al Gore's well-known film An Inconvenient Truth. But until relatively recently climate change and the science relating to it have been conspicuous by their absence from the stage. Early movers on the climate-change theatre scene included Caryl Churchill's 2006 climate-change libretto for the London Proms, We Turned on the Light, and John Godber's 2007 play Crown Prince. Since then, interest has steadily increased. In 2009 came Steve Waters's double bill The Contingency Plan (On the Beach and Resilience). This was quickly followed by Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett in 2010, and by three further plays in the spring of 2011: Greenland, the collaborative work of Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne; The Heretic by Richard Bean; and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. In this article Julie Hudson focuses on three of these works to explore how the plays engage with the debate through the medium of climate-change science. As her article suggests, these British climate-change plays make an important and occasionally subversive contribution to the long-running discourse on the relationship between science, the ecosystem, and human beings. In performance, they succeed in turning a subject that has been overplayed for effect in the public domain into compelling theatre. Julie Hudson is currently a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.

Climate change in literature and literary studies: From cli‐fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism

“…150 Ecocritical accounts of climate change have tended to focus on fiction to the detriment of drama and poetry. The main exception is Hudson, 151 who provides a comprehensive survey of climate change theater. Also of note is Solnick, 152 who briefly mentions The Contingency Plan 92 and Earthquakes in London 94 as representations of the pessimism that can result from society's inability to act on climate change, and Woolley 153 who references Ten Billion 101 before going on to discuss filmic representations of climate change.…”

Pregnant Pain and Power

“…This amalgamation of bodily and mental challenges such as fear and pain, as well as attendant social expectations during pregnancy are central to Earthquakes in London. The play has often been placed in the category of climate change fiction or cli-fi plays (see, for example, Angelaki 2017; Barleet 2020;Billington 2010;Bottoms 2012;Hudson 2012) and has been called a "big, epic, expansive play about climate change, corporate corruption, fathers and children" (Billington 2010)a description from which pregnancy or motherhood are notably absent. Instead, my analysis focuses on the protagonist Freya's pregnancy and her struggle in a patriarchal society.…”