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

• Published in: New Theatre Quarterly
• Main Author: Hudson, Julie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2012
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; Greenland; Hudson; Thorne
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x12000449; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X12000449

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.