Contemporary Catastrophes: 2010s British Climate Crisis Theatre and Performativity

Abstract

With an understanding of climate crisis as informed by performativity, this article offers an overview of 2010s British climate crisis theatre (or, ‘CCT’). While similar surveys of theatre that depict ecological issues have been written before, the approach this article takes is distinct in its application of performativity, as well as its specificity to theatre in 2010s Britain: a time and a place that saw a significant shift in its attitudes towards ecological concerns; not to mention Britain being a ‘first-world’ culture with high yearly carbon emissions and far-reaching historical legacies of effecting the Anthropocene. First, I demonstrate how performativity is relevant to both ecocritical concerns and theatre that involves itself with issues of climate crisis, illustratively exploring Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) here. I then overview 2010s British CCT through several areas: namely, its depiction of anxieties around overpopulation and children; the use of ‘cli-fi’; ‘zoomed-out’ approaches to representing temporality; issues of Anthropocentrism and articulations of posthumanism; the racialisation of climate crisis concerns; and the tension in CCT between performative affect and material costs.