Stephen Carleton's The Turquoise Elephant and David Finnigan's Kill Climate Deniers have each won Griffin Theatre's national award for best new Australian play over recent years, placing these theatrically irreverent black comedies at the vanguard of new Australian works dealing with climate change and global warming. In order to lampoon the absurdity of political inaction in relation to climate change, we argue that these playwrights and their audiences are engaged in what Timothy Morton identifies as a shared ‘ecognosis' – an uncanny ‘knowingness' – by staging the conversation about climate change denialism via fictional characters whose own level of insight and culpability in relation to this issue spans the spectrum of possible positions. Both Carleton and Finnigan present Morton's concept of ‘global weirdness' and utilise the ‘weird' or ‘twisted, looping form' of ecological awareness as a structuring device, engaging as they do with absurdist comedy's time–bending loop form: characters lack logical, cognitive reasoning; they avoid the catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy’s dramatic arc; and are destined to loops and cycles of behaviour unchanged or unreformed by the narrative crises they endure. In this article, we argue that a contemporary iteration of absurdism is being developed by these Australian writers to examine a crisis that only appears to have one inevitable result. Each play depicts a distorted time signature – the future as the present, or the present as the future – and invokes the prospect of eco–terrorism as the solution to what Morton refers to as the ‘wicked problem’ of how to solve the unsolvable global crisis. Carleton and Finnigan each depict eco–terrorism as the necessary jolt to shake government out of the absurd torpor of inaction that has dominated official Australian responses to climate change over the past decade.

中文翻译：

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'全球怪异'

斯蒂芬·卡尔顿 (Stephen Carleton) 的《绿松石大象》(The Turquoise Elephant) 和大卫·芬尼根 (David Finnigan) 的《杀戮气候否认者》(Kill Climate Deniers) 近年来均获得格里芬剧院 (Griffin Theatre) 颁发的澳大利亚最佳新剧全国奖，使这些戏剧性的黑色喜剧成为应对气候变化和全球变暖的澳大利亚新作品的先锋。为了讽刺与气候变化有关的政治不作为的荒谬之处，我们认为这些剧作家和他们的观众参与了蒂莫西·莫顿（Timothy Morton）所说的共同“生态认知”——一种不可思议的“认知”——通过上演有关气候变化的对话通过虚构人物的否认主义，他们自己在这个问题上的洞察力和罪责水平跨越了可能的立场。卡尔顿和芬尼根都提出了莫顿的“全球怪异”概念 并利用生态意识的“怪异”或“扭曲的循环形式”作为结构装置，与荒诞喜剧的时间弯曲循环形式一样：人物缺乏逻辑和认知推理；他们避免了亚里士多德悲剧戏剧性弧线的宣泄；并且注定了他们所忍受的叙事危机没有改变或未改变行为的循环和循环。在本文中，我们认为这些澳大利亚作家正在发展当代的荒诞主义迭代，以研究一场似乎只有一个不可避免的结果的危机。每部剧都描绘了一个扭曲的时间签名——未来就是现在，或者现在就是未来——并援引生态恐怖主义的前景作为莫顿所说的“邪恶问题”的解决方案，即如何解决无法解决的全球问题危机。