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.

摘要

借助表演性对气候危机的理解，本文概述了 2010 年代英国气候危机剧院（或“CCT”）。虽然之前已经写过描述生态问题的类似的戏剧调查，但本文所采用的方法在其对表演性的应用以及其对 2010 年代英国戏剧的特殊性方面是不同的：一个发生重大转变的时间和地点对生态问题的态度；更不用说英国是一个“第一世界”文化，每年的碳排放量很高，影响人类世的历史遗产影响深远。首先，我展示了表演性如何与生态批判问题和涉及气候危机问题的戏剧相关，例如探索 Ella Hickson 的石油（2016）在这里。然后我从几个方面概述了 2010 年代的英国 CCT：即它对人口过剩和儿童的焦虑的描述；使用“cli-fi”；表示时间性的“缩小”方法；人类中心主义和后人类主义的表述问题；气候危机问题的种族化；以及 CCT 中表演影响和材料成本之间的紧张关系。