Setting the stage for political agency and ecological democracy: towards an ecodramaturgical space in Far Away

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to make a timely intervention into the humanist bias of theatre by situating theatre within the overarching Anthropocene narrative and considering how the theoretical concerns of ecocriticism provide a platform for such examination. To explore these inquiries, I examine Far Away by Caryl Churchill, who has made a significant step towards re-orienting theatre from a human-centred focus to an Anthropocene-oriented focus. Churchill’s play provides a dynamic landscape in which all the entities and forces are figured with a kind of agency, taking their own side in response to the human-induced ecological mess. The agentic materiality of the play’s dark environment strikingly resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of ‘vital materialism’, providing an ontological approach to the political ecology of human and nonhuman actors. The paper concludes with a commentary on how a material ecocritical analysis of Churchill’s work applies to a nonanthropocentric elaboration of the world of theatre.