ABSTRACT
The theatre speaks continually of the ‘world’, but what can the earth tell us about the theatre? It is the place it occurs, and its ecological deterioration has become in recent times theatre’s concern and contents. There is of course an ethical dimension to this state of the world, the traditional relationship between morals and societal behaviour now being extended to include relations with nature and the earth itself. This ethical expansion brings with it considerable problems for politics, reviving as it does romantic notions of conservation and traditionalism, of rural retreaters and Utopian perspectives. Nature is a system of which the human is a part, an element one might say. Stability of this system and its complementary nature takes on deeper relevance than these concepts provoked earlier for here they are literally a cause of life and death. Care for nature implies, and is tantamount to, care for the human, as it is the value of nature for the human as a necessary condition for harmonious life that is at stake. It is impossible to avoid the anthropocentric in these issues, which makes them particularly relevant to a species-specific form like theatre. Unlike the splitting of imagination and production traced through Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium, there is now a growing perception that there should be neither a predatory nor a passive approach to nature, but a balance of extraction and transformation that protects both human and natural interests. Here is a ground where aims and practical actions are inevitably and continually at odds. It is clear from its inadequacies that science cannot be left to negotiate this responsibility, but the network of conflicting interests that would make up public discussion are disconcerting.
