ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the environmental shapeshifter once again appears in the guise of a natural disaster. King Lear, encountered in Chapter 1 as an important focal point at a key ecotheatrical moment in the early 1990s, leads the way in to a discussion of what happens to the environment on stage, in the guise of dearth, famine or hunger, in modern, mainly Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), stagings of Shakespeare’s most important dearth play, Coriolanus. Productions explored in this chapter include those by Hall, Thacker, Ninagawa, Chiten Theatre Company and Pearson/Brookes. The chapter explores what happens to early scenes in the play, with the aim of finding out whether the positioning of the environment on stage is shaped by theatrical economics (as represented in the balance between the star actor and the plebeian crowd); whether financial bubbles (runaway warming systems by another name) mitigate against the visibility of the environment; whether the weight of cultural tradition represented by the ‘Shakespeare industry’ muffles its voice; and whether a dislocation or disruption of prevailing cultural traditions is necessary to unleash dearth in performance. Such questions help to uncover different ‘mode[s]’ of ecological awareness.