ABSTRACT
This chapter on the subject of frugal modes of storytelling talks about two theatre companies: Paines Plough and Forced Entertainment. Duncan Macmillan’s climate change play Lungs opens the chapter because, as produced and performed in Paines Plough’s Roundabout, this play is an imaginative feat of ecoengineering in the all-round sense earlier encountered in Home of the Wriggler. Paines Plough’s series of some one hundred and sixty play lets in the form of over thirty productions of Come to Where I’m From were conceived to bring new plays to as many people as possible. They are a collaboration of imaginations in production and reception on the basis of a frugal mode of operations and touring; moreover, some plays in the series are ecotheatrical in other ways. The third production discussed in this chapter is Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare. Here, an imaginative form of recycling, a substitution of one thing for another, also turns out to be another form of theatre following an ecological imperative of narrative, memory and frugality (cf. Chaudhuri). In the runaway performative warming systems described in this chapter, the mind-set shift needed for humanity to grapple with climate change is performed in microcosm.
