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4 - A Cave, a Skull, and a Little Piece of Grit

Theatre in the Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 4: This chapter argues for a new way of thinking about what an ecologically oriented dialogue between theatre and science might give rise to. Three canonical Western texts – Plato’s cave, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Beckett’s Endgame – are read as instances of geology. The aim is to show how Western theatre is not simply a privileged space for human society to reflect on itself, as is often claimed, but a nonhuman medium, a decidedly mineralized practice – the very thing that so troubled Plato and that has caused Western philosophy to remain so suspicious of the stage. Reading Western theatre as geology, moreover, permits a theory of eco-performance criticism appropriate to and for the Anthropocene. Where accepted models of eco-theatre tend to run into dangerous contradiction, practically and theoretically, by divorcing themselves from theatre’s larger ecology and history, this chapter discloses, by contrast, the extent to which the theatrical medium is always already ecological by dint of its occluded mineralogy.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Suggested Reading

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London, 1986.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘“The Climate of History”: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, 2015.Google Scholar
Critchely, Simon, and Webster, Jamieson. The Hamlet Doctrine. London, 2013.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, 1987.Google Scholar
Durham Peters, John. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, 2015.Google Scholar
Egan, Gabriel. Green Shakespeare from Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism. London, 2006.Google Scholar
Essif, Les. ‘Introducing the “Hyper” Theatrical Subject: The Mise en Abyme of Empty Space’. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9 (1994): 6788.Google Scholar
Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge, 2000.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. In Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, 2002, 156.Google Scholar
Knowlson, James, and Pilling, John. Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett. New York, 1980.Google Scholar
Salazar Sutil, Nicolás. Matter Transmission: Mediation in a Paleocyber Age. London, 2018.Google Scholar
Schneider, Rebecca. ‘Theatre of Bone’. In Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Reason, Matthew and Mølle Lindelof, Anja. New York, 2016, 147–55.Google Scholar
Weber, Samuel. Theatre and Theatricality. New York, 2004.Google Scholar

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