An audience follows a park ranger into the woods looking for wolves … A young Danish prince contemplates a skull in a dug-up grave … A wheelchair-bound blind man spars verbally with the carer who is about to leave him … A woman with a deformed spine is murdered by a fanatical doctor who wants to dissect her corpse … A bald, cancer-ridden woman recites the poetry of Donne as she lies dying … Two pairs of couples in Regency dress dance a waltz as the lights gradually fade …

Chapter 11: This chapter surveys intersections between views of acting and paradigms of science, and addresses views of the human. The chapter begins with a brief historical overview, starting with Plato and Aristotle and proceeding to early twentieth-century scientists such as Pavlov and Freud. The focus is on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cognitive sciences and neuroscience, which provide the actor with concrete, material information about how body and brain work. This helps to eliminate misapprehensions about how different aspects of the self operate and offers insight into imagination, intellect, emotion, memory, and language, among other aspects of our experience. The discussion addresses the fact of actors as complex processes, inextricably connected to each other and their environments, and how the actor might utilize the findings of science.

Chapter 12: This chapter shows how theatre operates as a kind of cognitive prosthetic, helping us stage and imagine what we are not yet able to see around us or within us. Committed to embodied and extended theories of cognition, the chapter examines the relationship between the stories told onstage across the centuries and the shifting conceptions of the self and the other. Through a kind of wormhole between King Lear, the pageant wagon of the medieval period, and the off-off-Broadway theatre of today, the chapter connects the theatrical innovations around personation, or the taking-on of a character, in these different periods to argue that the theatrical conventions that set up the relationship between character and actor display a changing notion of the self. This shifting of theatrical conventions generates discomfort at first, as spectators learn to consume stories in a new way; and the discomfort unveils what we need to learn next.

Chapter 2: This chapter begins by observing that the repertoire of science plays is dominated by works in which scientific issues are the subject of the drama, rather than a mode of exploration, in symbiotic relationship with those of the theatre itself. This kind of symbiosis can occur only if the collaborative process is set up at the outset, so that the script evolves in concert with all aspects of staging and enactment – a method pioneered by Theatre de Complicité, under the direction of its founder Simon McBurney. Taking as a case study McBurney’s stage adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, the chapter explores the question of how consciousness might be staged, rather than talked about. Central to the experiment is the process of working with metaphor, both as literary conceit and as an approach to theatrical realization.

Chapter 3: This chapter charts the intersections between theatre and science and explores how experience and experiment are interlinked in each domain. Looking at three key scientific ideas and theatrical moments, the chapter draws out contextual aspects of the science that reflect the scientific concerns of their moments. Exploring first a play from the early years of the recent resurgence in the interest in theatre and science, the chapter investigates how the biological and medical sciences with their obvious link to genetic testing and human experience are represented, and moves on to consider how science, gender, and life become crystal clear in early twenty-first century theatre. It concludes by looking at how theatre is shaped by the experience of climate change and its science in the 2010s through two very different plays, one a staged lecture and the other a production whose deliberate excess results in an expansive ‘epic’ theatrical form that appears to take precedence over the science.

Chapter 1: This chapter starts by tracing the development of objectivity in both science and theatre through classical and early modern theatre, in which it was a fairly unimportant epistemic virtue, into the late eighteenth century where objectivity begins to emerge through the idealizations of ‘Truth-to-Nature’ in biology and in literary and theatrical Romanticism. Although some conceptions of scientific objectivity and observation treat these as virtuous by the extent to which they rise above personal or historical bias, the practice and theory of both objectivity and observation have changed through history. Drawing on the work of Lorraine Daston and others, the chapter goes on to show that the emergence of modern (‘mechanical’) objectivity, and a new relationship with observation, mark both nineteenth-century science and Naturalist theatre. Making the comparison explains some of the antitheatrical claims of Naturalist authors and the contradictions of Naturalist practice. As nineteenth-century ‘objectivity’ is superseded, so the theatrical figuration of science gravitates towards areas of ambiguity, chaos, and indeterminacy.

Chapter 7: This chapter looks at two recent performances, Arinzé Kene’s Misty (2018) and Neil Bartlett’s The Plague (2017), which depict cities under siege. Contagions, figurative and literal, spread among residents, destroying lives and tearing the fabric of the urban environment. In both productions the city is at war with itself, via the circulation of disease that passes between infrastructure and people. Focusing on these plays and their productions, this chapter explores how ideas of contagion are deployed to capture a sense of intangible danger spreading throughout the city, especially London, and how this formulation finds impetus in contemporary discourse that mobilizes the risk of economic, cultural, and political contagion as part of a divisive rhetoric. The chapter also considers how we might understand these forms of representation and discourse in light of the prevalence of ‘pathogenic performativity’, in which the language and phantasmagoria of contagion are deployed as tactics of governance, with theatre enabling its exposure or perpetuation.

Chapter 14: This chapter explores advances in stage technology from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that profoundly shaped and influenced both theatrical performance and playwriting, particularly in the domain of stage lighting. Opening with the mid-twentieth-century example of Josef Svoboda, the chapter then goes back to the invention of limelight and its behind-the-scenes manipulation, which leads into a consideration of other kinds of technologically oriented off-stage labor. The discussion then turns to theatrical patents of the late nineteenth century, building on recent scholarship on backstage labor with a view to considering how scientific, technological, and theatrical work merge and often share this status of invisibility. The conclusion proposes a model for approaching and teaching theatre history based on a greater recognition of the role of technology, especially in our understanding of ‘science on stage’.

Chapter 6: This chapter discusses how, as scientific medicine gained ascendancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theatre became an important site for the examination of scientific medicine’s aspirations, achievements, limitations, and dangers. Early twentieth-century plays celebrated the pioneers of modern disease research and their accomplishments, while later twentieth- and early twenty-first century plays display a growing critique of scientific medicine and its conception of the body as an object of medical knowledge. David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys considers the human and ethical stakes of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus addresses the historical objectification of anomalous bodies. Margaret Edson’s Wit, given extensive discussion here, explores the conflict between scientism and subjectivity in the context of the modern research hospital. The medium of theatre is central to these dramatic critiques; medical science may formulate the human body as an object of knowledge, but theatre’s bodies look back in the midst of their display.

Chapter 8: This chapter analyzes the legacy and influence of the diagnostic gaze in contemporary British theatre, examining how theatre can offer a site to negotiate the complex dynamic between psychiatric institutions and the experiences of patients. Contemporary psychiatry has overseen a vast expansion in the categorization of mental illness. Mental disorders can be identified and ascribed to individual patients in an act of diagnosis that signals mental illness as a ‘performative malady’. Alongside reflecting shifts in the etiology of mental disorder (increasingly focused upon a biomedical model), the speech-act of diagnosis has implications for the legal status and care of the patient. Analyzing works such as Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, this chapter suggests how theatre can offer a reimagination of diagnosis by situating and troubling the role of the psychiatric user.

Chapter 9: This chapter begins by noting that as science has become more interdisciplinary and recognized as a form of contingent knowledge circulated across cultural fields, devising has emerged as a suitable method for creating performances with scientific content and themes. By virtue of its multivocality (involving a number of authors), its multimodal forms of storytelling and address (through language, dance, physicalization, digital media, installation and site-specific environments, and the like), and its presentational modes, devised performance can often render scientific ideas performative, capturing not just what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’ and how they disseminate in the public understanding. Across scientific fields that are increasingly interrelated, devised performance provides new ways to move beyond merely conveying scientific ideas, choosing instead to invite spectators actively to map domains of knowledge and construct ideas that are constantly in transit.

Chapter 10: This chapter covers a broad range of practices, from science public engagement events to collaborations between artists and scientists, theatre for young people, drama education initiatives, and global activism projects. Several case studies are examined: first, examples of exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations focusing on Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and on public autopsy demonstrations as well; second, arts-science collaborations, known as ‘sci-art,’ with reference particularly to the work of Y Touring; and third, theatre and activism in relation to climate change, as exemplified by Climate Change Theatre Action project. The discussion is framed within the author’s own experience as a practitioner working at the boundaries of theatre and science.

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.