Film technology has become an increasingly prominent component of theatre design. In the practice of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage it may support what has been described as a ‘pizza style’ of presentation, in which disparate techniques and modes of presentation are used to disturb conventional ideas of narrative, context, and textual authority, while in the work of Motionhouse it creates a language of dance as circus. The longstanding collaboration between film designer Ravi Deepres and choreographer Wayne McGregor presents an alternative model, at once highly composed as narrative and based on meticulous research into textual evidence. In this interview with David Roberts, Deepres charts the evolution of his work with McGregor up to their award-winning Woolf Works, showing how a genuinely collaborative artistic process and attention to the graphic possibilities of different film technologies have transformed our understanding of the role of design in devised performance. Ravi Deepres is Professor of Moving Image and Photography at Birmingham City University. For the past nineteen years he has designed shows in collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Their most recent success, Woolf Works, won the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production and re-opened at La Scala Milan in April 2019. David Roberts is Professor of English at Birmingham City University. His recent publications include George Farquhar: A Migrant Life Reversed (Bloomsbury, 2018), and he is currently working on a new edition of Congreve's The Way of the World.

With a rich mix of theatrical material to bring to the table, the climate-change debate playing out in the public domain would seem well adapted to the stage, and has often been presented in docu-dramatic form, as in Al Gore's well-known film An Inconvenient Truth. But until relatively recently climate change and the science relating to it have been conspicuous by their absence from the stage. Early movers on the climate-change theatre scene included Caryl Churchill's 2006 climate-change libretto for the London Proms, We Turned on the Light, and John Godber's 2007 play Crown Prince. Since then, interest has steadily increased. In 2009 came Steve Waters's double bill The Contingency Plan (On the Beach and Resilience). This was quickly followed by Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett in 2010, and by three further plays in the spring of 2011: Greenland, the collaborative work of Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner, and Jack Thorne; The Heretic by Richard Bean; and Wastwater by Simon Stephens. In this article Julie Hudson focuses on three of these works to explore how the plays engage with the debate through the medium of climate-change science. As her article suggests, these British climate-change plays make an important and occasionally subversive contribution to the long-running discourse on the relationship between science, the ecosystem, and human beings. In performance, they succeed in turning a subject that has been overplayed for effect in the public domain into compelling theatre. Julie Hudson is currently a visiting fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Oxford University.