Theatre as Nature Writing: What We See When We Look

From an eco-spectatorial perspective, every live theatrical event is an ecosystem – a fusion of production, reception, society, and the environment. In Timothy Morton’s phrase from Being Ecological (2018), live theatre is ‘an experiential space’. When theatre (whatever its subject matter) is recognized as ecological, flows of energy, matter, and ideas come into view, as the combined life force driving the whole. In 2016, Carl Lavery asked, of the relationship between performance and the environmental crisis, ‘What Can Theatre Do?’ As a keen reader of nature writing, with a long-standing interest in eco-spectatorship, I see parallels between theatre and nature writing. Yet, a nature/culture divide separates the two fields. In this article, I experimentally conjoin them, in the hope of seeing more clearly what theatre might do. My opening paragraphs set the ecocritical scene. A shift in style brings in nature writing as a practical experiment in spectatorship. I explore several recent examples of live theatre, as a spectator: the RSC/Good Chance 2024 production of Kyoto ; the 2024 revival of Complicité’s 1999 devised production Mnemonic ; Kae Tempest’s 2021 play Paradise (National Theatre); and the RSC’s 2023 Theatre Green Book production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.