A large fish falls onto the stage in a surprising moment at the beginning of Andrew Bovell’s When the Rain Stops Falling (Bovell Reference Bovell2009b). This event takes place in the Australian desert in a climate change future when fish have become extinct. In combination with the sound of constant rain, the play with transnational settings reflects ecological fears of extreme weather and species extinctions. When the Rain Stops Falling is an intergenerational family drama originating in Australia that has reached audiences worldwide in more than seventy international productions (AusStage 2025). It demonstrates theatre’s capacity to materially and metaphorically encapsulate complex concepts about human interaction with the nonhuman world and climate change science.
Ecology and Climate in Theatre and Australian Performance explores how natural ecologies are centrally configured in the social and emotional worlds of twentieth- and twenty-first century drama and innovative theatrical performance. A focus on ecological content across theatrical forms reveals the escalation of drought, flood, land degradation and atmospheric damage, together with experiences of heatwaves, bush fires, rising seas, storms and other disasters. The book probes ecological and climate phenomena in drama, contemporary performance and innovative Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations/Indigenous) performance. It traces a twentieth-century paradigm shift from settler belief in human dominance of natural environments to the intersection of beliefs about coexistence in multispecies ecologies that prefigure human responsibilities. We argue that ecological damage and climate threats need to be understood as consequences of a combination of social and natural forces, and that drama and theatrical performance repeatedly enact entangled ecologies.
Drama and theatrical performance present worlds that resist, as well as reflect, environmental destruction and climate change inaction – nationally and internationally. Our analysis finds continuity over decades in the depiction of the social tension between short-sighted exploitation and longstanding, far-sighted conservation, a polarisation continuing in climate change debates. Drama and theatrical performance personify how human practices, beliefs and decisions influence and interact with ecological systems, dispelling the presumption that environmental and climate-related phenomena exist in a separate realm of nature, one measured only by science. Climate and other twenty-first century ecological challenges require a multifaceted social change in beliefs and in practices. Consideration of the scale of historic change makes it possible to envisage undertaking the massive restorative effort needed for the future.
While humanity is encompassed by ecological systems, we recognise throughout the book that entanglement is being highlighted with terms such as socio-environmental or socio-natural, or, more specifically, ‘conservation socio-ecology’ (Martin et al. Reference Martin, Maris and Simberloff2016: 6110) and ‘natureculture’ (Haraway Reference Haraway2003). As well, we apply socio-climate. Theatrical performance in Australia features human complicity in large-scale environmental change over a little more than a century. At the same time, our book encompasses innovative performances that draw attention to how sustainable practices on First Nations land called ‘Country’ have supported continuous cultures going back at least 65,000 years. First Nations performance illuminates a profound respect for, and knowledge of, multispecies habitats as it implicates the ways in which humans traditionally managed and cared for the ecological systems that they inhabit (Langton and Corn Reference Langton and Corn2023). Ecology in theatre is invariably political ecology.
A focus on ecology and climate in theatrical performance disrupts its human-centric presumptions. The ecology and weather of the world’s driest continent has become a national preoccupation for settler Australia – from the bush to the beach, from the desert to the tropics. Weather-related events that shape dramatic narratives function like protagonists in twentieth-century and twenty-first century Australian theatrical work, even as a larger idea of climate based on accumulated scientific data and measurement takes precedence (World Meteorological Organization 2025). Australia is well known for its unique fauna and flora, but it is perhaps less well known as a nation that is socio-politically aligned with, and economically dependent on, extraction industries such as coal and mineral mining, with one of the world’s highest rates of fossil fuel emissions per capita (Milman Reference Milman2021). Colonial settlement introduced wheat, sheep and cattle farming, which extensively reduced or eradicated ecologically biodiverse, well-adapted native species. Practices that harm land, water and atmosphere came to dominate, underpinned by ideas of human culture’s separation from nature. Although Australians remain socially and emotionally attuned to weather because of the devasting consequences of high temperatures, fire and flooding, governments have been slow to advocate and adopt sustainable environmental practices.
Ecology and Climate in Theatre places drama and theatrical performance staged in Australia in the context of the international repertoire and its scholarship in order to encompass the range of theatrical works produced in Australia that show awareness of, and resistance to, environmental exploitation and climate change. It asks: what do drama, theatre and innovative performance reveal about the social determinants of ecological and climate change? How do site-specific contemporary performers and First Nations artists radically confront orthodox relationships between humans and the biosphere? Why are climate activists – such as Australia’s high-profile ‘Climate Guardians’ dressed as angels at the United Nations COP 2015 conference in Paris – turning to performative modes to enact change and demand climate justice? In order to answer these questions, we explore the aesthetic, social, political and economic dimensions of ecologies and climates in theatre and Australian performance.
The book affirms that the performing arts contribute urgently needed emotional and affective responses to global climate conversations to assist people to absorb climate science predictions of disasters in the Anthropocene. Importantly, some theatrical performance presented in this book allows people to register in a shared space – in an emotional commons – a sense of grief for the immense losses associated with global warming, while also encouraging redressive action. Theatre about ecology and climate illuminates perspectives through its embodied and personified elements as it contributes to shifts in social values.
Studies of performance in the environmental humanities have gained significant momentum, developing into what is now referred to as ‘ecological theatre and performance’ (Arons and May Reference Arons and May2012; Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri1994, Reference Chaudhuri2015; Cless Reference Cless2010; Fancy and Alexandrowicz Reference Fancy and Alexandrowicz2021; Hoydis Reference Hoydis, Holmes and Richardson2020a; Kulick Reference Kulick2023; Lavery and Finburgh Reference Lavery, Lavery and Finburgh2015; Woynarski Reference Woynarski2020). The growing strength of this scholarly research can be found in the recent environmental analysis of American drama from the perspective of a national oeuvre (May Reference May2021). The performing arts are what Baz Kershaw (Reference Kershaw2007) calls a public gathering-place, providing a platform for ecological concerns. Recent ecological theatre confronts the emotional impact together with the performative instability of concepts of climate change (e.g. Love Reference Love2020; Watson Reference Watson2022). Climate change theatre can decentre the human, as Una Chaudhuri contends, a point that is expanded by Kirsten Shepherd-Barr and Hannah Simpson to revise the concept of ‘theatre as world’ and encompass the enormous scales of climate change through ‘world as theatre’ (Shepherd-Barr and Simpson Reference Shepherd-Barr, Simpson, Campos and Patoine2022: 325). Ecology and Climate in Theatre follows on from the authors’ Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene with recognition that local places are inseparably connected globally through climate (Stevens et al. Reference Stevens, Tait and Varney2018).
In contributing to public discourse, drama and theatrical performance usefully explore the ethical complexity of socio-environmental forces. As Elin Diamond argues, the destruction of nature needs the ‘gravitas of tragedy’ (Diamond Reference Diamond2014: 755). Yet the divergent theatrical genres considered in this book offer a multitude of perspectives. The presentation of information about, for example, climate catastrophes, does not solve them – and fear-inducing awareness may lead to avoidance (Tait Reference Tait2022). Moreover, influential theatrical performance is but one contributing strand of public discourse (Lavery Reference Lavery2016; Woynarski Reference Woynarski2020: 2), albeit one that is usefully indicative of the ‘imaginary’ dimension of culture in a particular moment (Kulick Reference Kulick2023: 8). This is supported by philosopher Bruno Latour’s theoretical and practical recognition of the value of performance for social communication and for enlivening an abstraction such as climate (Latour Reference Latour, Yaneva and Zaero-Polo2015).
Ecological concerns in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance were strengthened with outdoor performance from the 1970s, thereby suggesting that ecologies were not wholly sidelined into theatrical metaphor (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri1994) so much as pointing to problems that anticipate the approaches of recent climate change theatre. Australia’s official governmental record of rapid environmental damage dates from 1901 with a royal commission into colonial land damage, which Timothy Clark argues answers the question of why Australia in particular should have prominence in humanities scholarship (Clark Reference Clark2015: 116). Australian scholars are credited with formulating ‘environmental humanities’ (Emmett and Nye Reference Emmett and Nye2017: 3). They became internationally influential in interpreting the gendered implications of ecological philosophy and ecofeminism through Val Plumwood’s renowned critique of the mastery of nature, Ariel Salleh’s work on economic inequities and climate injustice, Freya Mathews’ progression of the idea of an ecological self to counter dualist mind–body thinking and Deborah Bird Rose’s work on multispecies ethnographies (see Stevens et al. Reference Stevens, Tait and Varney2018). Clark finds that Australian literary works contain large expanses ‘at the scale required by the Anthropocene’ (Clark Reference Clark2015: 123). This spatial capacity is evident in innovative drama and theatrical performance about ecology and climate.
Australia has two distinct histories of performance: that of First Nations cultures, which integrates environmental knowledges of species on Country into the embodied performance (Casey Reference Casey2012), and that of English and European theatres arriving with convict and settler cultures presenting the natural environment as separate from the human and agonistic to its intentions (Love Reference Love1984; Parsons and Chance Reference Parsons and Chance1995; Webby Reference Webby and Love1984). Crucially, First Nations artistry makes it possible to identify a different relationship with the environment and climate in an older, cohesive, philosophical belief system, one that sets aside human hubris and dominance (Syron Reference Syron and Casey2012). As Australian First Nations legal scholar Irene Watson explains, regarding customary ‘Raw’ law and ‘relational philosophy’ of the stories of First Nations people such as the Nunga, ‘we live as part of the natural world’ and use only what is necessary to ‘sustain life’ (Watson Reference Watson2014: 15).
Twentieth-century settler characters who battle the land and weather to exploit Australia’s resources are being replaced with twenty-first century characters and personae from culturally diverse backgrounds who face up to the reality of unsustainable and destructive practices and the need for biodiversity and climate redress, together with social and legal justice. Theatrical performance about ecology and climate encompasses First Nations beliefs, Anglo-European philosophies of deep ecology, and environmental ethics and activism. (The terms First Nations and Indigenous are currently used, and we use both to encompass the wider context or fictional settings.) Recent developments in Western philosophy acknowledge dynamic unfolding processes, such as the ‘new materialisms’ of Jane Bennett (Reference Bennett2010) and Timothy Morton’s (Reference Morton2013) ‘hyperobjects’. The argument for the non-separation of nature and culture in recent Western thinking can only be strengthened by the comprehension that the unities evident in the beliefs of First Nations traditional cultures come from ancient philosophies (Langton and Corn Reference Langton and Corn2023). A holistic ecological framework needed for the future is increasingly evident across twenty-first century Australian theatre.
Chapter Summaries
Theatrical performance about ecology and climate offers a dynamic way of understanding the human capacity for either a destructive or a protective existence in complex ecosystems. The chapter summaries below mention only some prominent examples from the wide range of theatrical texts and ecological performance included in this book. All serve to highlight socio-environmental phenomena. Even though this book recognises that the elements and phenomena of ecological systems are interconnected, each chapter focuses on a particular phenomenon, such as drought, flood or fire.
Chapter 1, ‘From Ecology to Ecocriticism’, offers a brief survey of how the scientific concept of an all-encompassing ecological system influenced the humanities and, particularly, perspectives in theatre studies that are relevant to this book. ‘Ecology’ and ‘ecological’ are understood to reflect how all the elements of land and weather supporting nonhuman and human species exist in an interactive and interdependent dynamic process. In Chapter 2, ‘Drought Escalates’, twentieth-century drama and contemporary performance replay how early settlers’ wheat-growing and mining radically altered Australian ecologies so that the socio-environmental phenomenon of drought increasingly prevailed. Historically, First Peoples were brutally dispossessed, and imported food crops destroyed biodiverse food sources. Plays by First Nations writer Jack Davis and by Dorothy Hewett, for example, as well as site-specific performance by Jill Orr, challenge monocropping and mining as they confront oppressive racial and species relations.
Chapter 3, ‘Endangered Lands’, focuses on drama that highlights a consciousness of ‘land’ and its unjust acquisition and degradation. But it finds an ecological unconscious even among settlers intent on dominance. ‘Land’ is put in quotation marks here to denote a contestable term in the contemporary representations of Andrea James’ (Reference James2003) Yanagai! Yanagai!, The Golden Age by Louis Nowra (Reference Nowra1985), and The White Earth by Andrew McGahan and Shaun Charles (Reference McGahan and Charles2009). Chapter 4, ‘Flood Damage’, critiques drama depicting the failure of twentieth-century engineering to forestall floods and protect homes, businesses and infrastructure. The ways in which socio-natural events such as floods continue to overwhelm human-shaped ecologies become evident in Eunice Hanger’s Flood and Mona Brand’s Flood Tide from the 1950s, as well as in twenty-first century works such as Alana Valentine’s (Reference Valentine2008) Watermark, Jackie Smith’s (Reference Smith2012) drama The Flood and Ian Meadows’ (Reference Meadows2012) Between Two Waves. Theatre engages with how authorities and victims confront raging torrents and toxic mud sludge.
Chapter 5, ‘Contaminating Atmospheres’, presents drama and theatrical performance about contamination of the atmospheric commons due to nuclear testing, power plant accidents and fossil fuel emissions. The emotional commons of theatrical work, however, offsets how fear of annihilation can become overwhelming. In Dymphna Cusack’s Pacific Paradise from 1955, a young First Nations female scientist protests against nuclear bomb testing on a Pacific island, while the older female nuclear scientists in Lucy Kirkwood’s (Reference Kirkwood2016) The Children must take responsibility for a damaging accident. Big hART’s landmark Ngapartji Ngapartji from 2006 reveals the deadly legacy of nuclear contamination for Pitjantjatjara peoples, with lands made uninhabitable, while recent theatrical productions expose the way coal-powered electricity and oil for machines unleash destructive forces into the atmosphere.
Chapter 6, ‘Water Restrictions’, explores theatrical perspectives on water ecologies, with an emphasis on wet tropical and dry desert climates. While twentieth-century drama points to the dividing-up of water sources through land proprietorship and racial injustice, innovative twenty-first century performance emphasises the interconnectedness of water flows and seepage. Water and its cyclic seasons are central to the emotional perspectives of Jarradah Gooragulli: Dance of the Brolgas from 2022 and Bangarra Dance Theatre’s SandSong from 2022, which also grapple with colonial injustice. In contrast, Melissa Reeves’ Reference Reeves2018 adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People depicts the industrial pollution of pristine water sources.
Chapter 7, ‘Melting Ice, Rising Seas’, presents performance concerned with melting polar ice caps and the intersectional injustices that result from rising sea levels and disappearing coastal ecologies. Australia and threatened Pacific islands in the southern hemisphere are the focus of performances with massive melting ice blocks such as Latai Taumoepeau’s i-Land X-isle in 2012 and physical theatre troupe Legs On The Wall’s Thaw in 2022. Theatrical works that stage the beach as threatened offer a mode of critiquing climate denialism, while other works focus on the geographic specificities of Antarctica.
Chapter 8, ‘Facing Mass Extinction’, examines theatrical representations of animal–human relations, pointing out that Australia’s high rate of mammal extinction is worsening due to climate-related disasters. The question of the most ethical way for humans to protect endangered species is scrutinised in Hannie Rayson’s (Reference Rayson2017) realist play Extinction, Nicola Gunn’s (Reference Gunn2015b) Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster and Fleur Kilpatrick’s (Reference Kilpatrick2019) participatory performance Whale. Animals are embodied in different ways in each work as spectators are confronted with the question: what are you prepared to sacrifice for nonhuman species?
The physical and material consequences of high temperatures and devasting summer fires are central to Chapter 9, ‘Staging Hot Weather and Fire’, which also outlines economic imperatives versus protests to save forests. From verbatim theatre that reproduces the words of those surviving a catastrophic fire in Campion Decent’s (Reference Decent2006) Embers and weather-changing fire in his Unprecedented (Reference Decent2023) to fire’s paradoxical capacity to both renew and destroy in Alana Valentine’s (Reference Valentine2012) Tinderbox about arson, fire remains a source of anxiety locally and nationally in Australia. Fears of hot weather, however, have a longstanding significance, including in Shakespeare’s drama staged outdoors. The performative annual event Refuge gathered participants to rehearse community action for a future of extreme heatwaves, pandemics and catastrophic fires.
Chapter 10, ‘Forms of Future Disaster’, outlines how climate change is depicted across tragic and comic genres. In particular, absurdist farce and futuristic cli-fi encapsulate national and international failure to reduce carbon emissions and prevent disasters. In Finegan Kruckemeyer’s (Reference Kruckemeyer2021) futuristic Hibernation, human hibernation becomes a possibility, while the tragedy of Caryl Churchill’s (Reference Churchill2016) Escaped Alone reveals catastrophe on a geological scale in the Anthropocene. Marrugeku’s innovative Cut the Sky from 2015 depicts ecological and climate damage as it also presents turning points in time over beliefs that support a sustainable world.
Chapter 11, ‘Dramaturgies of Dissent’, asks what inspires an artist or an activist to imagine ways to intervene to bring about the necessary political change. We suggest how the dramaturgical processes of performative action – which extend to dancing and singing in street protests – counteract fatalism with shared exuberant action.
Interpreting Perspectives
As non-Indigenous researchers looking at theatre and contemporary performance through the lens of ecology and climate, we are also mindful of Libby Robin’s critique of ecology as a ‘science of empire’ rooted in the politics of empire-building between metropole and colony (Robin Reference Robin, Griffiths and Robin1997). At the same time, we find an increasing respect for the highly developed ecological knowledges of First Nations Australians. Theatre about ecology and climate recognises environmental adaptation and, while accepting mitigation, argues instead for widespread amelioration and restoration. Thematic narratives about the ecological consequences of colonial agriculture are applicable to settlement everywhere: from North America to southern Africa, from India to the far reaches of Patagonia in Chile.
‘Ecology’ and ‘ecological’ may be more established nineteenth-century terms than the concept of the ‘natural environment’, which John Dryzek (Reference Dryzek2005: 5) recognises as coming into common usage in the 1960s. (The word possibly originates in the Anglo-Norman avirounement, meaning perimeters.) We are mindful of Charles Darwin on evolution and Alexander von Humboldt on nature as we focus on ideas of the natural environment and emphasise the concepts of ecology and ecological systems. To some extent, nature and the environment have become contested terms (Lavery and Finburgh Reference Lavery, Lavery and Finburgh2015). But even ‘ecology’ came into the vernacular in the 1960s, and use of the political concept of ‘green’ is attributed to Australian Jack Mundey and trade union green bans of the 1970s (Mulligan and Hill Reference Mulligan and Hill2001: 5, 264). Importantly, ecology is currently understood as a living system of constant motion that sustains and encompasses everything: from land to weather, from plant to animal species, including humans (see Chapter 1). The ‘socio-ecological complexities’ are manifold (Hoydis et al. Reference Hoydis, Bartosch and Gurr2023: 3). While climate has become synonymous with atmospheric measuring and accumulated data over distance, weather remains more local and therefore associated with cultural differences between geographical places. The Australian continent spans large differences in weather ecologies, from tropical to temperate, desert to rainforest.
Scholarship on the science of human-induced climate change is extensive, and this book draws on numerous interdisciplinary approaches. Some highlight the importance of the creative imagination in interpretations of physical processes – even in science (see Hulme Reference Hulme2022). This capacity to imagine a geographical location as socially shaped happens in drama and theatrical performance which ‘mixes actual physical landscapes and langscapes’, with the latter term referring to linguistic descriptions that can also destabilise place (Carlson Reference Carlson, Fuchs and Chaudhuri2002: 148). Place (Country) in Australia is physical, cultural and linguistic, in a fraught social space (Bonyhady and Griffiths Reference Bonyhady and Griffiths2002). An investigation of places and languages in Australia’s drama and performance is relevant to ecology and climate.
Ecology and Climate in Theatre traverses Australian drama and performance and the international repertoire, from Shakespeare and Chekhov to Caryl Churchill and contemporary theatre. A number of plays with Australian productions originate outside Australia. All theatrical performance invites reinterpretation from an ecological perspective (Cless Reference Cless2010), and we encourage artists to do this. This book refers to nearly a hundred plays and theatrical performances, selected for their national and international prominence and/or thematic content, and for continuity between older and newer works about a particular socio-environmental phenomenon and/or weather and climate. Of these, we have analysed a small number in detail. Together, the works convey a progressive paradigm shift in dominant values, moving away from social acceptance of colonialising practices to beliefs that support land restoration and climate change redress.
We invite readers to seek information about all the artists contributing to a theatrical production by searching the comprehensive, open-access website AusStage (Australian Live Performance Database), which contains records of Australian theatre and which the authors have researched and contributed to. We also draw on the important histories of Australian theatre, most recently by Joanne Tompkins (Reference Tompkins2006), John McCallum (Reference McCallum2009), Julian Meyrick (Reference Meyrick2022), and Maryrose Casey (Reference Casey2012). Surveys of twenty-first century English-language theatre about climate change include a number of high-profile Australian plays, such as When the Rain Stops Falling by Bovell from 2008, which slightly preceded a proliferation of climate change works around 2010 in the UK and Australia (Hudson Reference Hudson2012; Johns-Putra Reference Johns-Putra2016; Varney et al. Reference Varney2013: 26–32). Bovell’s intergenerational family saga features human depravity through child abuse and its denial as well as a future in which characters live with climate change. Accordingly, Australian scholarship is responding to climate change theatre (for example, Ahmadi Reference Ahmadi2022; Hassall Reference Hassall2022).
A competition held by the Playwrights’ Advisory Board in 1955 brought to national and international prominence the landmark Australian classic, Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, about seasonal labourers in the ubiquitous sugar-cane fields that drastically changed ecologies (Lawler Reference Lawler2012; Varney Reference Varney2022a). It was co-winner with Oriel Gray’s The Torrents, which depicts the historic settler switch from gold mining to farming. What is less often discussed is the judges’ commendation of Eunice Hanger’s Flood, about a flood disaster, and Mona Brand’s Flood Tide, together with Dymphna Cusack’s Pacific Paradise, which depicted resistance to atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs. The scope of these plays discussed in this book marks the beginning of a trackable awareness of human environmental damage. By the 1970s, ecologically engaged Australian performance-makers were contributing to an international, site-specific performance movement.
Drama and theatrical performance that deploy the word ‘environment’ to mean the natural environment developed from the early 1980s, and the great majority were concentrated in the youth theatre and young people’s theatre sectors (AusStage 2025, viewed 2022), which sit outside the scope of this book. This reflects a sense of responsibility for educating the community, and artistically important young people’s theatre about climate change continues to be produced. Although the book does encompass some dance theatre, a significant number of dance performances with environmental themes are beyond its scope.
Our account of drama and theatrical performance in Australia illustrates how physical surroundings are socially shaped, and how disruptive practices can drastically alter nonhuman environments in a short time. Drama over the second half of the twentieth century increasingly challenged social attitudes of dominance, and this paradigm shift in ecological values grew in strength into the twenty-first century. We find a way forward in the longstanding efforts of artists to make ecologies and climate matter.
Although dramatic theatre now reflects a population concentrated in larger urban centres on the coast, the bush and desert outback remain central to Australian national culture and feature strongly in First Nations performance. Rural areas and small towns continue to be epicentres of bush fires, cyclones and floods, which have greatly increased in number and scale in the twenty-first century due to the changing climate. Coastal cities with concentrated populations may have seemed less seriously affected until catastrophic bush fires in 2019–20 blanketed Sydney for days in toxic fine-particle smoke, forcing people inside, and the severity of the fires that year could not be ignored. Australians, like people everywhere, can no longer deny the unfolding effects of climate change on all aspects of their lives.
