Climate Fiction(s) #7

Looking at three recent plays produced over the past fifteen years, this seminar analyses the use of fiction to portray the collective and personal struggles involved in making sense of and living with the environmental crisis on the contemporary British stage. Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs (2011), Dawn King’s The Trials (2022), and Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming (2024) collectively offer insight into the evolution of contemporary British climate theatre over more than a decade. While differing markedly in scale, temporality, political imagination, and emotional register, all three plays seek to render the abstract scale of ecological catastrophe emotionally and theatrically intelligible. Taken together, they chart a trajectory from private eco-anxiety (Lungs), to collective accountability and climate justice (The Trials), to historical continuity and cautious hope (The Beautiful Future Is Coming).

This seminar examines how these works reflect changing cultural responses to the ecological crisis in Britain from the early 2010s to the mid-2020s, while also turning the multiple dimensions of climate temporality into theatrical form, from non-linearity and delayed causality to intergenerationality and the collapse of progressive futurity. As the future of humanity appears not only uncertain but increasingly threatened, and as our cognitive, ethical, and emotional capacities struggle to comprehend the immensity of the issue at stake, eco-theatre frequently departs from, while also reworking, the conventions of the well-made play. In doing so, it explores fragmented, multiple, or indeterminate temporalities that challenge—and at times subvert—the linearity of dramatic time. Taken together, these plays provide a sufficiently diverse and representative framework for examining how ecological rupture is translated into dramatic eco-fiction through various forms of fracture, dislocation and temporal disruption, as they engage with the ambivalent and often contradictory responses elicited by the broken promise of a liveable planet. Because eco-anxiety complicates future planning and projection, Lungs abandons conventional realism in favour of broken dialogue and narrative structures, exploring the erosion of individual decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Through a dramatic framework of retrospective judgment, The Trials moves away from naturalistic conventions, employing speculative fiction to encourage critical reflection on the unprecedented challenges that decision-making in criminal justice faces in the context of intertwined collective responsibility for global warming and ecological collapse. As neither the beginning nor the end of ecological catastrophe can be clearly determined, The Beautiful Future Is Coming rejects temporal unity altogether. Instead, it follows three interwoven narrative strands unfolding across different historical periods, relying on the echoes between the women in each timeline and their shared concerns about what kind of future the next generations will inherit to ask what it means to bring new life into a collapsing world.

Drawing from these observations, the seminar argues that the staging of emotional dysregulation, of cognitive dissonance and of the dysfunction of executive processes under the threat of environmental breakdown encourages formal experimentation in contemporary British theatre. By dramatising forms of decision paralysis – the inability to make choices under conditions of uncertainty – and execution paralysis – the inability to translate intentions, commitments, or decisions into sustained action due to emotional overload, anxiety, or anticipatory grief – these works demonstrate how climate fiction explores functional disruption, climate distress, and slow violence – defined as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction dispersed across time and space” (Nixon, 2011) – in a way that opens up new directions in contemporary British playwriting. In doing so, they develop dramatic forms capable of responding to unprecedented historical conditions and to the challenge identified by Donna Haraway of learning to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016).

Solange Ayache is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and English as a Foreign Language at the Graduate School of Teaching and Education (INSPE de Paris), Sorbonne University, and a member of the research centre Voix Anglophones : Littérature et Esthétique (VALE, UR 4085), where she co-leads a seminar series on “Theatre and Youth in the UK” with Aloysia Rousseau. Her research focuses on contemporary British theatre and performance, adopting an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the Medical and Environmental Humanities (ecotheatre, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, disability studies, trauma studies, care ethics, and mental health) as well as in the intersections between literature, performance, and the sciences (neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and quantum physics). She is particularly interested in how urgent questions concerning the state of the world, the brain, the body, and embodied perception are represented in theatre, dramatic literature, and spoken word. Her
PhD dissertation, entitled “In-Yer-Head Theatre: Staging the Mind in Contemporary British
Drama. Towards a Quantum Psychopoetics of the Stage” (University of Paris-Sorbonne and
University of Sheffield, 2017), analysed a range of theatrical experiments engaging with mental illness and the representation of cognitive processes on stage. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on playwrights and theatre-makers such as Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, Nick Payne, Simon Stephens, and Simon McBurney, among others. She is also interested in innovative performance practices and cross-media works addressing these issues in activist and/or educational contexts. Her other research interests include gender studies, children’s literature and theatre, drama in education, and neurodiversity in the classroom.