Environmental Directions in Contemporary British Drama

 

Zümre Gizem Yılmaz

 

Hacettepe University

 

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Abstract:

 

Throughout history, there has been a tendency to locate the source of “irrational fear” felt for the natural environments, especially after natural catastrophes have destroyed human habitats. Although human beings have always found ways to control the natural world, with claims of superiority over other beings, their attempts to control have been countered by the “agency” of nature and other beings. As a result of anthropocentric speciesism, climate change has been threatening the lives, not only of humans but also of nonhumans, on Earth. Denying the existence of intra-action and trans-corporeality, human beings have failed to comprehend the co-existence of discursive and material formations. This kind of binary opposition can be based primarily on Cartesian understanding, which hinted at the anthropocentric point of view that emphasises the privilege of “rational” human beings and the subjugation of “irrational” nonhuman beings. Moreover, human beings, afraid of losing their “thrones” and privileged places among beings, have developed an irrational fear, or ecophobia, towards the agential capacity of the natural environments. Judy Upton, in The Shorewatcher’s House (1995) demonstrates that ecophobia is so embodied in the human psyche that at times it may result in broken relationships, social and family problems, which exemplifies the stress of new materialist thinking on the co-existence of material and discursive formations. The environmental degradation confronted in Upton’s play has a direct influence on the broken relationship of the husband and wife. On the other hand, in two other contemporary plays, The Contingency Plan (2009) by Steve Waters and The Heretic (2011) by Richard Bean, it is clearly illustrated that environmental and material formations act upon our discursive formations, and vice versa. The aim of the paper is, thus, to examine three contemporary British plays about climate change and environmental degradation in the light of posthumanism and new materialisms.

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You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words:

 

Pray for us, who once, too, thought we could fly. (Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” p. 193)

New theoretical studies, especially in the fields of posthumanism and new materialisms, have already shattered the image of the human shaped according to the Cartesian understanding of body and mind separation. In the light of these studies, humans have been denied their privileged position as the masters of all the species in the world, and the agency of nonhuman beings and matter has been acknowledged. However, these groundbreaking ideas have not found a direct place in the theatrical studies until very recently. Therefore, in the article, theoretical explanations of certain terms related to the posthumanist and new materialist studies will be dealt with within the context of how these ideas have provided a new outlook to comprehend the universe and our place in it. Furthermore, emphasising the importance of drama in arousing attention among people, the climate change atmosphere in three contemporary British plays, The Shorewatcher’s House (1995) by Judy Upton, The Contingency Plan (2009) by Steve Waters, and The Heretic (2011) by Richard Bean, will be analysed within the framework of posthumanism and new materialisms.

Through ecocritical insights, especially in the third wave of ecocriticism, the place of humans and nonhumans in the whole ecosystem has been questioned, and Cartesian dualism that generated the dichotomies on the basis of the Western discourses has been fundamentally challenged. Although through linguistic means binary oppositions between man and woman (patriarchy); between heterosexual and gay humans (hetero-patriarchy); between black and white (colonial practices) had already been discussed in discursive and theoretical terms, the material side of the human (body) and its relation to the rest of the world has always been suppressed. The whole concept and image of the human, thought to be the only “being” capable of intellectual agential of the body” (Gatens, 1999, p. 228). As the agency of nonhuman beings has been denied, they were forced to “non-exist” discursively whereby this anthropocentric classification opened a path for humans to exploit the other beings, including such practices as butchering and torturing. The humanist image of the human is primarily based on “reason” and “ration” accepted to be already innate in human beings; thus, all the other beings and matter that have different conceptualisations from humans’ have been reduced to “not subject, not human, therefore object” (Haraway, 2008, p. 175) status; hence, their exploitation by humans has been excused.

Additionally, Cartesian understanding of the “human” was used as a justification to use all the natural resources instrumentally since it indirectly supports the idea that humans are of the utmost importance among all the beings in the world, hence they are right in interfering with the ecosystem even though it is apparent that they are making the world a place in which human form cannot survive any more. As Chris, the Minister for Climate Change, in Resilience, (the second play included in The Contingency Plan), rightly contends: “Am I right in thinking that our task, our duty is to make this planet a place to live on rather than just survive on?” (2009, p. 107). This question is so crucial and awakening that it is significant to comprehend how humans themselves, through the anthropocentric practices and humanist chauvinism, turned the planet Earth into being hostile to the human life form. Moreover, humans are trying to correct their mistakes through human-made technology and other means, and to become the saviour of the planet, as if the planet can only be saved by “intelligent” humans. In Richard Bean’s The Heretic, this understanding is criticised:

BEN: (Knowing.) I wanna save the planet innit.

DIANE: The planet doesn’t need saving. The planet will be fine.
You mean you’d like to save the human race. (2011, p. 36)

As can be understood from the quotation, humans want to resume their “master” places in the world by saving the planet from the disastrous position caused by humans themselves. In addition to this paradox, this mentality is parallel to the anthropocentric ideology since the planet (nonhuman beings and matter inside) is seen as a passive entity, incapable of regeneration or agency, that needs the highest “being” to come and save it. However, as human beings, we need to redefine what human is and what their relationships need in order to achieve successfully living on the planet together with the nonhuman beings and matter. To find a new explanation for our place in the world (both discursive/materially and ethically), the new studies emphasising the intra-active materiality of the human and the nonhuman have challenged the concept of “a materiality awaiting inscription, with the body acting as some passive surface upon which culture might do its work” (Colebrook, 2008, p. 71), and new principles have provided theoretical solutions by displacing humans from their “privileged” status.

In her innovative book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Karen Barad summarises the Western ideology and discourse as such: “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter” (p. 132). Human beings have thought theirs was the only method of producing “knowledge” and perceiving the concepts. Thus, they did not include themselves in the material formations by discarding their material side through the body and mind split which “is a social construction that obscures the holistic nature of human experience” (Hayles, 1999, p. 245). As they thought they were the only creatures in the world holding the power of “mind” and “ration” they were mistaken in excluding themselves as the observer and knowledge creator. However, the concept of agency has been redefined within posthumanist and new materialist theories, and the agential capacity has been extended to the nonhumans and matter. However, this agential power of matter should not be misunderstood as it does not mean that matter has the same subject status as humans; “rather [its agency] emerges from its intra-actions in a web of relations in which bodies and environments are co-constituted” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 154).1 Therefore, it is impossible to separate human-nonhuman or body-mind, as every thing in the world is intra-actively connected to and influenced by each other. In The Shorewatcher’s House, Upton touches upon the idea of intra-action through the fear of Brigida to give birth to children in a contaminated area. Living near a nuclear power plant where her husband works, Brigida adopts a kind of fear towards the outer world and feels the contamination even in the molecules in the atmosphere.

Brigida (affectionately) […] He wants to have children . . .
Jesus, children, Nik . . . they’ll be contaminated. I try to
explain it to him, no kids while we’re living here, no kids
for at least a couple of years after we’ve moved away. […]

Nik […] but I’ve a room paid for, a nicer room with an unspoilt view . . .

Brigida The air won’t be any fresher, the dust will be the same.
Even if you’ve a clear view of the beach without the plant
looming up on the horizon, the air still won’t be clean, the wind,
the rain and every ray of sunshine will still be defiled. (1996, p. 62)

The fact that human eyes cannot see the intra-active molecules in the air does not mean that the air is passive and waiting to be experienced by humans, which is rightly underlined by Brigida in this play. Hence, the centre of the world is not determined by discursive (human) practices, just because matter is already intra-acting with other bodies than those of humans in its ongoing process, “in the behavior of subatomic particles, in the co-evolutionary dynamics that characterize the paths of life on earth, [or more chaotically] in the way the combination of toxic substances and ‘toxic’ practices produces toxic places and toxic bodies” (Iovino and Oppermann, 2012, p. 450). Thus the concept of intra-action has demonstrated that matter is not “a passive object of our linguistic creation” (Hekman, 2008, p. 92). It has an agency of its own, which cannot be reduced to the capacity of thinking alone; but rather it should be taken as the capacity to act upon something and to be acted upon. Furthermore, since human beings are also entangled in the intra-active relationship with matter, it is inconceivable to categorise humans in a separate place from the material formations. In their introduction to the edited book, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost clarify the condition of the human: “As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. We live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matter. We are ourselves composed of matter. We experience its restlessness and intransigence even as we reconfigure and consume it” (p. 1) just as matter reconfigures and consumes us in its own means.

Judy Upton in her brilliant play explicitly dramatises this intra-active bond in which both discursive and material formations take equal parts. The nuclear power plant near the house of a couple, Brigida and Conrad, influences their lives and how they act. Brigida describes her house as “[a] beach house with death as a view at Time-Bomb-On-Sea. And contamination” (1996, p. 65); hence, as a material entity, the plant even affects the social and marital relationship between this couple and their mutual lover, Nik. Brigida links her anxiousness with her husband, Conrad, to the material existence of the plant, which highlights the idea of the co-existence of material and discursive formations. She thinks that the unrest in her marriage will be fixed when they move away from that contaminated house: “When there’s no contamination, everything between us is clean and pure again” (1996, p. 78). Hence, discursive formations (products of “human” culture) are influenced by material ones, or vice-versa. In relation to this issue, Katherine Hayles (2006) states: “What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together” (p. 164). Within this context she further states that the tools and human culture are co-constituted. While the cultural needs necessitate new tools, the culture of human beings makes those tools essential to sustain lives. However, there is no before or after in this relationship; instead, it should be acknowledged that they are co-emerging. So, the fundamental dichotomy between nature and culture is disrupted as they are merged into one another. Concordantly, separating human-produced discourses from their material counterparts has also become illegitimate.

Another dimension of this dualistic thinking is reflected in the misunderstanding that what happens ecologically in one country does not materially affect another country. As all the molecules and even subatomic particles intra-act, sooner or later anything that happened in a country will have an effect on other countries. A land will not rise upon the ashes of another country devastated by ecological catastrophes. Nonetheless, the social and political discriminations between countries result in categorisations in terms of ecology as if they do not have any material bonds. Steve Waters exemplifies this ideology in his play through the discussions of two sides: politicians and scientists. Although the scientists, especially Will, assert that the ice melting in the Antarctic has a direct influence on the floods due to the rise in the sea level, the politicians deny this fact.

CHRIS. […] The thing is, Will, we’re not working for the
Government of the Antarctic, even if we do have duty of
care to the Falkland Islands. Tessa and I are the servants
of the Crown, we answer to the people of Britain.

[…]

TESSA. I talked to everyone, the emergency services,
the victims, meteorologists, and not one of them mentioned
the South Pole. (2009, p. 124)

The distinction between political discourses and ecological happenings is apparent in this quotation. However, even though humans are in favour of superiorising human-based structures, such as politics in this case, it is inevitable that material and discursive practices complete each other by means of intra-action. Similarly, in Resilience (the second play in The Contingency Plan), all the political discourses change according to the ecological requirements, and only when the acceptance of the co-existence of material and discursive practices occurs, a livable present is settled.

Likewise, in the play, humans pay more attention to the discourses related to economics rather than the material formations. In On the Beach (the first play in The Contingecy Plan), Will, a glaciologist, opposes his father who thinks that humans should leave the coastal settlement to prevent extinction of their own species.

WILL. How can we abandon the coast? The whole economy
is maritime and with population densities inland – […]
We’re not estuarine birds, we’re not lugworms.
We have technology, we have resources, we have
knowledge, we have structures, okay, we’re not Bangladesh
– this, this is the product of thirty years of your refusal to engage – (2009, p. 56)

The source of Will’s anger towards his father, Robin, is Robin’s failure to make his findings of sea level rise accepted by the politicians. Robin simply says to his son, Will, that “[m]y work did emerge, boy. And they spat in my face” (2009, p. 63), highlighting the condition of the politicians that reject any practices that go against their means of gaining more power, money and status. Waters criticises that to gain short-term capital, long-term plans have been ignored, as a result of which humans are now facing such enormous environmental problems. After presenting such a dark picture in On the Beach, Waters hints at the resolution of material/discursive problems in the future through the linking character, Will. Rejecting his father’s ideas at first in On the Beach, in Resilience, Will achieves the ability to see a complete picture of the world where all the practices (both discursive and material) integrate.

One of the main obstacles in comprehending the reciprocal influence of material formations on discursive ones is the keystone of Western ideology which presupposes that humans can “control” everything thanks to their distinctive “intelligence” in accordance with the humanist discourses. Instead of learning to live with nature through intra-active bonds, humans try to be the master of it by keeping it under control, which, in turn, has unpredictable consequences. Yet, ironically the starting point of the impulse to control nature is to prevent unpredictability of an “untamed” nature because of the “anxieties about an uncontrolled nature, about the monstrous results of letting nature have its free and riotous reign” (Estok, 2011, p. 44). The ex-glaciologist Robin, in The Heretic, underlines the failure of humans in understanding the fact that they cannot “control” nature at all: “The only solution is to allow it to find its course. The lesson they took from ’53 was more barriers, more dykes, more drains, more groins when the real answer is more marsh, mass retreat inland, a whole new idea of living” (2011, p. 55). 1953 was the year when his findings and studies were annihilated simply because they required capital investment to prevent any catastrophic event because of the sea level rise in Britain. In order not to spend so much money on this issue, the authorities thought that they could prevent the floods by “human-controlling-nature” mechanisms such as barriers or drains, which turned out to be against humans themselves. In compliance to this, Simon Estok (2011) underlines: “One of the constitutional moments in Western history has control as its key issue: the biblical imperative about human relations with nature gives Man (a man, actually: Adam) divine authority to control everything that lives. Ironically, the more control we seem to have over the natural environment, the less we actually have” (p. 5). Let alone controlling nature, humans do not have any control at all on their own bodies, as well. They can not prevent any material encounters on their bodies; so while claiming the possibilities of “control,” humans should understand that “we control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves” (Gray, 2003, p. 38), and that we are “[n]o longer masters of nature but inescapably part of its force fields” (Kershaw, 2007, p. 12). Only then can humans acknowledge and accept that we have limited capacities in the face of a network of intra-actions in the whole universe.

In accordance with the control motives of human beings (resulting from anthropocentric point of view), both psychological breakdown and the persistence of ecophobia (coined by Simon Estok) in human psyche are reflected through the ecological catastrophes. For example, in The Heretic, Diane, Palaeogeophysics and Geodynamics lecturer, describes her innate hatred and irrational fear towards nature (ecophobia) by favouring human-made tools over natural things which are thought to give pain to human beings: “Nature is hell. Nature is hunger, cold, dying in childbirth. I want electricity, a car, central heating, and I don’t want to have to eat my own pigs, I want to eat someone else’s pigs” (2011, p. 98). All the uncivilised manners are associated with nature whereas all the civilised and favourable ones are attributed to society, whereby a strict distinction between nature and society (culture) is made discursively. Nature, reflected as “a demonized geography that is to be both feared and despised” (Estok, 2011, p. 78), is seen as the source of all human suffering, and it is represented as full of revenge towards human species. Humans fear nature as if threatens our lives while the situation is just the opposite. Moreover, although human-made products accelerate the ecological disaster, which will inevitably influence human life forms and human habitats, humans fear the natural and material environments more, which is where the irrationality of this fear rests upon.

On the other hand, there is another group of humans who live in a paranoiac level in regret of human intervention with the ecosystem and in fear of the forthcoming “predicted” extinction for human species. In the Heretic, Ben, a member of VEHEMENT, which stands for Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, defines his aims in minimising his role in the “death” of nature as such:

We believe that the biosphere, earth, would be better off
without humans. We’re working towards removing human
life from earth by non-reproduction. […] I don’t eat, except
locally grown vegetables. And if I do eat I fart, that’s
methane, methane is a greenhouse gas. That’s why I eat
garlic. There’s compounds in garlic, yeah, that kill off
the methane. And when I breathe, yeah, I breathe in like
half a percentage of carbon dioxide, and when I
breathe out, yeah, ’cause I’ve consumed oxygen from
the air five percent of my emissions. (2011, p. 58)

The key point ignored by Ben is the fact that humans also have a role in sustaining the ecosystem, and the elimination of humans from the world would cause another material formation, which would end up with another intra-active construction. Therefore, human extinction is not the sole solution for the ecological catastrophes; rather, annihilating anthropocentric discourses would help us understand our role in the system.

In understanding our role, theatre, as the site for the application of ecocritical theory, is very significant, as well. Nevertheless, totally environmentally conscious theatre is a very new happening in relation to the fiction. As Theresa J. May (2007) contends:

An increasingly lively and nuanced ecocritical discourse in
literary studies has entered its third decade, but a comparable
discourse in theatre studies has been slow to take root.
Given that ecology is the study of the interrelatedness among
living organisms and their environment—and that theatre
is always an encounter between people and place—I find this
gap surprising. (p. 95)

The idea of a theatre dealing with the human-made disasters in the material environment directly, in other words “the possibility of a theatre which engages not only with an environment constituted by the individuals and groups participating within it, but also their dwellings, their social and natural landscapes, their artistic and political structures of communication – in short, their entire nature and culture” (Giannachi and Stewart, 2005, p. 27), could only be achieved much later than other literary studies. On this delay, many scholars agree, including Wendy Arons (2007) who states that “theatre scholars and practitioners have been slow to engage environmental issues” (p. 93).

Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow have been significant in creating a totally ecological theatre. Chaudhuri in Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (2014) states the importance of a new ecologically-oriented theatre by stating that “the alarming phenomena of climate change – and their implications for our habits of thoughts and modes of life – provide the contemporary conditions for a new sub-genre of theatre practice [, of which] [w]e think […] as an up-dated ecotheatre” (Chaudhuri, 2014, p. 2) while, on the other hand, Canadian actress, writer, and director Karen Hines highlights the fact that a play bombarding people only with environmental problems would not find any audience. Hines underlines that it would be a mistake to look for a full environmental theatre because all the plays can be loaded with the display of the environmental problems in entanglement with other representations:

I have always resisted the classification “eco-drama” or
“eco-theatre.” I would never describe my shows that way
myself—my writing simply includes elements that have
ecological components because, as everyone here has said,
that’s the reality of our lives right now. We don’t classify
Tennessee Williams’s work as “mental illness theatre,” so … .
It’s just a tricky thing to try to find a way to present these
issues imaginatively, in an entertaining way, in a poetic way,
and in a dramatic way that remains human. (as cited in N. Gray, 2010, p. 23)

In the light of all these discussions, it should be noted that ecological problems have been reflected in the theatre of past epochs, though alludingly, as it would be impossible to present the situation of humans separate from their surroundings. Hence whether it is called eco-theatre or just theatre, in all the plays there are always hints at the environmental factors already-embodied in human life, even in the plays of the past centuries. Yet, an awareness of global warming, which is a problem of today, produced a number of climate change dramas in which ecological breakdown is touched upon directly. Nonetheless, naming a movement in theatre would help people gain more information about the theory of ecocriticism and its application, as a result of which humans’ place in the intra-active ecosystem can be comprehended in its full meaning.

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Zümre Gizem YILMAZ is based in Ankara, Turkey, and works as a Research Assistant at Hacettepe University, where she is also a PhD student of British Literature. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2010, and her master’s degree in 2012 at Hacettepe University, in the Department of English Language and Literature. Her master’s thesis, entitled “The Illustration and Function of Epic Theatre Devices in Selected Plays by Caryl Churchill” was an analysis of nearly all of Churchill’s plays, researched in terms of socialist feminism, gender studies, animal studies, and Brechtian theatre. Her research interests include contemporary British drama, new materialisms, posthumanist studies, queer fiction, animal studies, ecophobia, technophobia and gender studies.

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