Ecology and Environment in European Drama (review)

This newest addition to Routledge's Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies series opens up a new, greener understanding of familiar works. As the first book-length ecocritical study of Western European drama, it contributes to a growing and lively discourse in theatre, performance, and ecology that includes, for example, Baz Kershaw's Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (2007), Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart's Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts (2005), and Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri's Land/Scape/Theater (2002). Cless is the first, however, to turn the light of ecocriticism back upon the earliest dramas of the canon, illuminating how these plays speak to the complex and multifaceted human/nature relationship.

Cless's book is organized chronologically, moving from the ancient Greeks through the familiar arc of European theatre history to modern and early twentieth-century drama, and while this strategy seems to reinscribe a canonical view of Western theatre history, it also repaints that familiar landscape with a greener eye, opening up for new examination works by Sophocles, Menander, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, and others. The author's embrace of current scholarship from classical, Renaissance, and modern European theatre history, environmental history, and environmental philosophy enrich this study, and his bending of those understandings toward new interpretations provides many lucid moments.

The book explores the ecological understanding of specific cultures in key moments of European theatre history, and relates those ecological perspectives, or constructs, to the dramas of the respective periods. The Elizabethan "chain of being," for example, demonstrates not only a cosmological and consequent social order, but also an ecological order, with implications for the ecological well-being of humans, animals, and land. Plays provide a window into the material/historical moment of their inception and production, and this book looks for the kind of connections that show how theatre has always participated in the human/nature exchange. Theatre, he writes, "deeply connects nature back to humanity, because it can combine all of Félix Guattari's 'three ecologies'—mental, social, and natural" (16). Each chapter undertakes a combined revisionist history and revisionist eco-literary analysis of familiar plays, making them new again for readers, as well as for those who continue to direct these works for the stage.

As an accomplished director with a long career of working to green both the interpretation and production of drama, Cless generously walks the reader through the way this ecological understanding has informed his directorial choices. In this way, his book serves as both a historical-literary reanalysis and a handbook for ecotheatre practice. His vigorous ecodramaturgy shines new light through old vessels, and in this way gives theatre practitioners new cause to produce these works. The director's vision in each chapter gives a practical purpose to the book and adds to the urgency of the topic. Ecological knowledge can, and perhaps should, drive artistic production, and the information and insights that Cless provides are powerful, because they answer, in a new way, questions that every director must ask: "Why this play, why now?" While eminently scholarly in tone and rich in historical, analytical, and ecological research, Ecology and Environment in European Drama might also be considered as the manifesto of a director with an ecological sensibility.

An initial chapter on Greek tragedy lays out the "nomos/physis battle within extant Greek drama" (17-29), not only detailing current scholarship in the field, but also grounding Cless's ecological re-readings in a line-by-line textual examination that gives the reader cause to think beyond the humanist frame that is so routinely assigned to classical tragedies. When "natural phenomena are continuously active parts of the plot, dialogue, and imagery," the "agency of nature" is evident onstage (25). Cless's thesis is aptly demonstrated in the next chapter on classical comedy, where nature's agency is, perhaps, easier to ponder. Aristophanes' The Birds becomes what Cless calls a "protoecological" educational treatise (30). Aristophanes' text is, by...