Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage eds. by Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh (review)

A landmark study in second wave ecocriticism, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd excavates the non-anthropocentric aesthetics of classic absurdist theatre. It also convincingly suggests absurdism's foundational relevance to contemporary notions of ecological theatre. Ultimately, this collection establishes a provisional starting point for rethinking theatre history in light of Una Chaudhuri's (and others) condemnation of drama's complicity in our fractured ecology by returning to the field that Martin Esslin so assiduously surveyed. In the seemingly destructive, meaningless terrain of the absurd, these authors (re)discover an illogic that maps the ecologies of human subjectivity and sociality in relation to a poisoned environment—one that our habits of usage, meaning-making and representation have all helped to produce.

Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurds primary strength lies in its enactment of an eco-critical perspective in relation to absurdist plays. Lavery and Finburgh establish a compelling revisionist critical stance that rests upon rich engagement with ecological theories espoused by Timothy Morton, Gregory Bateson, Donna Haraway, Jean-François Lyotard, Félix Guattari, and others. The contributors ask: how has (absurdist) theatre already engaged the questions and values of ecological (as opposed to environmentalist) discourse? And what have we as interpreters of theatre missed, given our inherited anthropocentric biases? Joe Kelleher, in his essay "Recycling Beckett," notably extends these questions to other modes of artistic production, charting the ways in which Samuel Beckett's affective environments have been "recycled" through landscape photography (Gerard Byne) and sculpture (Miroslaw Balka) to evidence a porous "ecological memory" across representational media. Kelleher's essay manifests the volume's underlying concern with the ways that representational histories overlap, interpenetrate, and infect one another, insinuating the seepage of aesthetic interventions across temporal and discursive boundaries.

Several of the essays attempt to redefine Esslin's absurdism as an almost-hopeful ecological tactic, rather than an ideological position rooted in existential despair. Franc Chamberlain measures an increasingly disturbed human psyche against the acceleration of technology and nature's absence in plays by Arthur Adamov. Here, mechanized and commodified symbolic objects (like pinball machines, cut flowers, and butterfly collections) increasingly colonize the activities and perceptions of protagonists to produce toxic domestic environments and social interactions. For Chamberlain, Adamov's theatre stages a salutary, irrational confrontation with our ongoing alienation (from God, nature, and one another) in an attempt to rebalance our damaged ecology/epistemology.

Carl Lavery pursues a darker absurdist ecology in his interrogation of the relationship between poisoned ideologies and polluted air in plays by Eugène Ionesco. For Lavery, the ecological problem lies in our (and Ionesco's) desire for transcendence. Turning away from an environmentalist critique of bad air that would seek to the fix the problem, Lavery suggests we ingest Ionesco's poison as a lesson against transcendence, that we embrace toxicity and the radical immanence that our laughter (at the plays) affirms as the basis of a new absurdist subjectivity—one that develops in relation to rather than in opposition to the material conditions of contemporary existence.

Clare Finburgh and Mark Taylor-Batty (with Lavery) also reread seminal figures of Esslin's absurdism: Jean Genet and Harold Pinter, respectively. Beginning from metaphoric deployments of landscape, flora, fauna, and domus, Finburgh, Taylor-Batty, and Lavery examine binary breakdowns (chiefly inside/outside), dehierarchizations of theatrical elements, and evacuations of linguistic certainty. These efforts illuminate the crumbling boundaries of the stable social sphere that dramatic theatre seemed to secure. The authors introduce an essential revelation of absurdist theatre: the immanence and relational being of a human animal whose flawed values and ways of thinking obscure the ecological feedback loops it has initiated (with atom bombs, DDT, anthropocentric theatre, and most insidiously global capitalism). Encased in narratives of individualism and anthropocentrism, humans foster a view of themselves that inevitably leads to...