Editorial 32.2

Abstract

There is a dialogue between different conditions of our time(s) in this issue of Contemporary Theatre Review. While some of the articles examine productions presented in a pre-COVID world, issues of catastrophe, challenge, and change run through a consideration of how these stagings work and why they matter. COVID may have exposed fault lines and gaps in twenty-first century culture(s), but the articles here show how particular concerns have been manifest across a range of theatrical media. Intersections can be identified across a range of themes – catastrophe, COVID, Catholicism, Cyborgs, and Copresence. All have implications on how reality/ies are articulated and explained and how the relationship between self and other is forged. Joanna Mansbridge’s focus on a dramaturgy of extinction in her examination of Kris Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing) articulates how these productions present a view of extinction through human figures sidelined and displaced by animated landscapes. The result is a contemplation of how extinction may not here signify termination but rather the end of a particular and limited singular idea of the human subject. Ultimately, the article moves beyond the dominant frame of a single narrative to look at more complex ways of envisaging what might be seen as ‘progress’ or evolution. Contemporary climate crisis theatre in the UK is the focus of Alexander Watson’s article. With clear resonances to how Mansbridge engages with the Anthropocene, there is a focus on how the pieces Watson covers have engaged with and sought to expose the tensions and anxieties in the wider public sphere about climate change. The focus on Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) is positioned within a wider body of productions that demonstrate broader connections to the issues that Mansbridge highlighted in her discussion of Verdonck’s Conversations (at the end of the world) and SOMETHING (out of nothing). The focus in both pieces on performative affect and material expense points to wider currents in contemporary scholarship engaging with climate change, environmental politics, and an understanding of the relationship between time, space, action, and human agency. Providing a consideration of the stage production of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour (2015), Lee Hall’s adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel Contemporary Theatre Review, 2022 Vol. 32, No. 2, 121–123, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2022.2068870