Reframing Humanist Tragedy in The Tiniest Thing

Abstract

Tragedy is defined by Aristotle as a self-fulfilling prophecy, inciting fear and pity in an audience through a hero’s error of judgement, or hamartia. Anthropocentric climate change may likewise be viewed in similar terms, born out of the limitations of the humanist paradigm. Yet in an age of climate catastrophe, how might theatre represent this reality without reinforcing the same humanist logic of privileging human suffering? As a playwright, I have long grappled with how best to dramatise climate change: a phenomenon that seems beyond the scope of human-centred drama. At the same time, the Anthropocene is by definition a human-created problem, and the emotional impact of our doom-laden future bears a tangible human effect. When choosing a form, then, for my own new play about this topic, something of a balance seemed important to me: a human-centred approach that might nonetheless recontextualise human suffering within a more earthly timescale. My resulting new play, The Tiniest Thing, is a middle-class Australian family drama that is rudely interrupted by the natural world. As a forest emerges from a pantry, long grass appears beneath the living room carpet, and dead birds begin to fall from the ceiling, the human characters refuse to see what is right in front of their eyes – until one character, Susan, begins to let the outside world in. Ultimately concerned with the politics of perception, The Tiniest Thing asks: is it possible for humans to perceive an objective reality, or do we always choose what we want to believe? And how might rigid ideologies become our own hamartia in the face of climate catastrophe? I view these questions within the context of bringing an eco-critical dramaturgy to my playwriting, primarily through my use of structure, contrasting deep ‘planetary’ time with the ‘human’ time of the unfolding plot, inspired by the Arctic Cycle plays of Chantal Bilodeau. By seeking to show two different realities at once, I hope to evoke a world on stage in which the same phenomena are perceived by the human characters in vastly different ways, reframing their suffering within a wider ecological context.