Re-place: performative landscapes as conceptual ecological environments

Abstract

This dissertation aims to integrate Irish theatre history into a wider discourse of the environmental humanities. Combining material ecocritical thinking and theories of space and place, this thesis contends firstly, that grouping the selected theatrical, radiophonic, and digital landscapes under the umbrella term conceptual ecological environments will offer a way to examine disparate landscapes thematically. Secondly, that this thematic amalgamation, with its emphasis on inclusivity, bridges the division of nature and culture. That is, it can challenge (at least on a textual and performative level) the human/non-human dynamic that has facilitated the collapse of nature in the face of anthropocentrism. I intend to read the performances (and the corresponding digital documentation) as a material response to the environment it depicts, examining, as Serenella Iovino writes, “matter as a text, as a site of narrativity” (“Stories” 451). In examining the environmental rather than the cultural in these plays, this thesis challenges the polarization of both.