What are the challenges to theatre and the purposes of performance in an ecologically threatened world? Is there a future for theatre as an ethically and politically alert art through
environmental action? How might ecological understandings refigure the natural virtues of theatre and performance? Theatre Ecology gets to grips with such questions by investigating an eclectic
cosmopolitan sample of environments and performance events, in theatres and beyond. It proposes that performance is a peculiarly twenty-first century addiction at the root global warming.
Encountering this prospect head-on, it searches for pathological hope in historical theatre at the end of its tether and rumbles the contemporary paradigm of performance for signs of
eco-sanity. Recognising the future is always before its time, Theatre Ecology is a paradoxical tract for survival past the final ecological era.
