Emotionally Uninhabitable? Dramatizing Environmental Destruction and Contamination

Abstract

This article explores patterns of emotional expression in drama about the human capacity to damage the natural environment and cause extinctions. I propose that drama offsets depictions of a physically uninhabitable environment with contrasting emotions so it does not become emotionally uninhabitable, and I discuss this proposition in relation to twentieth-century canonical drama and two plays about atmospheric and land damage. Dymphna Cusack’s Pacific Paradise from 1955 and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children from 2016 frame catastrophic events through the responses of women scientists and oscillating patterns of fearful and cheerful emotions and moods. Drama about land contamination from nuclear radiation and its devasting impact on First Nations peoples is a relevant forerunner to drama about global warming – an ironic development, since some twenty-first-century climate change strategies have accepted nuclear power as an option. Scenarios of an uninhabitable environment might be a longstanding part of political performance, but in these plays, a fear-inducing mood that begins to seem overpowering is often interrupted with humour and by characters taking resistant action.