Contemporary Theatrical Landscapes: The Legacy of Romanticism in two examples of contemporary Australian Gothic drama

Abstract

At this time in history, climate change predicts that we are once again dwarfed by nature. Nature is as Massey (2008) suggests, understood as the classic foundations for our contemplation of place and our fascinations with belonging to place. As creative writers, artists and scholars respond to escalating temperatures, rising sea levels and natural disasters, on a daily basis, the threat of climate change events loom large in the contemporary imagination. Humankind’s pride in domination over all things natural is being put to the test, as we begin to anticipate the terrifying spectacle of our own damnation. From an ecological and eco-critical perspective, climate change may be considered, as the contemporary ‘abomination’ as it poses both a moral and a psychological paradox for us all. It is not an hallucinatory fantasy, nor is it a social pathology. Contemporary Australian Gothic drama explores the paradoxical relationship between perceptions of what is absent and what is present, between past and future, between climate, nature and disappearing landscapes and geographies. It is within this paradox of perception that Australian Gothic drama responds to literary legacies of Romanticism as we ‘lament the loss of spiritual connections’ to nature (Bate 1991: 17). This paper discusses the environmental and eco-critical themes embedded in two of my theatrical works, Dust 2016 and Salvation 2013, in which notions of evil in the Romantic sense are discovered in the ecologies of landscape, place and space from which we as humans are, in turn, becoming alienated.