Climate theatre as reversal agent: eerie art and the anaesthesia of capitalism

Abstract

This article examines short plays produced by Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA), using a lens from Mark Fisher who is living with us still (eerily haunting us, perhaps) through his two books Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) and The Weird and the Eerie (2016). We first draw on Capitalist Realism to examine our current capitalist predicament and its numbing of sensation that makes it difficult to envision alternatives. We connect this with Fisher’s conceptualisation of the eerie as an encounter with obscured agents or agency which is how capitalism operates but, as a theatrical technique, might offer a chink in capitalism’s armour through which eerie art can make a Real impact on capitalist reality. We then examine three short CCTA plays written over the past decade and consider the part that eeriness plays in their anti-capitalism. From this analysis, we broaden out to consider whether, in our current capital-induced anaesthesia in which it is almost impossible to imagine how things would work outside of capitalism, eeriness might be one of theatre’s most crucial contributions, offering not only a glimpse of capitalism’s obfuscation of causality, but also some concrete prototyping of alternatives.