Cirrus@Austlit

'Mohebat Ahmadi’s Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene offers a significant contribution to the rapidly expanding field of ecocriticism and scholarship on theatrical representations of the Anthropocene. The book argues for the ecocritical potential of theatre and performance that foregrounds the non-human via diverse and thorough formal innovations that ultimately destabilise anthropocentrism. This argument is supported by close textual and critical analysis of plays and performances from various contexts in the Anglophone sphere. Ahmadi examines works by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall and Miwa Matreyek, through an ecocritical lens, finding within them ‘a radical rethinking of some of the principal assumptions made about human–nonhuman relationship’ (4). For Ahmadi, interrogation of this relationship is at the core of truly ecocritical drama, and central to the ‘Anthropocentric turn in theatre and performance’ (200) which the book traces and contends.' 

(Introduction)