The Turquoise Elephant is a bitingly-funny absurdist work, depicting the chaos of a future world rapidly succumbing to climate change. As the environmental disaster unfolds, three generations of women from a privileged political family watch on - from their hermetically sealed, temperature controlled home. But just how safe are they? It's a play about contrasts: grotesque privilege and dispossession, sanity and insanity, hope and fatalism.
Source: ABC Radio National. Interview with Stephen Carleton available here.
Presented by Griffith Theatre Company. Performed at SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross : 24 October - 26 November 2016.
Director: Gale Edwards
Set Designer: Brian Thomson
Costume Designer: Emma Vine
Lighting & AV Designer: Verity Hampson
Associate Lighting Designer: Daniel Barber
Sound Designer: Jeremy Silver
Stage Manager: Karina McKenzie
Cast: Catherine Davies, Maggie Dence, Julian Garner, Belinda Giblin, and Olivia Rose.
Produced at Brown's Mart Theatre, Darwin City, 8-19 May 2018.
Director: Gail Evans.
'In this chapter, we consider Australian mainstage theatrical responses to the climate emergency that has dominated the period from 2007 to 2020, both through its urgency and the absurd political intransigence it generated. The case studies begin with Andrew Bovell’s landmark When the Rain Stops Falling (2008), the most internationally successful new Australian play of the decade, before considering two threads of practice that developed in its wake. The first, more resolutely realist strand is considered via Between Two Waves (2012) by Ian Meadows and the more absurdist turn by a pair of Griffin Award winners, The Turquoise Elephant (2016) by Stephen Carleton and Kill Climate Deniers (2018) by David Finnigan. Bovell and Finnigan then try to find some hope amongst the wicked problems of the age of the Anthropocene in a duologue.' (Publication abstract)
'Rapidly rising sea levels and temperatures, erratic and severe weather: we have made nature uncanny, broken and unpredictable. In his book Dark Ecology, eco-critical philosopher Tim Morton describes global warming as a “wicked problem for which time is running out, for which there is no central authority; those seeking the solution are also creating it” (37). Our modern plot has dark irony and repetition, paradox and illogic. The Anthropocene is absurdist.' (Introduction)
'Rapidly rising sea levels and temperatures, erratic and severe weather: we have made nature uncanny, broken and unpredictable. In his book Dark Ecology, eco-critical philosopher Tim Morton describes global warming as a “wicked problem for which time is running out, for which there is no central authority; those seeking the solution are also creating it” (37). Our modern plot has dark irony and repetition, paradox and illogic. The Anthropocene is absurdist.' (Introduction)
'In this chapter, we consider Australian mainstage theatrical responses to the climate emergency that has dominated the period from 2007 to 2020, both through its urgency and the absurd political intransigence it generated. The case studies begin with Andrew Bovell’s landmark When the Rain Stops Falling (2008), the most internationally successful new Australian play of the decade, before considering two threads of practice that developed in its wake. The first, more resolutely realist strand is considered via Between Two Waves (2012) by Ian Meadows and the more absurdist turn by a pair of Griffin Award winners, The Turquoise Elephant (2016) by Stephen Carleton and Kill Climate Deniers (2018) by David Finnigan. Bovell and Finnigan then try to find some hope amongst the wicked problems of the age of the Anthropocene in a duologue.' (Publication abstract)
