Interruptive Activism: Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Political Campaigning

The introduction to this special issue considers contemporary climate activism around theatre, exploring why Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion might have chosen three plays and operas with nineteenth-century origins for the site of their interruptive activism (at the musical Les Misérables in London and Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser in New York City) in 2023–24. It argues activist disruptions of these events acted to reconfigure theatrical audiences’ relationship to performance, unsettling Wagnerian immersion and the theatrical contract characteristic of the proscenium arch theatre in favour of a more active mode of spectatorship common in the nineteenth century and appropriate to our own age of environmental catastrophe. The introduction further situates contemporary climate activism around the arts in the tradition of nineteenth-century campaign and protest theatre.