“I’m talking about here and now”: self-reflexivity, history, and climate futures in contemporary lecture plays

Abstract Sabrina Mahfouz’s A History of Water in the Middle East begins with a self-reflexive passage that establishes the play’s peculiar form, a lecture. Her choice of aesthetic frame and discussion of climate change resonate with an earlier such lecture play at the Royal Court, Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion . Both authors perform their own work, transposing the lecture performance into the theatre, which, I argue, enables a highly subjective and self-reflexive investigation of political and social origins of the climate crisis. Additionally, both use narrations of the past to project future climate scenarios which rely on self-reflexive framing to gain credibility and are based on (or complicate) the prevalent temporal metaphor of the line. Ten Billion focuses on a global history of rapid population increase to explain resource overuse and the resulting change in climate. Emmott’s self-identification as leading scientist lends institutional authority to his lecture play but his account of seemingly objective and universal climate data is undermined by his reliance on a habitual Eurocentric position that cannot account for local difference. His projection that existing measures will inevitably fail to address the climate crisis precludes positive engagement towards sustainability. In contrast, Mahfouz tells her own story alongside her community’s account of British imperial history, challenging supposedly objective, institutionalised versions of that history. Her play leans more fully into the self-reflexive potential of the form, complicating such straightforward temporal extrapolations as Emmott’s and re-framing imagined futures from the margins.