Amid composting mounds of academic work that offer ‘Beckett and’ more or less anything, this gathering offers ecological responses to Beckett. The book emerges from the International Federation for Theatre Research and includes an unusually large and diverse array of contributors. Predominantly addressed to theatre, the last third of the book is devoted to Happy Days. Its theatrical exemplar, prominent on the cover, and subject of more than one essay, is Sarah Jane Scaife’s notable production of Leathanta Sona, Mícheal Ó Chongaile’s translation of Happy Days. The book’s most engaging features are the rhizomatic short essays that puncture it. These ‘pithy pieces’ archive both the global reach of environmental collapse and Beckettian theatre-making in the ruins.

The obvious problem is that Beckett’s work is not ecological, far less activist, in any literal or intentional way. Beckett’s work appears prescient, more than merely or even unconsciously aware of emerging environmental catastrophes. But this does not quite bring Beckett into alignment with ecopoetics. The editors nevertheless propose to ‘scrutinize ecology in the crosshairs of the Anthropocene’. The book takes a brisk look at Beckett’s dark ecology, his dust, and various metaphorical ecologies of collaboration, culture, and language. Geographical ecologies emerge in translations of Beckett’s work from Japan to Galway, from Chile to Algeria, within and across media ecosystems. There are fascinating glimpses of adaptations of Beckett, such as ‘eight Hamms on wheelchairs, but it was not Hamm any more, it was Abdelaziz Bouteflika’. ‘Working-class and Anglo-Irish accents’ in Walter Asmus’s Godot in the 1980s are briefly mentioned, but the book mostly avoids confrontation with the class violence of Anthropocene capitalism. As Hamm might say, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.

Amid the diversity of perceptive commentaries, there are salient reminders of Beckett’s own productions, such as ‘the stone’ in Beckett’s Schiller production of Godot. Beckett’s abandoned road trip into the Wicklow mountains offers an intriguing glimpse, too, of Beckett’s alienation from nature. Within the widespread recognition that Beckett’s work was not as apolitical as once claimed, there is nevertheless an important sense in which it was not explicitly political. Beckett dramatized failures of agency rather than strategies for political transformation. It may be that Beckett’s work articulates an acute sense of not quite going on in the mud of ecological ruins. But it is salutary to recognize that Beckett also lived and worked through the Vietnam War years, the years of the Prague Spring, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and indeed the years of the Troubles in the north of Ireland, without such conflicts becoming altogether explicit in his work. It is also salutary to recognize that Beckett’s preference for medium-specific, proscenium-arch theatre-framing is a feature of his work that twenty-first-century ecological theatre often resists or supersedes.

It becomes evident, nevertheless, that Beckett’s work inspires contemporary theatre practitioners in surprising ways across many parts of the world. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which Beckett offers insights on ecological activism in ways that might be configured out of, say, Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, or Cecilia Vicuña. Perhaps the spirit of Beckett speaks more to twenty-first-theatre practice than more overtly political theatre-making does, but perhaps that’s part of the problem.

It remains puzzling, moreover, how far Beckett thought through questions of nature or ecology, rather than working through a more intuitive sense of modernist negativity. Given the pervasive resistance to conceptuality in Beckett’s writing, it is perhaps surprising that few of the contributors here risk suggesting what Beckett might himself have thought about ecology or nature. The cognitive dissonance between post-Heideggerian eco-theorizations and Beckett’s work remains palpable. A persistent ghost in Beckett’s theatre, for example, is his interest in Dante’s purgatory. These and other ghosts in his work sit more awkwardly with twenty-first-century ecological attunements. This book nevertheless lays down a series of markers on how discussions of Beckett and ecology might move forward. Perhaps the most exciting insight this book offers is into the ways Beckett inspires theatre-makers across so many parts of the world. This is a more global Beckett than the more familiar Beckett of predominantly anglophone studies.