Despite the potentially global significance of this book's title, it is unlikely to tell readers anything they did not already know about either climate change or its aesthetic representation. The authors deal with the general question of ‘what makes climate change difficult to represent in art’ in fewer than ten pages (pp. 23–8). Instead, this ‘casebook’ purports to offer two main things: ‘(1) a practical methodology, Research Theatre … and (2) a theatre aesthetic, Ecotheatre’ (p. 2). The methodology involves developing new plays through a workshop and devising process that ‘tries to multiply the questions, meanings, interpretations and possibilities evoked by a given discourse … Our goal is not to use research to make theatre, but rather to use theatre to do research’ (p. 5, original emphasis). Chaudhuri begins by briefly outlining a series of previous projects that she has conducted on this basis over the last decade or so, and thereafter the book is largely concerned with recounting the specific process by which she, Edelow and their collaborators developed Carla and Lewis, a short play presented at Incubator Arts Project in New York in 2011. Edelow's script for the play is published at the end of the book as an example of this new ‘ecotheatre’.

What is most striking here is that the authors, despite their stated concern with ecology, seem so oblivious to the wider ecology of their home discipline. They show no awareness of the rich and diverse literature on ‘practice as research’ that has developed since the 1990s, particularly in the UK but also elsewhere (for a US perspective see Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter's 2010 collection Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research, also from Palgrave). Thus they write as if their ‘research theatre’ model represents a significant innovation, when in practice what they describe is quite traditional (a collaborative devising process resulting in a text-driven, studio-based play). Still more questionable is the authors’ claim that their own approach represents a departure from ‘what might now be recognized as “traditional” or “established” ecotheatrical practice, best described and theorized by scholars like Wendy Arons, Theresa May, Baz Kershaw and Downing Cless’ (p. 28). Yet it is nonsensical to suggest that these four scholars have arrived at some identifiable practical model: Cless's Ecology and Environment in European Drama (2010), for example, examines eco-inflected productions of classic dramatic texts, whereas Kershaw's Theatre Ecology (2007) offers a theory-driven ‘paradoxology’ of environmental performance in its widest possible sense. Dismissing their diverse approaches as collectively ‘traditional’, ‘established’ and indeed ‘literalist’ (p. 28) functions only to establish a false binary against which to oppose Chaudhuri and Enelow's purportedly radical new practice. For all the book's posturing, however, Carla and Lewis turns out to be a mildly diverting magical-realist fantasy whose main appeal lies in its satirization of American narcissism and ignorance about conditions in other parts of the world. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that such work should emerge from a studio process involving American actors with no specialist knowledge about climate change.