Abstract
How might ecological performance practices reanimate Double Falsehood as a dynamic, environmentally conscious work while preserving its dramaturgical and historical integrity? This exploration investigates Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1727), purportedly derived from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost The History of Cardenio (c.1613), as a case study for exploring adaptation, Shakespearean afterlives and ecological performance. Responding to the conference theme Shakespeare in Spirit, the session situates Double Falsehood as a text haunted by its contested authorship and identity, engaging participants in an interrogation of spectral presences and uncanny tensions between adaptation and unadaptation. Discussion foregrounds ‘doubling’ as both a thematic and practical strategy, exploring how doubling, manifesting in paired lovers, mirrored betrayals, co-authorship and a dual aim of innovative performance and ecological messaging, amplifies thematic resonances and scenographic solutions. Building on this, the session will unpack how staging choices rooted in biophilic sustainable design based on natural patterns and principles and expressed through emergent technologies might evoke the play’s forest as an otherworldly landscape while reflecting on how ecological performance can reshape the haunted landscapes of Shakespearean drama.