Alys Daroy

This conference presentation contributed to an invited collective session associated Stanislavsky and Research Methods (ed. Stefan Aquilina), which foregrounds reflexive and methodological approaches to theatre and performance research. The paper advanced an eco-critical and biophilic reconfiguration of Stanislavsky, proposing “eco-Stanislavsky” as a methodological framework for contemporary practice-led and interdisciplinary research. Drawing on biophilia theory, embodied cognition, and environmental humanities scholarship, the presentation reframed Stanislavsky’s principles of nature and liveness as ecological processes shaped by material environments, sensory perception, and more-than-human relations. Positioned within wider debates on research methods in theatre and performance studies, the paper argued that Stanislavskian practice offers a productive site for rethinking methodological reflexivity in the context of climate crisis, ecological awareness, and environmentally responsive performance-making.

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.