Kamila Mamadnazarbekova (she/her) is a doctoral researcher at Sorbonne University, preparing her thesis on landscape theatre and concepts of nature in 21st-century British theatre under the supervision of Professor Élisabeth Angel-Perez and Dr. Anna Street. She holds a Master’s degree from Le Mans University, where she researched Philippe Quesne’s theatre and scenography of the Anthropocene, and is a member of the Performing Water research platform. She previously graduated from the Moscow Theatre Academy (GITIS) with a thesis on the curatorial approach of Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller at the Avignon Festival. In 2024, she received the EARTH Scholarship from British Council Scotland, spending three months at the University of Glasgow mapping contemporary landscape performance under the supervision of Professor Carl Lavery. Her research explores the intersections of theatre, performance, ecology, and gender.

The fear of nuclear destruction has haunted British drama since Beckett’s Endgame, Churchill’s The Ants, and Pinter’s posthumously published The Pres and the Office. Critiques of techno-modernism and the military-industrial mindset are subtly woven into the landscape aesthetics of rural and coastal Britain, often evoking nuclear energy and hyperobjects. This tension is vividly expressed in eco-feminist movements and their theatrical offspring, notably born at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, where activists united against American ballistic missiles. Protest camps also emerged in places like the Faslane submarine base, set against the sublime backdrop of the Clyde Estuary in Scotland.

Nuclear weapons, with their monstrous materiality, shape the collective imagination as both a bureaucratic structure of the state and a philosophical concept. Queer ecology is sometimes born out of nuclear fear, as it happened in Dungeness, where Derek Jarman spent his last days recording his gardening journal in the shadow of an ageing power plant. Sites like Orford Ness, a former atomic weapons research centre transformed into a nature reserve, inspire artists to explore recovery and the possibility of living and dying well amidst the ruins of capitalism. Karen Barad describes the contamination of indigenous human and non-human communities as “nuclear colonialism”. This perspective was also developed by Donna Haraway’s disciple Zoe Soufoulis, who linked the nuclear drive to pronatalist politics and the repression of reproductive rights. Michael Gardiner critiques nuclear weapons as the logical extension of English rational philosophy and the idea of dominion over nature.

My paper examines the texts by Lucie Kirkwood (Bloody Wimmin), David Greig (The Letter of Last Resort), Jenna Watt (Faslane), Chris Thorpe (Talking About the Fire), Phil Smith (Stalking Sebald), and Robert Macfarlane (Ness), exploring how these works interrogate the nuclear sublime and its intersection with landscapes of identity.