“I Can Hear the Glaciers Melting”: Tom Stoppard’s Radio Drama Darkside and the Exploration of Ecological Ethics via Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon
摘要
This chapter focuses on Tom Stoppard’s BBC radio play, Darkside: A Play for Radio Incorporating The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, a 2013 radio play adaptation of Pink Floyd’s most famous album, arguing that it functions as an ecoadaptation in both form and content. In addition to shifting between abstract philosophical experiments and the concrete imperative of “glaciers melting” (a phrase repeated in the play as a shorthand for ecological crisis), Darkside also shifts between the abstract and the concrete because of its form: through its dialogue, music, and sound effects, radio attempts to make material the characters and scenes in the drama in the imagination of the listener, but at the same time, because it is implied that the protagonist’s travels through the thoughtscape are a function of her imagination, the material existence of the thought-experiment characters she encounters cannot be established. Radio drama is a potent way of conveying the dangers of climate change, due to its ability to create drama from the unseen, similar to the way that the impact of climate change was (until very recently) relatively invisible.