Finding words to deal with the climate era

Daniel Nelson

Scenes From The Climate Era isn’t the last word on climate change, but it’s a lot of useful, fascinating, entertaining, amusing, frightening words on the biggest problem facing the planet.

Given that many of us are increasingly concerned about our carbon footprint — even while we are frozen into inaction by the size of the remedial actions needed — it’s apt that this 80-minute performance uses only four actors and so few props that their combined footprint will hardly make a ripple in the atmosphere.

Playwright David Finnigan’s work is a rapid-paced, sharply-pointed, thought-provoking wave of conversations and situations, starting with a couple discussing whether it’s environmentally right to have a baby and ending with a calamitous pile-up of floods, fires and storms that are ushering in our new world.

In between, some 50 scenes shapeshift like quicksilver, from 6,000-year-old Aborigine eel traps, to nightclubs, UN conferences, TV interviews, Hyde Park beach, banks, a guards caring for a dying species of frog, public cooling centres, a pilot seeding the sky with sulphur dioxide, courtrooms, Arctic scientists, cats declared illegal because of antibiotic shortages, survivalists, paper bags v plastic bags, heat-stricken babies, lentil-sabotaged 4by4s (yes, literally).

Many of the arguments will be known to audiences, but the brief confrontations are compressed and sharpened into a breathless whirligig of facts and ideas.

There’s no room for characterisation, which is usually essential to theatre, and no plot, other than the ever-hotter, ever-more alarming scenarios. A recurring thought is the formula of public response: denial, optimism, despair — though hope is dismissed in a couple of vignettes as the enemy of action, the equivalent of Karl Marx’s dismissal of religion as the opium ol the masses. The idea that hope is holding us back is one of several assumptions shattered in the show’s hail of bullets. Another is that maybe there’s no climate crisis, just a new normal.

The show is sharp, provocative and exceptionally well acted and staged. It’s worth an hour-and-a-half of your time, even if no clear answers are offered.

* Scenes From The Climate Era, £22-£5, is at The Playground Theatre, Latimer Road W10 6RQ until 25 October. Info: Playground

• Post-show events organised by the Gate Theatre:

  Friday 10 October: Decolonising the Climate Era, Tayshan Hayden-Smith, Raymon Ayres, Ceylan Hassan, chaired by Shami Chakrabarti

  Wednesday 15 October: playwright David Finnigan in conversation with Simon Evans

  Sunday 19 October: Emergency - a scratch response to the play: emerging writers from global majority backgrounds present short pieces of new writing, performed by professional actors + discussion

  Tuesday 21 October: Ana Yang inm conversation
  Friday 24 October: Re-Indigenising From the Stage With Love Ssega, performance and Q&A