SCENES FROM THE CLIMATE ERA

The Playground Theatre

★★★½

“a triumph for the cast and creative team”

David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era is a disturbing play. It’s meant to be. Even more disturbing is that two years on from its first performance in Sydney, it punches as hard as ever. Is there hope for redemption from the human follies that have brought us into this era? That is the core question of this piece and, playing after the UK’s hottest summer on record, we must ask ourselves whether hope itself is the folly.

Gate Theatre is presenting the European premiere of ‘Scenes’ at The Playground Theatre and the studio style space is exploited perfectly by Gate’s Artistic Lead Atri Banerjee. As the action opens, it feels as if we are looking at a rehearsal – a young couple discussing whether it is responsible to bring a child into this world (a conversation which quickly breaks down into a disagreement about whether paper or plastic is doing more damage). This feeling is intensified as a third actor breaks out from the audience (we are seated ‘in the round’) with startling, thunderous applause to bring the key process into focus.

This process is a disruption of the original ‘SARA’ curve of change management – Shock, Anger, Rejection, Acceptance. Here we are presented instead with three stages: one – denial; two – optimism and solutions; three – grief, anger and despair. In a very short space of time, 80 minutes, over multiple brief scenes (the original had 66 – I lost count in this production that has brought the statistics of the climate crisis bang up to date), we are treated to real and imagined snapshots: dinner party debates; COP speeches; protests; oil company whistle-blowing; scientific predictions; even a dance party that interleaves the conversations.

Framed in sound baths, dramatic changes in lighting, and smoke creeping through the studio, we watch the action range chaotically over time and place. There is a media interview in 1981 about the greenhouse effect; a laboratory in the future where the last of a particular species of frog is being kept alive. The Climate Era as a definition is proposed – a theory that we are now living through a defined era, like the Byzantine one, which will come to an end. How, when and what that might look like are debated. Toward the chilling conclusion, the couple we met at the opening have had their family, and we are still left asking ‘Was that responsible?’

The extraordinary blend of scenarios, dialogue, and special effects is a triumph for the cast and creative team. Miles Barrow, Harriet Gordon-Anderson (an original cast member), Ziggy Heath and Peyvand Sadeghian are the high energy and accomplished physical actors taking us through this small-scale epic, with much owed to the overall design (Anna Yates) and the lighting and sound team.

This is the stuff of theatre. To put the spotlight on a current and sobering topic, present it as entertainment and then drive home the unavoidable importance of the content. If there were a criticism, it is that the switch between scenes is so intense and the range so diverse, it leaves one breathless and with no time to reflect. The single bit of audience involvement business, near the beginning, seems redundant. There is no story arc (that is not the point, we are still in the middle of the era) and the pace is relentless with very few quieter moments. I am sure that this is actually the intention, but the complexity can be overwhelming.

When we get to the last two scenes, Finnigan offers us four endings, each set in different parts of the world, and each offering its own existential conundrum. Then he answers the original question ‘how will we know when the Climate Era has ended?’ with a twist. Whether it is hopeful or not, is down to the way each of us interacts with the prognosis.

SCENES FROM THE CLIMATE ERA

★★★½

The Playground Theatre

SCENES FROM THE CLIMATE ERA

The Playground Theatre

★★★½

“a triumph for the cast and creative team”