Review: ALBATROSS, Omnibus Theatre
Martha Loader’s play deals with the personal cost of working on the frontlines of the climate crisis
It’s become something of a cliché in climate change coverage that the crisis has emerged out of the sins of the older generation wrought upon the young, and that fixing it is something that parents owe their children. Never, though, is that maxim quite so apparent than in this family drama, from recent George Devine Award-winning playwright Martha Loader.
Caroline Rippin is Alice, a scientist specialising in glaciers who works for several months at a time in Antarctica. Her sixty-something, recently widowed mother Eve (Agnes Lillis) has been raising Alice’s young daughter Alma while she’s away, and the family’s reunion is tinged with the probability of Alice’s return to her research and the prolonged absence from Alma.
Over the space of a tight 80 minutes, set entirely within a suburban living room, both women grapple with what they have sacrificed in pursuit of a better life for their descendants. The air is thick with awkward, fraught domestic interaction, and both Rippin and Lillis are skilled at revealing years of resentment in a single glance.
With the prospect of Alice’s research losing funding due to changes in the environment, even mundane references to the temperature of the house linger uncomfortably. Eventually, her frustration with her mother tips into an angst-ridden demonstration of how icecaps melt using a tub of ice cream, a set piece that is both toe-curling to watch and genuinely educational.
This is a play rich in dichotomies. Alice weighs up her career against being a presence in Alma’s life, but in the light of impending climate disaster that familiar dilemma takes on an existential edge. Her idealism and desire to be a hero to her daughter’s generation rubs up against her mother’s enjoyment of family life in the face of grave danger. All the while, Eve has been pursuing a carefree romance with Martin (Patrick Morris, who also directs), and the couple’s plan to go on an Antarctic cruise leads to direct ethical conflict with Alice.
Martin, a spiritualist who believes in “the healing power of fossils”, has become obsessed with an idealised version of Alice as romantic adventurer – the eponymous stuffed albatross he buys as a gift for her lurks meaningfully in the corner of the set. Inevitably, his dynamic with Alice veers into more ambiguous territory, and this is where the drama loses some of its subtlety and stretches belief.
Perhaps that shift into soap opera is necessary because Loader’s writing is better at posing dilemmas than it is at resolving them. The story winds up in a place where neither Alice nor Eve have deviated far from their previous choices, but not enough development in their characters has happened to justify this stasis in the plot. Alice returning to Antarctica and Eve staying home feels like returning to square one, rather than revisiting the past through new eyes.
Still, the play is wise when it comes to motherhood, to family, and to how we face up to the climate crisis, while resisting preachiness. Many will see themselves reflected in Eve or in Alice, and Loader has done a fine job at making both their positions seem sympathetic – the world may be ending, but there is no one right way of dealing with that fact.
Albatross plays at the Omnibus Theatre until 30 May
Photo credits: Ashley Day
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