Review: SCENES FROM THE CLIMATE ERA, Playground Theatre

Outside festivals, agitprop theatre can be difficult to find or, I ought to say, agitprop theatre that ventures beyond the somewhat self-referencing spheres of identity politics and mental health issues. Specifically, the overarching global challenge of the 21st century - climate change - barely gets a hearing on the London stage. Maybe it’s just too big.

Australian playwright, David Finnegan, has an answer - split a production into a series of scenes, some past, some present, some future that builds into a collage that tells not a single story, but makes a single point - that we may already be too late.

That format probably looked better on paper than it does on stage. Director, Atri Banerjee, never quite solves a key problem of presenting a show in the round. The grim physics (and there’s lots of grim science in this subject) is that actors will always have their backs to some of the audience which, especially when voices are raised in passion or pain, makes the words hard to hear, lost in the unforgiving acoustics. 

The other issue is that the four actors progress so quickly from one scene to another that there’s little chance to create characters - personalities are flattened to the expression of their concerns or trauma. It’s disorienting and destabilising, but that may be deliberate, an upending of the comfort of just standing aside from the whole mess or chipping in with a (subsidised) EV or going vegan - and relapsing a bit.

The show is not sunk because Finnegan has given Ziggy Heath, Peyvand Sadeghian, Miles Barrow and Harriet Gordon-Anderson some very interesting things to say. This is especially so in explaining how human beings modified the environment for irrigation thousands of years ago - and it still works - or in showing how the media requires so simplistic a presentation of the issues that all impact is lost. Less successful are scenes set in dystopian futures of environmental and social collapse - that’s cinema rather than black box theatre material.

Whether anyone will be swayed by what they see is moot - people who buy tickets for shows like this usually have firm ideas one way or the other and look for those to be underlined rather than overturned. That said, nobody will be unmoved by the strength of feeling that animates everyone involved and I’m also pretty sure that everyone will learn something, as the breadth of the climate era is covered with an unflinching eye.

For all the theatrical challenges involved in tackling the subject head-on and with no sugar-coating of an unlikely romance or a heroic quest to anchor the narrative, it’s still important that the stage can be a forum for this debate. It would be churlish indeed of a reviewer not to welcome this production and look forward to seeing how theatremakers will tell stories, affect hearts and minds and change destructive orthodoxies in the future.

If there is one…        

Scenes From The Climate Era at the Playground Theatre until 25 October