Review: Scenes from the Climate Era, Playground Theatre

This is a world where the subject of climate change is increasingly becoming a personal issue. Across the globe, we are experiencing the effects more directly, whether that be through extreme heat, forest fires, flooding, or loss of homes and habitat due to rising sea levels. As writer David Finnigan clearly points out in Scenes from the Climate Era, it’s a situation that can leave people resistant, angry, fearful – unwilling to engage with something that seems too overwhelming to consider.

Here, Finnigan cleverly facilitates the conversation by breaking it down into small vignettes, making the issues easier to contemplate. It’s pointed out early on that the play has got the word ‘climate’ in the title, so we know what we’re in for, but the whole is accomplished with humour, sensitivity, and insight, creating a microcosm of human experience. It’s almost a therapy session for a global community, as we move through and around the process of acceptance.

Within a fragmented form, the play approaches the enormity of a difficult subject from a kaleidoscope of perspectives and opinions. Never didactic, yet highly informative and often funny, it focusses closely on real human impact, in different locations and times. The production feels slightly experimental, suggesting the characters too are winging it as they discuss an issue to which none of us have the answer.

An outstanding ensemble (Miles Barrow, Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Ziggy Heath, Peyvand Sadeghian) bring impressive energy and emotion to the piece, working brilliantly and collaboratively throughout. Cast from a variety of backgrounds and heritages, they are representative of a planet that is diverse in culture and community. Each plays an extraordinary number of characters, switching seamlessly between them. It’s compelling storytelling and hugely exciting to watch, yet makes the difficult subject matter manageable. In this theatrical safe space, the characters offer familiarity, shared humanity and vulnerability and establish a global arena. Here together, we acknowledge and understand the many ways individuals struggle to cope with climate change now, and also envisage unimaginable futures.

Clean, open staging in the round sees a large blue circle on the floor – our planet, over which the action occurs. It leaves space to focus in on the actors, to listen carefully to their words, which are eloquent, emotional but often conversational and relatable. Occasionally they use microphones, interestingly shifting the energy and dynamic of the action. Their spoken word is supported by an elegant soundscape that shifts across geographical and emotional landscapes. The presence and demise of known and as yet unknown environments and species are underscored audibly, with some given names: Smiley the frog becomes a very real loss, connected emotionally to humankind.

The audience is also supported to not just be passive casualties of disaster but active against it – if they choose to do so! We are enabled to proactively engage in SUV sabotage with the most primitive of tools (or a door key). Our imagination is activated through vividly descriptive, almost poetic language, allowing us to conceive of alternative futures, and to recognise how belonging in an ecosystem that works with nature instead of exploiting it brings healing. Superb sensory drama in the concluding scene makes the crisis very real, with evocative visuals, sound and even the smell of catastrophe filling the room.

This is a truly excellent play, brilliantly presented. It connects the local and the global in the way that only theatre can, reminding the audience that we’re all the same in being individuals experiencing the same event. We are an ecosystem, and to get through we’re going to need each other.

You can read more about Scenes from the Climate Era in our recent interview with Atri Banerjee.

Written by David Finnigan
Directed by Atri Banerjee
Designed by Anna Yates

Scenes from the Climate Era runs at the Playground Theatre until Saturday 25 October.