How would you define the times we’re living in? As the planet gets warmer and the future seems dangerously uncertain, what would you say about who we are, what we believe and where we’re going? The playwright David Finnigan has an idea. Move over Mistress Isabelle Brooks and forget the Eras tour – this, Finnigan suggests, is the climate era.
Often artists will tackle an era with the macro (a sweeping epic) or the micro (by focusing on a key detail, time or personal narrative). Scenes from the Climate Era, making its debut at Belvoir, takes the micro and turns it macro by presenting more than 50 short plays within a tight 80-minute running time. It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope: a whole fractured into fragments.
Finnigan is no stranger to putting the climate crisis onstage. A production of his earlier play, Kill Climate Deniers – a darkly comic look at political inaction – was cancelled in 2014 after the Australian columnist Andrew Bolt and the rightwing US media group Breitbart criticised the Australian Capital Territory government’s decision to fund the play, which they suggested was inciting hate speech. When it reached the stage in 2018 it was a recursive, metatextual experiment: it turned Bolt’s objections into set pieces and made punchlines out of the death threats aimed its way. It was a restless, dangerous work. Next came You’re Safe Til 2024, a work that tried to temper climate despair with hope. Even his comedy 44 Sex Acts in One Week, a comedy in which the acts were modelled on fruit, turned on a climate disaster catalyst.
Now, in Scenes from the Climate Era, Finnigan can do it all: the dark comedy and fury directed at the government; the heartbreaking story of an “endling” (the last animal of its kind before complete extinction); rigorous searches for, and disavowal of, hope; and a little instructional (but not advisable) information about how we might reduce the number of petrol-guzzling cars on the road.
The cast of five (Harriet Gordon-Anderson, Abbie-Lee Lewis, Brandon McClelland, Ariadne Sgouros and Charles Wu, all fantastic) move from scene to scene with disarming naturalism and seemingly boundless energy. With a dizzying number of stories, characters and scenarios, it’s vital that the actors are present and connected in the moment. Without fail they show up to each scenario, whether it’s a friend group spiralling into climate dismay, a group of scientists trying to bio-engineer a new reef system, or a couple discussing whether it’s ethical to have children.
The director, Carissa Licciardello, keeps the focus on the actors, and there’s a playfulness suffusing the production that makes its speed a feature rather than a bug. When it’s time for brief scenes of heightened emotion, tragedy and loss, she carves out a moment of breathing room to treat them with care.
To help us feel those beats and to keep situated with each new setting (most are briefly introduced with a timestamp and brief description of the characters we’re about to meet), the set is almost entirely bare. Designer Nick Schlieper has kept it simple with only a table and five chairs onstage, because the lighting, which he also designed, is the real set: it narrows to a point to heighten our concern; it washes out over us to encourage us to breathe; it becomes our signpost and our lifeline. When it darkens, so do we. Slowly, another set element is introduced to indicate the loss of options and opportunities as the planet moves toward climate catastrophe – but it’s worth keeping as a surprise.
As a definition of an era, as a play for our times, what does Scenes from the Climate Era offer us? A reminder of how we have been failed by governments and corporations. A eulogy for what we have lost from the natural world and an elegy of what we have still to lose. A reminder, as historical stories serve to do, that the past and future are filled with people like us – people we will never meet but who still matter, and who experience the world differently to the way we do, and who might make us feel less alone.
Scenes from the Climate Era is at Sydney’s Belvoir St theatre until 25 June
