Theatre-maker David Finnigan is perhaps best known for Kill Climate Deniers, the controversially titled play that made headlines and faced a vicious backlash. Where that project was climate art as provocation, You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History – one part of a six-year cycle of shows about the changing planet – is a more contemplative and equivocal investigation of what theatre can do in the face of environmental collapse.
The show works with two contrasting timescales: the epic sweep of human history, and the intense period of a few days in December 2019 when swathes of Australia – where Finnigan was born and raised – were in flames. These are the two extremes of the Anthropocene that we struggle to wrap our heads around. Climate disasters can destroy homes and lives with terrifying speed. And yet the causes and impacts of global heating stretch far into the past and future.
