Scenes From the Climate Era tackles a planet-sized subject, heroically attempting to wrestle meaning via the Art world.
So much has gone into this mix from playwright David Finnigan that it is not surprising the cake explodes in a mess out of the oven.
Finnigan’s main occupation is as a consultant on climate change and for private industry and think tanks. He readily admits he is not a scientist. But he has a background in gaming and modelling world scenarios. He works with climate scientists to produce theatre presentations, over the last twenty years.
This places him at the heart of the climate-modelling industry, a multi-billion-dollar business which powers the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Finnigan mentions the important global change that was signalled in 2018, when governments first agreed to concrete measures to limit carbon emissions within a time frame. Signalled by a ramping up of climate change activism.
That was the impetus for writing Scenes From the Climate Era. It gained enthusiastic response when the play was premiered in Australia last year.
This production is a collaboration with Silo Theatre and Auckland Theatre Company.
There was some tailoring from the original script, to highlight areas of local relevance. Which means there will be different versions of the play as per location.
Five actors, equating to five points of a pyramid. They must try to hold this behemoth together under the direction of Jason Te Kare.
Dawn Cheong (The First Prime Time Asian Sitcom), Amanda Tito (The Book of Everything), Arlo Green (Brokenwood Mysteries), Sean Dioneda Rivera (Jingle Bellethon Telethon) and Ni Dekkers-Reihana(The Haka Party).
Two key opening scenarios.
In the first, a couple, Cheong and Green, are getting passionate and fraught about whether to have a child. In this world where the future is uncertain, and the disaster scenario has become overwhelming.
This becomes the dominating and oppressive theme to this play. Disaster is now an era. Inextricably tied with guilt. Man is a bad animal. Quite reductionist but there it is.
The second is problematic. Dekkers-Reihana is a climate activist, maybe even from Extinction Rebellion.
She explains how to disable an SUV. Seen as a symbol of deafness to environmental concerns. It is an ingenious little method of asymmetric warfare.
Or else you could just coin the car, she says. Either way the aim is to disappear them.
The audience tonight were primarily Boomer. (I put my hand up too). There was palpable unease at this. This is clearly a deliberate ploy by the writer.
Some context. In a recent interview, Finnigan spoke about a play he had great difficulty in launching a few years ago called Kill Climate Deniers.
He confessed to being a Woke Inner City Leftie. Eventually with some compromise the play proceeded to significant success.
Climate Deniers are included for balance. A scientist expresses his reservations about modelling and questioning the validity.
In truth it is completely glossed over, and summarily dismissed. That is the biggest elephant in this playroom.
That term is meant to be haughtily dismissive and derogatory, like conspiracy theorists.
It is a deliberate misnomer as all would agree that the climate is constantly changing and goes through huge geological time cycles. The issue is how much is the fault of human behaviour.
All of it or very little? Not many, if any sang Scribe some time ago.
Climate is a vast subject, because it then includes by association environmental degradation, the act of mining for any elements from the Earth’s dermis, tapping oil and gas, clearing forests and jungles, over-fishing.
The more you bring in, the more overwhelming.
An actor has a beatific epiphany over plastics and micro/nano particles. They are here, there and everywhere. (Thank you, Beatles ’66 and Revolver).
Then we move clearly into the Doomsday Scenario where the world is heating up unbearably and freezing or melting concurrently.
It doesn’t necessarily have to hold together logically.
This production holds it together with some Herculean effort from the players.
The women can sound histrionic and screech in hard-to follow babble, but that is the extreme end of climate activism.
Dionedra has the best comedy timing, as a scientist denier and a transwoman. Green has a great comedy turn as an obsequious Ted Show presenter.
Inadvertently the writer has possibly short-circuited his own fear and guilt.
One scenario tackles the question of animals becoming extinct. What happens when you have the last few of an endangered species, and they are unable to mate successfully.
In the original book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, (adapted into the Blade Runner movies) by Philip K. Dick, this is the central theme. Species have disappeared, and replaced by artificial ones which look and behave the same. Until they develop a software viral glitch.
The most popular past-time for many people in this story is gaming programme called Fusion with Mercer. Where people can enter a virtual reality world where they interact with an entity called Mercer, and everyone endlessly struggles in a calamitous world. They even get hit by rocks occasionally. But nothing materially changes. It is a bleak desert.
That Mercerism dominates the second half of the play.
It may be an impossible task to encapsulate this play’s subject matter in 70 minutes. Some of it is not an easy watch.
The writer’s intention was NOT to provide any resolutions but to keep posing questions. That is a fine and noble intent.
Which does leave me free to observe that there are serious gaps in the factual content.
There is much to discuss and open out to, in Scenes From The Climate Era. That is this production’s greatest triumph.
NB: Mercerism is exposed as a hoax at the end of that book. There is hope.
Rev. Orange Peel