Humour and horror are used to equal effect, leaving audiences to wonder how they would react in such circumstances.
David Finnegan has found a way to combine science and the arts to help researchers engage better with stakeholders and also create compelling drama.
His latest play, Scenes from a Climate Era, performed at the Playground Theatre in London in October, portrayed the conversations that unfold between ordinary people about the realities of climate change, moving backwards and forwards in time and across the world.
The play features four actors switching between multiple characters ranging from activists, scientists, politicians, bankers and clubbers, and foretells climate catastrophes ranging from the extinction of coral reefs and extreme weather to civil unrest.
Interactive
Humour and horror are used to equal effect, leaving audiences to wonder how they would react in such circumstances.
Finnegan has been writing about climate change for nearly two decades. Originally from Australia, he grew up around climate scientists, and when he started making theatre with friends in the early 2000s, it was a natural step to collaborate with researchers in earth science subjects.
His other hat – as a freelance consultant creating games and scenarios for clients including government departments, campaign organisations, the World Bank and the United Nations – grew out of this work.
The scientists he met were creating ‘participatory co-models’ – predictive models used to engage communities and stakeholders and help them negotiate complex issues such as changes to farmland or a river valley.
He realised these were similar to interactive theatre and game design, and started to develop ways of making these much more sophisticated, using his experience in theatre.
Inspired
“It’s a really useful way to get a group of people up to speed on an issue quickly, without a lot of complicated data and graphs and presentations,” he says. For example, a current project is working with the World Bank in Nepal on climate and disaster risk with local government agencies.
“This is a way to get everyone up to speed about the issues around post-disaster reconstruction. It gives people a chance to experiment with ideas and negotiate with one another,” he says.
In turn, experiences in this work have inspired some of the scenes in his plays, for example, younger bankers leaking information to activist groups about significant meetings so that they could time actions with these features in Scenes from a Climate Era.
“There’s a few examples like that of these fascinating climate conversations that have been happening in the past few years that I was just really struck by, and wanted to put on stage,” he says.
Non-didactic
Over the years, Finnegan has let go of his initial ambition of using art to change people’s minds about an issue and motivate them to take action.
Humour and horror are used to equal effect, leaving audiences to wonder how they would react in such circumstances.
“I realised that actually, it's impossible to change people’s minds, particularly if you set out to do it. If you set out to write something really important and meaningful and impactful, it’s probably going to be bad,” he says, acknowledging that he had made his share of “really bad didactic art” in the past.
"People can definitely tell when you're trying too hard and they don't like it. They want something that speaks to them on a level and doesn't try and dress up a moral lecture in a fun story," he says.
“You can't anticipate how people will feel - everyone now is processing this huge thing of climate change in their own way, and on any given night, you'll have 50 different responses to the same material,” he says.
With Scenes from a Climate Era, “there are no tricks, we’re sharing these stories because we are really switched on by them and excited to share them,” he says.
Electric
That said, Finnegan reports a change in the demographic of audiences at his plays. “The only people that would come to my plays 15-20 years ago would be really old school climate activists - very traditional conservationists, corduroy pants, socks and sandals.
“And they came to be told that the world was f***ed and that it was our fault. There was this self-flagellation vibe in the crowd. I never knew what to do with that,” he says.
In the past few years, this has shifted and people from all walks of life come to the shows. Rather than be ‘punished with bad news’, they want to be part of the conversation.
Colonisation
“With this show, audiences are coming with their own experiences and they want to talk about them. The conversations after the show have been electric. It feels like the show is facilitating a space for people to have their own discussions rather than being told how it is,” he says.
The fact that climate change has featured in far more theatre in recent years is "really exciting". Just this year, Scenes from a Climate Era has followed Weather Girl and Kyoto as London plays host to this new genre.
“Theatre programmers I’ve spoken to tell me they’ve seen lots of scripts about climate, and people coming at it from all different angles.”
These are now going beyond the lens of science, activism and climate denial into plays dealing with issues such as queer identify and colonisation, he says. “These are conversations that are already underway and they’ve connected back to climate to identify the relationship between them.
"It’s a much richer space than it was even a few years ago.”
IPCC
For his next play, Finnegan is taking on a huge task – a dramatic adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report.
The contents of the report will not be finalised till 2029, making the task of creating theatre out of it "deranged", Finnegan jokes.
However, the chapter subjects are already published, and Finnegan is currently working with scientists leading the work on those, and workshopping potential scenes with actors at New York’s Public Theater.
“I’m concretely aware of what the material is going to be. How that becomes a night in the theatre is the real thing we’re experimenting with,” he says.
He compares the IPCC reports to epic poems like the Iliad, Odyssey or the Mahabharata. “These classic myths have stories within them, but they also contain the whole universe in the way that they’re told,” he says. “In many ways, the IPCC report is an epic poem for the present day – it’s an attempt to make sense of the entire world, how it all fits together, where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”
This Author
Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for The Ecologist. Find her on Bluesky @catearly.bsky.social.
