Chris Rapley is a leading climate scientist, a former director of both the British Antarctic Survey and London’s Science Museum. Together with playwright Duncan Macmillan (whose adaptation of 1984, with Robert Icke, recently played in the West End) he has crafted a 70-minute piece that summarises the current scholarly position on climate change.
It’s an unsettling companion to Stephen Emmott’s Ten Billion, staged at the Royal Court two years ago and soon to be released as a film. But whereas Emmott offered a bleak view of the threats posed by overpopulation, Rapley and Macmillan have created something that holds out at least a crumb of hope.
Rapley delivers what’s sometimes called a “performance lecture”, though in this case the word “performance” feels out of place. In Katie Mitchell’s lucid production, with designs by Chloe Lamford, he sits throughout, looking discreetly authoritative. Behind him are ghostly black-and-white projections by Luke Halls, which later give way to graphs and timelines.
There are no lurid images of some parched (or drenched) future dystopia.
Rapley emphasises that he’s a scientist, obliged to be objective rather than a polemicist. He lets the data speak for itself. But the approach feels too dry.
True, there’s a ripple of amusement when he mentions that as a child he owned an atlas which labelled Antarctica as a region “unknown to man”, and we hear a memorable description of inspecting an ice sample drilled from within a glacier. The title also introduces a personal note, since it derives from the fact that the eldest of his grandchildren will in 2071 be the age that he is now (67).
Yet the dominant tone is glumly impersonal — sufficient to prompt thought but not to provoke action.
Until November 15 (020 7565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com)
Latest theatre reviews
