Environmental themes are hitting the stage in plays left, right and centre, but artists must strive to be more than just advocates
When TippingPoint ? an organisation that brings together artists and scientists to explore climate change ? approached the Arts Council four years ago about funding to create a series of projects, the response came back that artists showed no particular interest in making work around climate change. In a way, ACE had a point, as the National Theatre has recently discovered with Greenland: a polar bear does not make a play, and neither does bringing together a group of fine young playwrights and letting them loose on an issue, however pressing.
But much has changed in the last four years, and in London alone this month you can see Greenland, Richard Bean's The Heretic at the Royal Court and Water at the Tricycle ? all part of a steady drip-drip of theatre work exploring the human impact on the environment and what a changing environment does to humans.
Clearly theatre-makers are interested in climate change, just as they're interested in imagining all aspects of the present and future, and responding to the world around them. If proof were needed, it lay in the fact that there were no fewer than 180 applications for this year's TippingPoint commissions, the winners of which were announced on Tuesday night at the Jerwood Space. Those who got the commissions ? funded largely by Major Road theatre company, a group that liquidated its assets and decided to invest in new projects when it wound down in the late 90s ? included dreamthinkspeak, who will be mounting In the Beginning Was the End at Somerset House, 509 Arts' wake for the gas guzzler, My Last Car, Barnaby Stone's A Beautiful Thing (which I saw in a scratch version at the BAC One-on-One festival), Feral theatre's Funeral for Lost Species, composer Tim Sutton's ensemble piece Unplugged at the Eden Project, and Joe Duddell and Craig Vear's digital family opera, Found Voices. The TippingPoint/Without Walls co-commission of �30,000 went to Wired Aerial theatre's As the World Tipped, which will be written and directed by Nigel Jamieson.
We've already had not one but two superb plays about climate change from Steve Waters ? The Contingency Plan was the other, and Waters was on the TippingPoint commission panel ? and I'm sure we will see more and soon. But what's interesting about many of the TippingPoint commissions is that they have gone to artists whose work is not interested in polemic or agitprop, but who are questioning the form of theatre itself. There are many kinds of narrative about our relationship with the Earth, not just disaster stories, and it is as possible to imagine optimistic futures as well as dystopian ones. Artists can be advocates, but they are only really successful artists when they make the best, the most urgent and most beautiful work possible.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/feb/16/climate-change-beautiful-stage-theatre
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