Fred Pearce enjoyed the wit and the laughs in Richard Bean's The Heretic at the Royal Court, but found the science wanting
Unlike cinema, theatre has largely avoided climate change ? but now we have three offerings on stage in London at once. The Tricycle Theatre's revival of Water and the National Theatre's Greenland were joined this week by The Heretic at the Royal Court. Juliet Stevenson plays Diane, a university researcher whose conclusion that sea levels are not rising around the Maldives leads her into deep water back on campus.
The dialogue rattles along with wit, but the scientific critique thrown in by writer Richard Bean, drawing heavily on "Climategate", the scandal of emails released at the University of East Anglia ? becomes increasingly hard to take.
If you lumber a plot with repartee about dodgy tree-ring data, Al Gore's Y-axis and the saturation theory of CO2, why not get it right? Dramatic licence is fine, but too often, Bean offers formulaic boffin-bashing culled from nasty blogs.
As Diane's relationships with her anorexic Greenpeace daughter Phoebe and her tweedily corrupt professor deteriorate, her scepticism turns to hectoring. "Green is proxy for anything. Class war. Hate your dad. Hate America. It's the perfect religion for the narcissistic age."
Her public profile grows and she tells Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight that "the real global warming disaster is that a small cohort of hippies who went into climate science because they could get paid for spending all day on the beach smoking joints have suddenly become the most powerful people in the world". No wonder she gets a Telegraph column by the second half.
Sadly, rather than exploring the scientific uncertainties and psychological traumas that led her on this road, Bean invites us simply to join her in rage.
We are left in little doubt that the globules of science are meant to be real critique. Diane's student Ben turns hacker and uncovers a thousand incriminating emails from the University of ? er ? Hampshire. "Hide the decline", the most famous phrase in the East Anglian emails, becomes "bury the downturn" in the Hampshire version.
But the scientists "Mann, Bradley and Hughes" ? famous for their controversial "hockey stick" graph which featured in the 2001 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report ? get a personal mention. And Diane's slimy prof commits an offence far worse than any actual climate scientist has been found guilty of by deliberately inserting into his IPCC chapter "some made-up stuff from an activist".
Would that it were so simple. Bean's science may have a whiff of reportage, but is itself often "made-up stuff". Still, there are plenty of laughs. I enjoyed Ben the student's thermal chicken theory ? but not as a refutation of the greenhouse effect.
The Heretic never quite gets what heresy involves. There are no sweaty moments of revelation; no internal anguish; no journey of discovery. A shame, as there are great real-life models out there.
Last month I shared a conference table with Judy Curry, a US climate scientist. She was labelled a "heretic" in Scientific American for criticising colleagues over the East Anglian row and trying to find common ground with sceptics. Her story is better than Diane's ? a riveting drama of big egos, corrupted institutions, divided loyalties, conflicted motives, personal anguish, and, yes, real debate about science and saving the planet. I can see Juliet Stevenson playing Judy. It would be more exciting and more real ? but also more ambiguous ? than this nicely written but ultimately boorish and confected conspiracy tale.
Fred Pearce is the author of Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming
Read Michael Billington's review of The Heretic online at www.guardian.co.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/11/the-heretic-climate-change-review
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