A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, review: innovative eco-theatre lacks power
Is it time to take theatre "off-grid"? In an age of understandable alarm about climate change and the related consumption of energy, it’s an art-form that looks, through an eco-lens, uncomfortably resource-hogging.
Though she’s no stay-at-home, director Katie Mitchell has done her level best in the past decade to foreground "green" issues – staging stark, engaging, scientist-fronted warnings about where we’re headed and trialling energy-production in situ. In 2021, for instance, she directed Houses Slide for the London Sinfonietta, the first bike-powered classical concert.
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction continues that inquiry into sustainable models. Presented in conjunction with Headlong, the lighting and sound are powered by bike (two cohorts of five tirelessly pedalling cyclists, their varying generated wattage displayed in real-time across the hour) and it will tour in a novel fashion. Instead of being carted about the country, the piece will be reconstituted using local theatre-makers at each nominal stop-off.
There’s just one principal performer (albeit accompanied by a sign-language interpreter), abetted by a touch of audience participation and a climactic choir too. For the UK premiere, Lydia West, known for her TV work (It’s a Sin) and making her stage debut, imparted the text by the American playwright Rose Miranda Hall, with a stirring contribution from the refugee-led Citizens of the World Choir.
Compared to what we’re used to, especially on this vast stage, it’s a pretty dour spectacle, the picture of austerity. It would be easy to sneer that it must be Greta Thunberg’s idea of theatrical heaven, but if the alternative is full hair-shirt (theatre being done in daylight, outdoors, say) or the industry carrying on regardless, this exercise seems perfectly valid, and urgent.
What’s frustrating, though, is Hall’s uneven script. It involves the rather needless serio-comic framing of the monologue as a spontaneous heart-on-sleeve address about the climate crisis by a dramaturg called Naomi, standing in at the last-minute for a (faintly laughable-sounding) right-on eco production. It also detours badly into blaming "white supremacy" for all our ills – like pumping toxic effluent into otherwise clear waters.
The bulk of the piece, though, explaining past mass extinctions, evoking the brevity of humanity’s span on Earth and naming the species lost in the past 25 years is transfixing, sobering and haunting. More of that, less of the woolly minded other please. But while we’re at it, isn’t it high time a playwright detailed the aeons of political failure that got us here? After all Margaret Thatcher warned the UN, and us, of the threat back in 1989.
Until Sat 29 April. Tickets: barbican.org.uk; tours to Sept (headlong.co.uk)
