Theatre review: Scenes From The Climate Era makes a serious trip to Asia

Straits Times

3 days ago

Rehearsal shots of David Finnigan's Scenes From The Climate Era, which plays at the Esplanade Theatre Studio from Jul 18 to 20 as part of The Studios.
Scenes From The Climate Era
The Studios, Esplanade Theatre Studio
July 18, 8pm
World leaders argue at a table about climate treaties. A couple mulls over the carbon footprint of having a child. A woman bears witness to the final years of a species.
How can theatre capture the frantic constellation of effects that climate change has wrought on every scale? Grand and unifying narratives falter, so Australian playwright David Finnigan has fractured the view into a brisk array of vignettes that resonate across the stories without being reduced to a single perspective.
Racing through them is a reminder that the climate crisis is a complex beast to grapple with practically. It demands multilateralism yet is led by governments, it requires scientists to speak across epistemological differences, it is at once intimately human and abstractly planetary. So too does it pose a narrative challenge.
Writer Amitav Ghosh argues in The Great Derangement (2016) that fiction is ill-equipped to grapple with the scales of climate change, which also presents itself as a narrative crisis. Finnigan rises up to the problem and forsakes going deep for the wide-ranging, bringing the audience through boardrooms and bedrooms, tropical and media storms.
Debut director Ellison Tan has worked with Finnigan to localise some of the script – and the result is that its scope feels global yet distinctly Asian, with actors wielding their various Englishes inflected with Asian languages. Among the various frontlines of the climate crisis in Asia, Singapore looms large, as the script imagines Tampines at 55 degrees Celsius and a sketch of a national climate conversation.
Some of the most powerful scenes have an undertow of surrealism – one where the Chinese are working to build a sea wall to prevent a melting glacier from pushing up sea levels, for example, or the curious case of a carer for an 'endling', the last known individual of a species before it goes extinct. If not for the fact that these are actual phenomena, these scenes might have been filed under surrealism.
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There are less compelling segments, such as when a climatologist abruptly waxes lyrical about calling the 'climate crisis' the 'climate era'. Finnigan's characters are largely self-reflexive ones who can discourse on the nuances of climate policy and science, so they exhibit a self-consciousness that sometimes tips towards didacticism.
In part too, the effect of Tan's direction is that most of the scenes by the ensemble are played earnestly. But Finnigan's scenes sometimes appear to approach more of satire and melodrama, so an even-handedly serious approach amounts to tonal monotony over time.
For a script with thematic variety, one would expect more tonal variation too.
As a result, the diverse eight-member ensemble – consisting of Siti Hajar, Tay Kong Hui, Ali Mazrin, Vishnucharan Naidu, Lian Sutton, Gloria Tan, Claire Teo and Teo Pei Si – often feels constrained by the range of that single mode and therefore largely plays it safe.
There are some beautiful tableaus that play out on the minimalist recycled set, which consists of a large round table surrounded by chairs and benches. Sound designer Bani Haykal's soundscape is evocative of a tropical rainforest and adds sensory depth to the minimalist visual.
Made by a playwright who is deeply embedded in the world of climate science, the play knows its audience is the converted and does not attempt to persuade. Instead, taking the ground of the climate crisis as real, Finnigan stages a dilemma between the politics of hope and despair, between wonder and disenchantment.
Book It/Scenes From The Climate Era