A Future of Hope - Scenes from the Climate Era

For many of us, it is hard to believe that climate denial still exists. And yet, some fifty years on from the initial modelling and predictions about the impact of global warming, with an increasing body of evidence to support the predictions, climate denial not only exists, but it has also become a divisive political issue.

Rather than governments taking a bipartisan approach to developing long term-solutions or mitigation, climate change is now an ideological battlefield filled with contradictions. In the main, climate deniers tend to lean toward the right of politics, the traditional upholders of the status quo, conventionally supported by the wealthy. Conversely, championing climate action is now often seen as the preserve of the ‘elite,’ who are deemed to have little regard for the cost of long-term solutions and the burden those solutions might place on many in the community. And determining the best action to take is fraught with difficulty. For example, advocates of renewable energy can find themselves at odds with those campaigning to save wildlife or habitat. There is no easy path.

The beacon of light and cause for hope, despite this confusion and inaction, are the young. Increasingly, young people have become the most effective advocates for climate action. Greta Thunberg became a global figure at the age of 15, inspiring the student strike movement and becoming the voice of the young in addressing global leaders. Her influence is significant but in truth young people around the world are acutely aware of the impact of climate change because it is they who will bear the consequences of continued inaction.

Students at St Michael’s Grammar School are no exception. They have proactively engaged in promoting environmental issues through the student-led club Environmental Action Club and have championed change, most recently through a waste-management initiative that resulted in a threefold increase in the recycling of School waste.

Supported by the School and its commitment to contributing citizenship, students engage in Signature Programs, in partnership with community organisations, which explore environmental issues such as the conservation of the local penguin colony. The School also has a long standing immersion for senior students who travel to the Great Barrier Reef to explore one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems, and the sequenced Experiential Learning program has a significant focus connection to the natural world.

St Michael’s therefore provided the ideal environment, when Rory Godbold, as Director of the highly regarded annual Year 10 -12 play, proposed a David Finnegan work, Scenes from the Climate Era, as the 2024 production. Motivated by a personal philosophy that the creative arts should explore the human experience and ask bigger questions, Rory agrees with Brecht that ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.’ David Finnegan is an Australian writer and games designer whose work explores the intersection of science and art. His interactive, exploratory, speculative works have been performed around the world and many of them explore the impact of climate change.

Scenes from the Climate Era was a bold choice. It was a new work, performed for the first time in 2023 by Belvoir St Theatre, with St Michael’s getting special permission from David to present the work in 2024. The work comprises a series of vignettes, as many as 65, depicting the human experience as people live through the ‘climate era’ from 1983 to 2043. The vignettes explore different perspectives from the changing face of activism as the impact of climate change escalates, and the increasingly radical solutions put forth by scientists to the commitment of governments to action and the ‘greenwashing’ of business. It is a challenging work that requires the cast to adopt many personas.

Rory was inspired by his experience as a teacher where he witnessed students’ frustration with the lack of action to address climate change. He also recognised that it is this generation of students and young people who will shape and change the debate, as in the current political landscape the perspectives and solutions seem engrained to a legacy of the past. He was therefore keen to explore the dramatic possibilities of the audience hearing the many and varied perspectives on climate change from young voices, moving through solutions, denial, grief but most importantly to hope.

The students themselves were at first unsure but quickly engaged in the process and there were many spirited discussions about the context and the history of climate change and the inherent threat of continuing climate denial. Of the 65 possible vignettes in Finnegan’s work, the students chose 55 which they deemed to be of most relevance from their perspective and sequenced depending on the experience they wanted their audience to have, following Finnegan’s rules for ending and overall running time. Students also enthusiastically discussed the politics of climate change, and the competing pressures on governments to support initiatives such as the Kyoto Protocol.

Given that it was a new and demanding work, and that the subject matter was one that invited not just debate but invoked strong passions, there was an unquestionable element of risk in staging the production, both for the performers and for the audience.

For the performers there were specific challenges. As the work is a series of vignettes, a collection of short stories with short narrative arcs, there is no opportunity for character development. Each performer had to make an immediate impression with their character communicating to the audience the world the exist in and the stakes of the moment, or the impact would be lost. The cast was also on stage for the whole performance, symbolically as witnesses to the events like the audience, adding another layer of difficulty. These factors would all be daunting for professional performers but especially taxing for students, who were rehearsing before and after school and on weekends while juggling VCE studies.

The work is also challenging from the audience perspective as the vignettes portray both radical activism and radical scientific solutions alongside the often harrowing impact on humanity. The subject does invoke passion and as observed earlier, it has become the subject of ideological debate. It is a political issue. The scenes accumulate in a way that the work makes no overt political statements but invites the audience to consider the complexity and contradictions of the issue, to see the different perspectives and to draw their own conclusions. And finally to consider how to act on the information presented.

Central to the power of Scenes from the Climate Era was its use of dramatic metaphor to collapse the distance between audience and subject. The production began with a conventional fourth wall, the audience positioned as observers looking in on rooms where characters discussed a crisis unfolding somewhere else, at a safe remove. As the piece progressed, however, this wall was steadily dismantled, until the theatre itself stood exposed.

The metaphor was precise and unsettling: the climate crisis could no longer be held at arm's length, contained within an imagined world on a stage. It was taking place in the St Michael’s Grammar School Drama Studio, the communities shared space, and the conversation happening in it was not fiction but the audience's own.

This spatial metaphor was doubled by a tactile one. The decision to stage the work in a sandpit meant that every entrance, exchange and decision left a visible trace, so that the accumulating disorder of the sand became a direct analogue for the earth itself, moving from a calm, still and undisturbed state at the outset to a churned, chaotic mess by the play's end. Together, these choices demonstrate how theatre can use metaphor not merely to illustrate an idea but to enact it physically, allowing an audience to feel the argument of a piece through the transformation of the very space they occupy, rather than simply hearing it argued from a distance.

Scenes from the Climate Era was a theatrical triumph. The cast rose to the occasion and performed with a maturity beyond their years, embracing the complexities of the work. Yet it was their youth that had the most impact. Listening to the many and varied perspectives from young people who are acutely aware that the climate debate began long before they were born but it is they who will bear the brunt of inaction was especially poignant. The characters denying the changes in the 1980’s may not be alive for the climate shocks in the 2024’s but the students certainly will. There was a clarity in their performances that resonated strongly with the audience. Truth is never so powerful as when it is delivered by the young.

And what of the performers themselves? What did the work mean to the students who participated? Based on observations and conversations during rehearsals, and throughout and after the performances the students benefited in three distinct ways. The challenges presented by the script and the students’ responses facilitated the growth of their skills and confidence as performers. The subject matter in the script and the many discussions and debates during rehearsals gave them a deeper understanding of different perspectives on climate change. And they gained a valuable insight into the way that theatre, and the creative arts more widely, can be more than a reflection of society, it can help shape it.

While Scenes from the Climate Era, explores critically important issues and includes poignant insights into the potential impact of climate change, ultimately it is about hope. The title itself implies that while our world and the way we live will be vastly different, there is an end to the era, just as has been the case in other eras in human history.

There are solutions to Climate disaster, but they need to be interrogated, explored, defined and refined just like a piece of theatre. Hope itself is important but perhaps the best chance of a ‘happy ending’ is to ensure that our young people have the knowledge, skills and confidence to be agents of change. Through productions such as Scenes from the Climate Era, they are learning that theatre, and the creative arts, can be a powerful catalyst for change.