In the face of cataclysmic climate change, the women of a new Australian play are ready to do their bit: burn more fossil fuels; write more blog posts; eat endangered animals. It's crazy, but it just might work.
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| Just eat it: Belinda Giblin stars in The Turquoise Elephant at the Griffin Theatre. Photo: Edwina Pickles |
"I wrote the first draft of the play in the lead-up to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015, spurred on by the malodorous denialism wafting out of the Murdoch press at the time," Carleton says. "another year on … we find ourselves with a federal Senate peppered with conspiracy theorists and anti-climate science nutters running with their whacky ideologies as formal policy."
Carleton's story sees three generations of women from a privileged political family observe the unfolding of a climate disaster from their hermetically sealed, temperature-controlled home.
Augusta is a campaigner for the reinstatement of global reliance on fossil fuels. Her sister Olympia believes the best way to save species at risk of extinction is to eat them. Their niece, Basra, thinks social media might be the answer.
But when Visi, an activist, enters the fray, the atmosphere turns even more unpredictably stormy.
Lee Lewis, Griffin's artistic director, says she programmed The Turquoise Elephant because audiences are hungry for stories about the "biggest crisis facing the planet".
"Australia has a strong tradition of drought plays, and now we're in transition to climate change plays," Lewis says. "But they are tricky to write because you don't want them to be didactic or to include science that isn't great. It still has to be an interesting story."
Climate change theatre is relatively rare in Australia. Griffin staged Ian Meadows' Between Two Waves in 2012, the story of a climate scientist concerned about rising sea levels and extreme weather events.
Stephen Sewell's end-of-the-world drama It Just Stopped played at Belvoir in 2006. Andrew Bovell's 2008 drama When the Rain Stops Falling has played widely, and Malthouse staged the "extinction gut-punch" They Saw a Thylacine, in 2015.
In June, Ensemble Theatre and ATYP co-produced The Big Dry, adapted from the novel by Tony Davis. In Melbourne, David Finnigan's Kill Climate Deniers, a hostage satire about an eco-terrorist attack on Parliament House, has been turned into a concept album, a radio play and a short film.
Internationally, the artistic response to climate change has been fuelled by arts funding set aside by bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation focused on health and science issues. Similar funds exist in the United States. Locally, the Australian branch of the UK group Tipping Point, is committed to empowering artistic responses to climate change.
"A lot of the climate change theatre happening in other countries verges on agit prop because they are trying to convince their audiences the issue is real and important, which can lead to dreadfully dull drama" says Tim Roseman of Playwriting Australia.
"Here, we are already living directly beneath the hole caused by climate change. We don't need or want to preach."
At Carriageworks this month, as part of the LiveWorks Festival of Experimental Art, a number of visual and performance artists will present climate change-inspired works.
Ecosexual Bathhouse is a large-scale artwork where viewers are invited into a series of spaces for "eco-play" experiences. A pollination lab will allow the audience to help orchids spread their seeds; a sauna invites visitors to relax and listen to recorded eco-stories; a nature table has them digging through worm farms and dipping fingers into ponds, and a rainforest room hosts a "storm". Audiences will be invited to wear a "grass mask".
"The work looks at climate change as something that is inevitable, so why not embrace a new way of living," says artist Loren Kroneymeyer, from the Perth-based artist collective Pony Express. "We are trying to tackle the subject matter in a way that is less obvious and a little more progressive with this proposition of integrating our hedonistic desires into a climate change reality."
Also at LiveWorks, Sydney-based artist Tina Havelock Stevens has created Thunderstorm, an imposing large-scale video installation of a violent super-cell storm she filmed during a road trip through Texas.
"When it first played at Dark Mofo in Hobart, some people said it was foreboding and others said it made them feel safe," Havelock Stevens says. "We run to nature to get grounded and to feel better.
"So it is interesting that we are destroying nature, this thing that we need so much, and we're very much in denial about it. Looking out at that storm, you cannot help but meditate on the state of the contemporary world and where we are now."
The Turquoise Elephant opens at Griffin (Sydney) on October 21. LiveWorks plays at Carriageworks (Sydney) from October 27-November 6.
Links
- 'Half a degree avoided': Breakthrough in talks to limit global warming
- Why poorer suburbs are more at risk in warming cities
- A comet smashing into ancient Earth may have set off catastrophic global warming
- Climate change is stoking a $260 billion-a-year problem
- Australia facing questions at UN over post-2020 climate change stance
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