Aimee Powell
19 Sept 2025
Let’s face it: few theatre invitations are more likely to make audiences flinch than the words “climate play.” For many, the phrase conjures images of didactic monologues, dystopian doom, or eco-preaching that makes you feel like you're being force-fed vegetables. You might expect a few charts, a crisis montage, and a quietly despairing audience stumbling into the lobby wondering what they’re supposed to do next.
But Scenes from the Climate Era, now making its European premiere at The Playground Theatre in a production by The Gate Theatre, and directed by Atri Banerjee, proves that the genre doesn’t have to feel like homework. Instead, it’s a dizzying, dynamic, and deeply human tapestry of vignettes that bypasses statistics and settles straight into the gut.
Written by Australian playwright David Finnigan, the play unfolds over 65 brief scenes in 80 minutes, performed by a dexterous five-person ensemble. There are no central characters, no single storyline, no antagonist to defeat or saviour to cheer. Instead, we’re given flickers, conversations, snapshots, thoughts, regrets, jokes, stitched together like a patchwork of the ordinary and the extraordinary. And it’s through this seemingly scattered structure that Scenes from the Climate Era finds its enormous emotional power.
Finnigan, a climate dramaturg who’s spent years embedded in scientific and policy communities, has said he never set out to make a conventional climate play. In fact, he seems wary of the genre entirely.
“I wanted to write about some of the wildest and most extraordinary stories currently unfolding in the climate space,” he explains. “Things that make my head spin and my eyes widen. And it just so happens that a lot of those stories are funny.”
This idea, that climate theatre doesn’t need to be miserable, is not only refreshing, but essential. Many of the play’s scenes are surprisingly light-hearted. There’s a party where guests argue about music, a school trip full of restless kids, a conservationist giving a doomed frog the name of his nephew. Elsewhere, a life-saving pilot takes a moment to de-stress after work. These moments are disarmingly ordinary, and that’s exactly the point. Climate change isn’t an epic, one-time catastrophe. It’s an era. It’s already begun, and it’s unfolding in people’s living rooms, lunch breaks, and nervous conversations with partners.
By presenting climate change through small human interactions, the show sidesteps the paralysis that often accompanies the enormity of the issue. “People spiral,” Finnigan says. “We clutch at straws of solutions, or wait for some kind of doomsday that we believe is inevitable. This show doesn’t do that. It meets you in the middle of life.”
Holding the entire piece together is an ensemble of just five actors, Violette Ayad, Nic English, Meg Hyeronimus, Abbie-lee Lewis, and Brittany Santariga, who cycle seamlessly through dozens of roles. From boardroom executives to giddy teenagers, their transitions are precise, fluid, and emotionally grounded.
Their delivery is often matter-of-fact, almost documentary-like, which makes it all the more affecting when their restraint gives way to moments of grief or panic. This balance is a feat of tonal management, as scenes veer from absurdist comedy to gut-punch tragedy, and back again, with elegance and speed. It’s rare to see a cast sustain such momentum over a fast-cutting, kaleidoscopic script without missing emotional beats. Here, the agility is astonishing.
“It’s less like a three-act play and more like an album of songs,” Finnigan says of the structure. “You have to think about the builds and drops, where to let things breathe.”
Banerjee's direction supports this beautifully. The set, designed by Nick Schlieper, is deliberately minimal, a table, a few chairs, a space open to transformation. This allows for the rapid shifts in scene and mood, while also focusing attention squarely on the performers. But one element offers a persistent visual metaphor, trickling sand.
The sand is subtle at first, almost abstract. Is it time running out? The creation of new landscapes? A signal to notice what's slipping away? Over time, its presence accumulates, physically and emotionally, until it delivers a powerful crescendo near the play’s end. In a piece where most scenes vanish without a trace, the sand becomes the one thing that lingers, the residue of change, of impact, of loss.
There’s something remarkable about how much Scenes from the Climate Era makes room for laughter. And not the awkward, ironic kind, but genuine, well-earned comedy. Characters crack jokes in serious meetings. A father explains to his daughter how the world has changed by comparing it to a half-melted chocolate bar. A child questions the morality of bringing more children into the world. It's absurd, but so is the world we're living in.
“Humour sits alongside grief and despair in the piece,” Banerjee explains. “And I think that’s why it resonates. It’s an emotional whirlwind, not a lecture.”
This interplay is vital. Dread, after all, is paralysing. And as Finnigan notes, much of the Global North experiences climate change as dread, a terrifying future force that hasn't quite arrived. But in places like Australia, the Philippines, or Nepal, where Finnigan also works, the impacts are already visceral. “You don’t dread something that’s already here,” he says. “You live it.”
This play tries to collapse that distance. It doesn’t ask us to imagine climate change. It insists we recognise it, on a personal, cellular level.
Banerjee, one of the UK’s most exciting young directors, sees theatre’s real power in its intimacy. At the Playground Theatre, the audience is small, just 100 people each night. This makes the experience feel personal, even participatory.
“There’s a thesis in the play,” Banerjee says, “that what we need to survive is community. And being part of an audience for this piece embodies that. We’re literally in it together.”
In that sense, the venue itself becomes part of the play’s message. The audience doesn’t just watch, they bear witness. And perhaps most importantly, they leave with understanding, not overwhelm.
“We’re not being blamed,” one audience member said after opening night. “We’re being asked to care.”
One of the most vital contributions Scenes from the Climate Era makes is to reimagine the climate narrative. As cultural theorist Amitav Ghosh has written, the climate crisis is also a crisis of imagination. We've struggled to portray it in ways that feel immediate, relatable, or emotionally true. Theatre, at its best, is a corrective to that failure.
This play doesn’t propose solutions or rally cries. It doesn’t tell us to march, protest, compost, or vote, though it certainly wouldn’t mind if we did. Instead, it offers a kind of emotional truth-telling, a snapshot of the messy, contradictory way humans react when the world changes around them.
As Finnigan puts it, “Hope is important. But it won’t save us.”
What will? Possibly nothing. Possibly everything. Possibly just the choice to stay in the room together and talk honestly about where we are, what we feel, and what we still care enough to fight for.
Scenes from the Climate Era is not just a climate play. It’s a play about what it means to be human in a world that’s cracking open. It’s about love, fear, grief, absurdity, and the little gestures of meaning that survive even the most uncertain futures. It’s about what we pass on to the next generation, not just biologically, but emotionally, spiritually, culturally.
By the time the sand falls for the final time, you don’t feel bludgeoned or hopeless. You feel oddly alive. A little rattled. A little more awake.
It’s already here, the play says. And so are we.
🎭 SCENES FROM THE CLIMATE ERA will be performed at The Playground Theatre, London Tuesday 23 Sept – Saturday 25 Oct Tickets: https://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/book-online/SCENESCLIMATE