Green drama, at last

I have something rather shocking to report. I went to see a dramatisation of climate change last week – a play called Resilience – which was eerily accurate, funny, pointed, powerful and moving. For me there’s always been a mixture of dread and guilt as one is presented with a documentary or fictional account of the issue. Al Gore served his purpose with An Inconvenient Truth but I’m loathe to sit through it again. Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour was Gore-light with added disaster clichés (burning forests, ice sheets melting etc) that prompted boredom rather than a call to action . I admit to my shame not having caught The Age of Stupid, a film set in the future where humans are pilloried for not acting earlier as the true consequences of their inaction and folly are exposed. So playwright Steve Waters’ The Contingency Plan double bill at the Bush Theatre in West London had something of a point to prove. To walk the tightrope between drama and melodrama, to being informative in science and politics without shoving the writings of Monbiot or Lovelock down our throats. To entertain. He performed the balance brilliantly.

What Waters does in the second part of the double bill is to cleverly poise the play between the present and the near future. In this respects he finds the drama, by foreseeing a time when the political urgency relating to the issue will be real not rhetorical. Namely, when the physical effects of climate change are bearing down on us. The drama raise the question: what will happen when floods and storms threaten coastal areas in the UK and, heaven forbid, our capital?

Two themes emerge from this. The first is the age old tension between politics and science. The former demands certainty, simplicity and slickness of message and communication. The latter can rarely deliver this, especially in the particularly thorny task of predicting what nature will do in the short or long term. Towards the end of the play Chris, the Cameron-esque new Conservative minister of climate change ridicules Will, the idealistic glaciologist who finds himself thrust into the role of government scientific advisor, as “Nostradamus” for his attempts at predicting future weather patterns.

The second theme is the prospect of an intriguing political about turn that could take place once extreme weather come into the picture on our shores. Could conservatism actually embrace climate change? Waters posits that it could be from two angles. The first is defending the country: not from foreign invasion or from immigration or Europe, but our countryside and nature. Politician Chris sums it up:

My love for this country comes out in the strangest ways…. such as my love for the avocet (a bird)… I consider the avocet the quintessential English bird. I think avocet and immediately I see a levee over a salt marsh, a network of creeks, the distant North Sea as dark as flint…

The reason I am here, the reason I am endangering my already imperilled marriage and why I have taken a 200% cut in income is to defend the that avocet and all it brings in its train from change – climate change – but any change truly because frankly I can imagine no alteration of any of that which is not a diminishment.

Tessa, the opposing political figure in the drama, puts her finger on the second reason why the reactionary may be inspired by climate change. That of a return to traditional values of thrift, a “nanny state” and wartime urgency. “I find all this (crisis) salutary. It puts us back in our place. A salutary lesson in human limitation, I think,” as she puts it.

So with our landscape and people imperilled political goalposts could shift dramatically, Waters appears to be arguing. Will is is forced into offering a series of dramatic policy proposals at the end of the first half of the play:

Demolish all house that are not carbon neutral. Convert all of East Anglia to wetland as a protective sump. Carbon rationing universally applied. One car per street. Cease road construction, in fact begin to close roads…

Is that what you’re looking for?

They sound ridiculous at that point in the drama but Waters moves proceedings on so far that by the end of the play they don’t sound quite so  stupid. And in the title of the play he manages to mix the multiple meanings of the word brilliantly: the scientific definition (the Sustainable Development Commission offers a handy to the science of resilience), the scope of our democratic resilience as well as our resilience as individuals and as a community. Tessa responds to Will’s green wishlist by spelling out the action we took during the Second World War:

Nearly 100% drop  in car use, 100% rise in agricultural production, malnutrition abolished! Within five years. In the middle of a war. This, this is the resilience we’re talking about, surely.

So Waters has delivered entertainment, emotion and, above all, true drama. To make another comparison, this time with another recent political satire, the film In the Loop, Resilience actually has a point to it. It’s not dealing with mere verbal pyrotechnics and utter ridicule against the political class. It manages to combine a sharp-as-a-tack feel for science and the working of Whitehall with pyschological depth and understanding. Glad I missed the Champions League final for it.

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