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Just over a decade ago, the auteur director Katie Mitchell staged a show at the Royal Court called ‘Ten Billion’. Essentially a lecture about overpopulation (by scientist Stephen Emmott), it wasn’t flashy but it was focussed and powerful, enhanced but not overwhelmed by Mitchell’s interjections.
‘A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction’ is like the gigantic mutant descendant of ‘Ten Billion’: at its heart a lecture on the subject of extinction, but souped up far beyond the small scale of its distant theatrical ancestor. It still has a quasi-lecture format, but with a text by US playwright Miranda Rose Hall that’s performed by an actor, it’s essentially a dramatic monologue.
It’s also notable for reasons that go beyond the individual performances: produced by trailblazing company Headlong, its Barbican dates come as part of a tour that doesn’t actually tour. That is to say, the Moi Tran-designed set is locally sourced and replicated at each venue, as are the performers. It’s an intriguing concept to engage with critically: normally a critic wouldn’t comment on tour dates or logistics, but it strikes me that this is all part of the theatre of the show, perhaps the most effective part. Precisely how much carbon is saved feels less relevant than the rhetorical flourish of suggesting imminent, drastic change to our behaviour is required.
That’s a rhetoric that extends to the staging. The London performance marks the stage debut of ‘It’s a Sin’ star Lydia West, who offers a few minutes of preamble before grandly declaring that ‘we’re going off grid’, gesturing for the Barbican house lights to be switched off and summoning a group of black-clad cyclists, whose efforts on a series of wired up stationary bikes power a much lower energy secondary grid, and fills the air with an ominous whirring. You could clearly save more energy by having the cyclists pumping away from the off. But the gesture is much more powerful this way.
Hall’s play is a mixed bag. It begins with the slightly confusing conceit of West being the dramaturg for a hokey-sounding touring company, who were touring an eco-themed production she describes as ‘a carnival of death’ and ‘an unscientific apocalyptic bacchanal’. But her two colleagues have been called away, leaving her to complete the show’s tour herself.
This stuff feels… a bit extraneous, and is soon all but abandoned. It gives way to a more lecture-like show, beginning with a section in which West talks us through the Earth’s five previous mass extinctions (we’re living through the sixth). The tone teeters on the ironic, as members of the audience are asked to come up on stage and dance the role of the Earth’s first trees, or talk on a roving mic about a body of water that meant something to them as a child… which sounds horribly earnest, but I’m pretty sure it was all intended as a sort of semi-parody of climate change theatre. Pretty sure.
What is indisputably great about it is West’s performance. It’s not high-concept character work, but as a version of herself freaking out over animal extinctions, she’s terrific. It’s her matey charisma that gets us through the more tongue-in-cheek earlier bits, and it’s her horror and dismay that helps the most successful, final section land. There is a gut-churningly powerful long sequence in which she reads out the names of a series of plants and animals recently extinct or nearing extinction while photos and footage of the creatures are displayed and Paul Clark’s ghostly, dissonant music sounds out. And late on, her horrified description of the dying out of brown bats is searingly effective.
In the end, though, I struggled with the play as a whole. Mitchell’s low carbon flourishes feel like a coherent gesture about our need for change. But Hall’s text is all over the shop, from ironic beginnings, to earnest but brief stabs at intersectionalism (linking climate change to white supremacy), to trying to convey the scale and emotional weight of extinction, to a faintly bewildering earth-motherish ending. Where ‘Ten Billion’ and its Mitchell-directed sister show ‘2071’ essentially felt like coherent lectures that sacrificed some drama for the sake of well-articulated scientific argument, Hall’s text is good at conveying extinction as an emotional weight, but otherwise feels too scattergun to really argue a point beyond ‘extinction is sad for humans’.
In the end ‘A Play for the Living…’ is more successful as a gesture than drama – the logistics of its tour and staging have a clear point that the actual show lacks. Perhaps it’s more important that critics share the means of its staging than pass glowing judgement on it as entertainment - so in that respect, it’s job done.