Review: A PLAY FOR THE LIVING IN A TIME OF EXTINCTION, Barbican Theatre

What's the point of doing a show if we are all going to die? No seriously. What can art say when it stares into the face of environmental catastrophe and existential annihilation? Director Katie Mitchell's answer: nothing. It cannot even look in the first place. The question itself is incomprehensible. So don't bother trying.

A Play for Living in the Time of Extinction is an anti-theatrical ice bath of an experience.
It starts with Lydia West emerging onto stage, house lights still blaring, to tells us there was an actual play about the climate, about oil, with all the dramatic bells and whistles you would imagine it to have. She apologises; she is just the dramaturg and one of the performers' mothers is in hospital after a fall so it must be cancelled.

But there never was a play; instead there is only something close to a hyper-stylised exhibit at the Natural History Museum underpinned with the melancholic nausea of Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. The dramaturg narrates the potted history of the earth over an hour. A wade through millions of years from the Primordial soup up to now: the sixth mass extinction that we are living through and is having catastrophic impacts.

It starts like 2001: A Space Odyssey except there is no Strauss; instead the gentle whir of bicycle chains from on stage bikes that are peddled to power the show echoes throughout the room ominously. White neon lights keep them in view. The visuals are kept minimal: there is a spotlight, a microphone and West, all surrounded in oppressive darkness.

Whether in virtue of or despite of its visual asceticism it is deeply emotional. The subject matter is so depressing that you can feel an immense weight gathering in your chest, even if what theatrical elements remain are contrived.

No sugar can help this bitter pill go down. Yet we must swallow it regardless. Perhaps climate catastrophe is more like the sun: impossible to look at directly. We can only gesture towards it. A Play for Living in the Time of Extinction is exactly that: an artistic gesture, not an answer.

West extrapolates from the singular to the universal. She focuses on the death of a family member and uses it as an imaginative leap to try and visualise the death of a species. A singular voice to a final chorus (which actually emerges at the end, again a little contrived) with plenty of stats about climate change thrown in along the way.

Walking out one ought to ask not "what do you think?" but rather "how do you feel?" Some will be overcome by so-called 'climate anxiety.' Some will see it as a desperately needed wake-up call. Some will accept our seemingly inevitable fate. Despite everything there something powerfully cathartic about it all.

A Play For Living in the Time of Extinction plays at the Barbican Theatre until 29 May

Photo credit: Helen Murray

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