“I realised that actually, it’s impossible to change people’s minds, particularly if you set out to do it. If you set out to write something really important and meaningful and impactful, it’s probably going to be bad,” he says, acknowledging that he had made his share of “really bad didactic art” in the past.
“People can definitely tell when you’re trying too hard and they don’t like it. They want something that speaks to them on a level and doesn’t try and dress up a moral lecture in a fun story,” he says.
“You can’t anticipate how people will feel – everyone now is processing this huge thing of climate change in their own way, and on any given night, you’ll have 50 different responses to the same material,” he says.
With Scenes from a Climate Era, “there are no tricks, we’re sharing these stories because we are really switched on by them and excited to share them,” he says.
Electric
That said, Finnegan reports a change in the demographic of audiences at his plays. “The only people that would come to my plays 15-20 years ago would be really old school climate activists – very traditional conservationists, corduroy pants, socks and sandals.
“And they came to be told that the world was f***ed and that it was our fault. There was this self-flagellation vibe in the crowd. I never knew what to do with that,” he says.
In the past few years, this has shifted and people from all walks of life come to the shows. Rather than be ‘punished with bad news’, they want to be part of the conversation.
Colonisation
“With this show, audiences are coming with their own experiences and they want to talk about them. The conversations after the show have been electric. It feels like the show is facilitating a space for people to have their own discussions rather than being told how it is,” he says.
The fact that climate change has featured in far more theatre in recent years is “really exciting”. Just this year, Scenes from a Climate Era has followed Weather Girl and Kyoto as London plays host to this new genre.
“Theatre programmers I’ve spoken to tell me they’ve seen lots of scripts about climate, and people coming at it from all different angles.”
These are now going beyond the lens of science, activism and climate denial into plays dealing with issues such as queer identify and colonisation, he says. “These are conversations that are already underway and they’ve connected back to climate to identify the relationship between them.
“It’s a much richer space than it was even a few years ago.”
IPCC
For his next play, Finnegan is taking on a huge task – a dramatic adaptation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report.
The contents of the report will not be finalised till 2029, making the task of creating theatre out of it “deranged”, Finnegan jokes.
However, the chapter subjects are already published, and Finnegan is currently working with scientists leading the work on those, and workshopping potential scenes with actors at New York’s Public Theater.
“I’m concretely aware of what the material is going to be. How that becomes a night in the theatre is the real thing we’re experimenting with,” he says.
He compares the IPCC reports to epic poems like the Iliad, Odyssey or the Mahabharata. “These classic myths have stories within them, but they also contain the whole universe in the way that they’re told,” he says. “In many ways, the IPCC report is an epic poem for the present day – it’s an attempt to make sense of the entire world, how it all fits together, where we’ve come from and where we’re going.”
This Author
Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for The Ecologist. Find her on Bluesky @catearly.bsky.social.