Writer: Miranda Rose Hall
Director: Katie Mitchell
A squad of people on fixie bikes power all the electricity for Headlong’s new show currently at the Barbican. While it’s a nifty way to approach the subject of climate change, the play never suggests that cycle power should be the future of theatre. Instead, the cyclists are left to spin on their own while Lydia West gives a lecture on how the Earth is dying.
Of course, this is not new news. We know all too well that the most invasive species ever seen on Earth is destroying the ecosystem and that this destruction is happening at an alarming pace. Even though we may not want to face the brutal facts, we know the future doesn’t look good. Can Miranda Rose Hall’s script frame the impending doom in a new way?
Not really. Her show plays out like an emotional TED Talk as Lydia West, playing a dramaturg called Naomi, tells us that we are living in the middle of a mass extinction; the sixth. The Earth has seen a few already; including the one that killed the dinosaurs and the very romantically named The Great Dying that occurred about 250 million years ago. But this will be the first extinction brought about by one of Earth’s species.
Reading from an iPad, presumably fuelled by the cyclists behind her, West is an impassioned speaker, but she is less convincing when she takes ‘time-outs’ to control her tears. These moments seem very scripted. Her delivery is better when she shouts about the horrors that scientists found when entering caves where bats hibernate. These stories are more effective than showing photographs of animals and plants that are most at risk of becoming extinct.
Director Katie Mitchell keeps the focus on the lecture style for most of the 70-minute show, and so West is often stranded behind a microphone, only raising her arms at key moments, but there are so many of these key moments that the arm gesture very quickly loses its impact. There is some audience participation too, but the Barbican’s vast space makes this awkward.
Rather than a call to arms – it is too late for action – A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction is an elegy to what has gone and to what is about to go. Its defeatist view is depressing and although a choir arrives at the end to sing a song, perhaps to lift the audience’s spirits, it’s difficult to work out the lyrics.
Like the cyclists, who despite their gutsy pedalling, go nowhere, Headlong’s play doesn’t take us anywhere we’ve not been before. David Attenborough does this kind of speech every Sunday on TV. At least he gives us a slither of hope for the future.
Runs until 29 April 2023
