Writer: Ben Wendel
Directors: Emily Hawkins and James Christensen
Full of ambition, Ben Wendel’s new play Anthropocene is both an environmental thriller and a moving coming-of-age story. Featuring outstanding acting from its cast of four and some startling lights from Wendel, if one play needs a transfer after Camden Fringe, it’s this one.
Wendel’s story is riveting, but directors Emily Hawkins and James Christensen use their vision to make the play vital and exciting, no easy task in the small Barons Court Theatre. The narrative of a 15-year-old girl grieving the death of her scientist mother is peppered with vignettes depicting creation itself. It sounds like an impossible task, but the creative team produces some stunning scenes to show how life was formed on Earth.
Set in 1974, Anthropocene starts with the death of the mother. Focussed entirely on her work in environmental science, she hasn’t been the best mother to Diana, who remembers her mother as either working in the lab or lying on a hospital bed. In a wonderfully precise memory, Diana recalls that on the trips to the cancer ward, she often sat in the back of the car with her parents in front. As her mother became more sick, positions were reversed with Diana taking the passenger seat and her mother sitting in the back.
Understandably, Diana finds mourning her mother difficult and even proclaims that she wishes her mother had died earlier. Diana’s father surprisingly doesn’t defend his wife, agreeing with Diana that she was an awful mother, who increasingly became exorcized at the university where she worked. But when Diana finds her mother’s notebook, filled with theories about creation and apocalypse, she becomes eager to carry on her controversial work.
As she pores over books on virology, scenes of man’s evolution are staged. We see monkeys fighting and wolves being domesticated. At one point, in a scene entitled The Ballet of Pollen, the actors have to pretend that they are giant trees “ejaculating” their pollen into the air. It shouldn’t work – actors pretending to be trees is everyone’s worst nightmare – and yet these sections are executed brilliantly and imaginatively, all to Ross Baille-Eames’s ominous music and Heather Holme’s blue-hued projections. They look rather grand and momentous.
Perhaps there is one error in this retelling of Earth’s story. We witness the demise of the dinosaurs caused by a meteorite crashing into what is now known as Mexico, but this theory wasn’t postulated until 1980, while the play is set six years earlier. A scientist whom Diana befriends talks of “clean energy”, but was this term popular then?
Anachronisms aside, Anthropocene is still a gripping play, serious without ever being too weighty, its 90 minutes never too long. In many ways, it shares the same ideas proposed in Rachel Kushner’s excellent recent novel Creation Lake, although the book challenges our perceived knowledge about evolution.
Rosie Yates is effortlessly convincing as Diana, the girl who sublimates her grief into research, while her nihilist best friend George is played well by Jasper Price. As Dr Johann, Naomi Paxton puts in a fantastic turn, and Patrick Strain is Diana’s gruff but empathetic father. Together with the creative team, they produce theatre at its finest.
Runs until 17 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
