Scenes from the Climate Era opens tomorrow at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre (IPAC), delivering nibbles of topics ranging from zombie mice to a post-aeroplane planet. Of the 50 scenes in David Finnigan’s play, actor Nic English is most looking forward to sharing the story of Smiley the frog.
“My favourite part of the play, I get to play a man who looks after the last remaining silver fringe-limbed tree frog in a shipping container,” Nic says.
Scenes from the Climate Era provides great scope for its actors, with five cast members performing 50 short plays.
“The play’s a series of scenes dealing with the climate era, climate crisis, climate science, everything really, from a whole bunch of different perspectives,” Nic says.
“I play, at one point, a husband talking to his partner about having a baby in the climate era and, at another point, a scientist in the '80s talking about predicting the climate on a computer and being sceptical about that."
Stan viewers may recognise Nic from TV's Ten Pound Poms, in which he played Robbie. The Sydney-based actor is new to Scenes from a Climate Era, having joined the cast just two weeks ago after finishing a show at Belvoir called Big Girls Don't Cry.
Fresh cast touring Scenes from a Climate Era
“Belvoir did the original production in 2023,” Nic says. “We have one returning cast member, but four new cast members, myself included, and we had a week to rehearse it, which is nuts, absolutely crazy.
“So I'm very proud of the work that we've put in, and very proud of the show.
“There's a couple of nods to policy and politics and stuff which get a bit of a chuckle. Have things changed? It feels like the conversations around the climate and action have kind of plateaued, I think, or taken a back seat to other issues.
“Hopefully this puts it back into people's conversation and starts them talking about it again.”
Laugh or cry
Nic is a millennial and, for his generation, one of the show's key takeaways is it’s okay to flip between hope and despair.
“You don't have to sit in one space for your entire life,” he says.
“It’s okay to despair but I think it's important to remember that you can always come back to hope.”
Nic says people have told him scenes stay with you long after the performance. “It's very funny. I hope it does provoke people to take a strong viewpoint, whatever it is. I think that's the value of good theatre.
“The play kind of has a theme of the stages that people go through when they're dealing with the climate crisis. I think that that resonates.”
Personally, starring in the play has “just fortified” his opinions.
“It's easy to be apathetic, so I think it's emboldened me.”
The show runs for an hour and 20 minutes with no interval and Merrigong Theatre Company recommends it for ages 15+.
“I think young people should see it,” Nic says, “because they are the people who are going to inherit whatever we leave behind.”
Local relevance
The Wollongong performances come after Labor’s landslide election win, a significant moment in the local energy transition, as former opposition leader Peter Dutton had promised to cancel the Illawarra's offshore wind zone if elected.
“That’s going to be fascinating, because there's a scene where we're talking about wind farms, and wind farms versus coal,” Nic says.
“Without giving anything too much away, there’s a scene in the play where it's a focus group in Mudgee and my character – he does wildlife rescue – just talks about how he'd prefer coal rather than wind farms, but he likes solar.
“It just unpacks the complexities around people's preferences when it comes to renewable energies. Like it's not a 'one size fits all' approach, and I think in order to engage people, you have to listen to what they're saying, what the concerns are, without being judgmental.
“That kind of scene, it's just really interesting to me, because I'd never thought of wind farms as being problematic.”
Modern misinformation doesn’t get a look in, nor does the nuclear debate, but 1980s anxieties rear their head in a scene that contains early hints at the politicisation of climate.
“I do a scene set in the '80s, playing a climate scientist who's unsure about the modelling around predicting the future based on a computer … and [my scientist character] goes, 'Oh, no, we know that is true, because that's measurable. But how do we predict the climate in 50 years based on all these different data points?'... ”
The show will be at IPAC from May 14-17 and Nic is looking forward to exploring Wollongong.
“If anybody does come and see it and they have had some questions or want to chat about it and they see us in the street, please come up and have a chat. We'd love to hear what your thoughts are.”
Tickets $55-$65, via the Merrigong website
