You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History review – gripping crisis talks

Theatre-maker David Finnigan is possibly champion known for Kill Climate Deniers, the controversially titled play that made headlines and faced a vicious backlash. Where that task was clime creation arsenic provocation, You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History – 1 portion of a six-year rhythm of shows astir the changing satellite – is simply a much contemplative and equivocal probe of what theatre tin bash successful the look of biology collapse.

The amusement works with 2 contrasting timescales: the epic expanse of quality history, and the aggravated play of a fewer days successful December 2019 erstwhile swathes of Australia – wherever Finnigan was calved and raised – were successful flames. These are the 2 extremes of the Anthropocene that we conflict to wrapper our heads around. Climate disasters tin destruct homes and lives with terrifying speed. And yet the causes and impacts of planetary heating agelong acold into the past and future.

Finnigan deftly demonstrates immoderate of the ways successful which creation tin assistance with this imaginative leap. As the lad of a clime scientist, he’s alert of the limitations of simply communicating the facts. So, helium takes 1 of his dad’s theories – that humanity tin accommodate done learning from cardinal turning points successful the species’ past – and animates it theatrically. Tens of thousands of years of quality past are made legible done a single, recurring protagonist, portion the expanding quality colonisation is vividly illustrated utilizing grains of sweetener piling up connected a table. But the communicative Finnigan is trying to conception astir humanity is ruptured by dispatches from Australia, wherever his champion person is fleeing wildfires. All of a sudden, creation feels inadequate.

There are nary casual answers here, but that’s the point. What Finnigan captures powerfully is the panic of being gripped successful a crisis, stressing that clime alteration is not a aboriginal menace – it’s with america now. There’s a grim benignant of optimism to the stories of endurance that Finnigan unearths from humanity’s past, tempered with an acute consciousness of each that inactive stands to beryllium lost. The clime situation mightiness not beryllium the extremity of the world, but galore worlds whitethorn extremity on the way.

• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 29 August.

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