Why are we humans hurtling towards environmental hell? Because there are too many of us. We’re joint authors of a big fat eco-disaster, but no institution or individual will take overall responsibility because noone is entirely to blame. Which raises a question: why on this imperilled Earth did the National Theatre decide to lumber its new climate change drama with the same flaws as the crisis it’s supposed to expose?
‘Greenland’ is a multi-authored ecological disaster. Four talented writers (Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne) have contributed stories that have about as much common ground as BP and Greenpeace. And the two well-respected hands on the tiller can’t steer it away from disaster. Headlong’s dramaturg Ben Power and director Bijan Sheibani merely wrap a slightly surreal Rupert Goold-style packaging around four plots which are thinner than the South Pole’s ozone layer. If ‘Greenland’ is the ‘Enron’ of climate change, then I’m Father Christmas.
The characters drown in a rising tide of graphs, hectoring stats and moments of utterly unsustainable visual beauty. They’re all climate change clichés anyway: the dull couple who row over recycling; the geographer who counts birds in the frozen north; the bewilderingly globe-hopping activist. Topical plays need to hit a nerve, but ‘Greenland’ has been lapped several times by reality: Ed Miliband is the Energy Secretary in the main story, which reimagines the 2009 Copenhagen Climate conference as a dingy shagfest for rogue scientists, hacks and politicos. Watching a hugely credible actress like Lyndsey Marshal flinging herself into a three-scene love story which has as much depth as a crushed can is an object lesson in waste.
Power and Sheibani throw everything they’ve got at the audience: plastic bottles shower down on the stage; the stroppy teenage activist floats around in a shopping trolley (recycled from ‘Hamlet’, one hopes); shredded paper and a wind machine create a gorgeous Arctic snowstorm. But not even the cuddly animatronic polar bear – or thumping song and dance routines – can save this titanically misguided enterprise. The National doesn’t often err but maybe, if this and 2008’s North Pole-set stinker of a rhyming play, ‘Fram’, are anything to go by, it should steer clear of the Arctic and stay closer to home.