Theatre preview: A short section in Australian writer David Finnigan’s play Scenes from the Climate Era depicts a solitary tree frog, the very last of its species in the world. “Smiley”, kept in an aquarium to guard against disease, has suddenly started croaking, calling for a mate. But there will never be a reply.
The scene, called “The Vigil”, is based on a true story about “Toughie”, the last Rabbs’ fringe-limbed tree frog. Endemic to Central America, the Rabbs were ravaged by a fungal infection in the early 2000s. When scientists transferred a small group of them, including a male they called Toughie, to an adapted container in Atlanta’s botanical gardens, they continued to die.
With Toughie’s death in 2016, the species is thought to have become extinct. Goodbye, Toughie; goodbye, Smiley.
“These creatures, they’re not coming back,” mourns the scene’s narrator, as he cites other species that have also recently vanished. “They’ve been on the planet for millions of years, and soon they’ll be gone forever.”
The Rabbses’ fate has some resonance with New Zealand’s endangered Archey’s frog, which is threatened by proposed changes to mining regulations on stewardship land.
This worries a lot of people, but not Resources Minister Shane Jones, who stated in Parliament that if mining was “impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddy”, blasting “the hysteria surrounding climate change”.
Finnigan hadn’t heard of Jones vs Freddy when he wrote the frog scene, but he has now. He has seen it all before.
“Unfortunately, that story is not an isolated incident,” he says on the phone from his London home, shortly after reading a news story on Jones’s speech. “It’s a sort of callous and pathetic immaturity towards a species that has been here for millions of years and will go extinct under our watch.”
Scenes from the Climate Era, which debuted last year at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, adapts to whichever countries it travels to. Its season in Auckland, a partnership between Auckland Theatre Company and Silo Theatre, is directed by Jason Te Kare, starring Dawn Cheong, Nī Dekkers-Reihana, Arlo Green, Sean Rivera and Amanda Tito.
The play features some New Zealand-specific events immersed within a fast sequence of about 30 scenes modelling life within the new climate era.
“At the end of the 20th century, we were like, ‘There’s this crisis and we need to stop doing this thing to maintain the world we have,’” says Finnigan. “That is the world we had and it is gone. What we need to do is build a whole new world … and we need to do this in the face of shocks that are coming faster and larger.”
New Zealand climate writer Tom Doig, editor of the 2021 book Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices From Aotearoa, was Finnigan’s guide for the Auckland version. “Tom gave me lots of steers on the conversation happening on the ground in New Zealand. It’s extraordinary right now, really fascinating.”
The New Zealand scenes include a character complaining that he didn’t like the show – “I want to see something fun” – but Finnigan’s intent is to unsettle and challenge. Sydney’s Time Out described the play as creating “a shudderingly wide-ranging awareness”.
One scene, “Three Field Recordings”, takes the audience through three aural snapshots of the health of the Waikato River region’s biodiversity. It starts out well enough in 2003, with the roar of the river, the multiple cacophony of native birds, the singular cry of a morepork. The last recording, in 2043, features the sound of traffic and one lonely call. What an appalling prospect.
“What really does my head in is to think about how we might look back in 20 years’ time and think, ‘I can’t believe we had such a rich, biodiverse world as we had in 2024,’” says Finnigan. “Right now is the most biodiverse moment that you and I will live in for the rest of our lives.”
Finnigan is not a climate scientist, but he grew up with one. His father, John Finnigan, heads the Centre for Complex Systems Science at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, in Canberra. Finnigan senior, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, specialises in the intersection of atmospheric systems, the environment and the economy.
“I grew up around scientists, my dad and his friends and colleagues who were having those debates about climate change back in the 80s, right through to today,” says Finnigan. “I guess I have had a front-row seat to seeing how that shifted and moved, and some of the ways climate met policy which met business, law, culture, behaviour and the arts.
“All of these things impacted in waves that moved in different directions. I have always been so fascinated by them and that is the wave I have been on my whole life … science is one way I have found that story.”
Finnigan, 41, started making “plays about this stuff” about 20 years ago. “You couldn’t drag people along to see shows about the climate,” he admits. “The only people who came were activists, who came to be told the world was fucked and it was all our fault. There was a kind of self-flagellation vibe in the crowd.”
One of his earlier plays, a 2014 eco-terrorism satire called Kill Climate Deniers, which received funding from the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) government, got Finnigan into trouble. After being targeted by conservative Australian broadcaster Andrew Bolt and the far-right-leaning Breitbart News in the US, the play was cancelled. Finnigan rewrote the script and it was staged in 2018 at Griffin Theatre in Sydney and won the $10,000 Griffin Award for a new play.
“Before Kill Climate Deniers, I was trying to write something that pleased everyone, trying to inspire hope, and I felt I was contorting what I wanted to say,” he says. “But with Kill Climate Deniers, I let go, and suddenly you’re in the conversation with all these right-wing outlets and it became a really febrile space. It wasn’t a fun time.”
These days, Finnigan occupies a space where his expertise as a climate science communicator is welcomed in projects with University College London, the World Bank, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Australian Academy of Science.
Scenes from the Climate Era is the third chapter of a six-episode series called You’re Safe, platformed by the Barbican Theatre in London. “I am deep into the writing of the next work now,” he says. “I am looking at the IPCC [the United Nations’ Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change] report, the big report that thousands of scientists get together to write every six-eight years that gives a snapshot of the climate.”
Fun times, and indeed Finnigan plans to sign off You’re Safe with a huge eight-hour “durational performance” dance party, tracing the history of humanity over the past 75,000 years and looking into the future, if we have one.
“The tool of theatre is the worst possible thing you could choose to look at something as big and abstract as climate change, but that contradiction is what I love,” he says. “With Scenes from the Climate Era, we are not trying to dress up this show and pretend it’s a fun comedy with secret lessons. These stories are exciting because they are true.”
Scenes from the Climate Era, is at Q Theatre, Auckland, until August 24.
