You can’t accuse the British theatre of ignoring climate change: in fact, it was Steve Waters’s The Contingency Plan at the old Bush that in 2009 kicked off a spate of plays on the subject. But, much as I applaud the spirit behind Tanya Ronder’s new 95-minute piece, it spends too long circling around the big issue before launching into an impassioned moral debate.
The aggressive title clearly refers to people’s double standards: Gordon, Ronder’s hero, is a top guy in a big energy company who frets about the loss of his daughter’s toy polar bear while working on schemes that will wreck the planet’s animal life. But Gordon is a bit of a mess all round. At work, he’s been offered the post of chief executive with a licence from the government to pursue fracking operations. At home, however, his wife, Serena, bluntly tells him she doesn’t like their life, his housepainter brother acts as a rebuke to his conscience and domestic objects mysteriously go haywire. On top of that, the Icelandic au pair turns out to be a militant conservationist.
For much of its length, the play resembles one of those 70s movies that used to be dubbed “Yuppie nightmares”. The trouble is you start to wonder how Gordon could be such a big wheel in the corporate world and such a panic-stricken klutz at home. I presume Ronder’s point is that this is the result of the contradictions between his private beliefs and public postures. But it’s only in the last quarter of an hour that the play gets down to the nitty-gritty and starts to debate the real issues: Gordon and Serena finally start to wonder whether there is an alternative to their life of conspicuous consumption and aspirational solitude and discuss the future that awaits their daughter.
Many of the points raised, such as whether natural disasters will lead to mass migration and armed conflict, were aired by Stephen Emmott in his one-man play, Ten Billion, but they can never be heard too often.
The play is decently directed by Caroline Byrne, who uses a revolving stage to evoke spiralling chaos, and there are good performances from Andrew Whipp as the neurotic Gordon, Susan Stanley as his guilt-ridden, fitness-conscious wife and Jon Foster as his ex-addict brother. Ronder’s intention is clearly to use domestic comedy as a way of steering us towards a dialectical debate. It’s a reasonable aim but I found myself wishing she had cut to the chase and started her play at the point where it ends.
• At the Bush theatre, London, until 24 October. Box office: 020-8743 5050.
