Steve Waters’s double bill about global heating, The Contingency Plan, is even more relevant today than when it was first performed in 2009. As the BBC’s publicity for its recent series Frozen Planet II puts it, we are living on “a planet on the brink of major change”.
Each play stands alone, or can be experienced as a pair, in any order. I saw On the Beach, directed by Chelsea Walker, first. The writing has echoes of Ibsen or Arthur Miller: fates of individuals are connected to wider realities; the consequences of past actions (or inactions) disrupt the present and threaten the future.
Will, a glaciologist, returns home to the north Norfolk coast from the Antarctic with news for his reclusive parents. Birds call across an expanse of flat greyness, the open, sea-lapped space (sound design by Giles Thomas; set by Georgia Lowe). A storm approaches. His data on ice-sheet melt indicates that “the tempo of change is off the scale”; sea levels are rising fast; the next storm surge could bring catastrophic floods. Encouraged by his senior civil servant girlfriend, Sarika, to “scare the crap out of this government”, he has decided to take up a post in Westminster as an adviser on climate action.
Will’s father’s, Robin, who was also a glaciologist, opposes Will’s decision. As the two men clash, Robin reveals that he made a similar decision 40 years earlier; it broke him. Now, thwarted and obsessive, Robin is terrifying in his anger, fragile in his brokenness (a terrific performance from Peter Forbes); against him, Joe Bannister’s Will is both combative and cowed. Robin’s disillusioned pessimism and Will’s hopeful idealism are positioned at opposite poles of a crucial question: at what point must data-gathering give way to action?
Resilience, directed by Caroline Steinbeis, takes up this question and explores its follow-on: what form must action take? The intersecting grey slabs of Lowe’s design now suggest the confines of a government bunker. Will is introduced to the new Ministry for Resilience by Sarika (Kiran Landa injects life into a thinly written character). In calling for immediate, drastic measures to protect against flooding, Will again finds himself opposing the entrenched views of an older glaciologist. Colin (also played by Forbes) was a colleague of Will’s father in the 1970s (it was he who dismissed Robin’s early intimations of global heating). Now, Colin advises ministers on the climate crisis: “Nothing is ever achieved by forcing the pace.” The two men’s argument, based on facts but sharpened by emotions, has real dramatic heft. This time, Will wins.
From now on, the focus of the play becomes fuzzy. As a potentially lethal storm surge threatens, Will has to decide whether his data justifies costly action. His dilemma, though, is shared by the politicians whose careers will be on the line if he makes the wrong call: pragmatic Tessa (a crisp Geraldine Alexander; also Will’s mother in On the Beach) and the caustic, entitled, cowardly Chris (horribly credible Paul Ready). The subject matter is still deadly serious but the tone shifts to comic-satiric (a mix of Yes, Minister with The Thick of It and Don’t Look Up!). The effect is dislocating.
Where Resilience offers laugh-aloud humour, On the Beach is more emotionally and dramatically satisfying. Compelling arguments in both remind us: we have only one Earth – there can be no contingency plan.
Star ratings (out of five)
On the Beach ★★★★
Resilience ★★★
