A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction – Shakespeare North Playhouse

For a play where its most significant feature is being ‘off the grid’, using self-generated power and a touch of candlelight, the Playhouse, styled as a mini-Globe with slightly better seating, seems like the perfect setting for it.

Tonight’s show, written by Miranda Rose Hall, and directed by Nathan Powell is an incredibly clever and fresh concept. The play tours, but not the people – everyone involved is from the local area.

The strip lighting and sound that encompasses the stage is produced from the efforts of four very hardy onstage cyclists, with a digital display that shows the wattage they are generating. It’s a highly creative and fascinating experiment in sustainable theatre.

The conceit is that one of the play’s actors has suffered a family emergency – her mother is dying. And so instead of choreography, taxidermy and nudity that the play apparently should contain, we get Naomi (Shareesa Valentine), the show’s Dramaturg, thrust into the pedal-powered limelight to narrate the play’s key themes for us.

What emerges is a faux-spitballing run through the life and times of Planet Earth from the perspective of its fragile climate. Along the way we get musings on our own responses to death and mortality and how personal trauma can be intertwined with the overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of mass extinction events.

Valentine is charming as Naomi, giving a convincing sense of improvisation to the piece. And whilst she may not trouble David Attenborough in the gravitas stakes of talking through the serious climate changes we all face, she is an engaging speaker.

There’s also some lovely music at the end courtesy of a patchwork choir made up of local signing groups. And the occasional dimming of the lights as the heroic cyclists ease up now and again, to wipe their brows or swig some water, feels almost allegorical of the ever-dwindling supplies of energy and materials we rely on for modern life.

At the end of the day, the freewheeling nature of our narrative leaves us with no real epiphany. There’s not enough time to really get into the nuance of what’s to be done – it’s too big an elephant to eat in an 65minute chunk.

Tonight is certainly a memorable experience but just a bit too inventive for its own good, as earnest entreaties to acknowledge the crisis we face, are lost to theatrical novelty.

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Reviewer: Lou Steggals

Reviewed: 17th May 2023

North West End UK Rating: