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Royal Court, London
Climate change drama is the new growth industry. But, while the National's Greenland is entirely issue-driven, Richard Bean's new play uses characters to explore ideas. The result is provocative, funny, contrarian and stimulating. It is also overlong; by the end of three hours, you feel Bean has not so much lost the plot as provided almost too much of it.
He starts from a promising premise: the isolation of Dr Diane Cassell, a leading light in the earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university. Her speciality is measuring sea levels in the Maldives, and her pragmatism leads her to conclude they have not risen in 20 years. Inevitably her climate-change scepticism lands her in trouble: she gets death threats from Sacred Earth Militia, is at odds with her anorexic Greenpeace daughter, and is eventually suspended by her faculty boss and former lover. Her consolation is a student, Ben, whom she induces to share her strictly scientific approach to global warming.
I found the first half of Bean's play pugnacious and entertaining. He is good on the dangers of heterodox thinking, the absurdity of academic bureaucracy, and the problems of treating climate change as a quasi-religion. He also writes one bitingly funny scene in which his heroine finds herself grilled by Jeremy Paxman in an exchange that spreads more heat than light.
But one question kept nagging me: does Bean admire his heroine because of her courageous independence, or because he believes she is right? Would he extend the same charity, I wondered, to a flat-earth advocate?
Having raised a host of big issues in the first half, he loses sight of them in the second. By now the action has shifted to Dr Cassell's country cottage, and a host of new questions arise: rigged scientific data, the extremism of the climate change lobby, the possibility of the heroine's reconciliation with her daughter and ex-lover. What starts as a mordant satire ends in a warm glow of humanist sentiment.
Even if Bean bombards us with incident, Jeremy Herrin's production keeps us watching. Juliet Stevenson brings a crisp intelligence, a steely wit, and just the right hint of inflexibility to her portrayal of the science-driven Diane. Johnny Flynn is totally magnetic as the gangling Ben, whose trendy rap dialogue conceals an original mind, and there is good work from James Fleet as the line-toeing faculty boss who is as anxious to get into bed with commercial sponsors as he is with Diane. But, while I don't resent Bean's questioning of conventional wisdom, he never achieves the perfect dramatic balance between the personal and political.
