Anticlimactic though fully climatic, 2071 is a lecture, not a play, on the perils facing mankind if we don't act on the obvious changes our climate is experiencing.John Gaden portrays the teleprompted professor, espousing the words of Chris Rapley, Professor of Climate Change at the University College, London, who is attributed as co-author of this facts and figures foray into the folly of not heeding the meteorological evidence and acting post haste lest we suffer an environmental apocalypse.
This 2017 presentation of 2071 has been fashioned by co-writer Duncan Macmillan, a dab hand at numerical inverting, having recently adapted George Orwell's 1948 novel, 1984, into a play.
Unprecedented is a word that is repeated in what is basically a seventy minute monologue interspersed with collaborative emphasis from the sextet of youth.
The Professor ruminates on the unprecedented change in climate since he first became intimately and intricately involved with the science in 1957, the International Geophysical Year, sixty years ago.
He then presents a litany of the horological environmental events like the melting of the ice caps that are heralding the ecological holocaust to come.
Presented in association with Australian Theatre for Young People, the supporting cast is entirely made up of ATYP performers Lucy Brownlie, Sasha Rose, Ellery Joyce, Matthew Simmons, Jacqueline Morrison and Heath Jelovic.
The use of these children, merely their very presence on the stage, is a powerful reminder that our current and future generations are both the inheritors of unprecedented climate change and, hopefully, the innovators of its containment and management.
Rapley's parting words of the project are personal yet universal:
“My eldest granddaughter will be my age in 2071. What will be our legacy to her and the generations to come. What kind of future do we want to create?”
We must take big steps now to reduce the size of our carbon footprint.
Or we won’t have a leg to stand on.
Seymour Centre presents
2071: A Performance About Climate Change
by Duncan Macmillan and Chris Rapley
Venue: Everest Theatre | Seymour Centre, Cnr Cleveland Street and City Road, Chippendale
Dates: 26 May – 10 June 2017
Tickets: $43 – $35
Bookings: 02 9351 7940 | www.seymourcentre.com
