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2071: The Most Skull-Crushingly Dull Piece of Green Propaganda in the Planet's History

2071: The Most Skull-Crushingly Dull Piece of Green Propaganda in the Planet's History

Environmental catastrophe has been adapted from dry academic journals into countless worthy T-shirts, novels, movies, posters, pop songs, and opera. Even music festivals became a vehicle for raising the ecological consciousness of barely-conscious revellers.

The latest development in the green colonisation of the cultural sphere is the planet-saving stage play. This year, the Royal Court Theatre commissioned Duncan Macmillian and Chris Rapley to adapt for the stage the latter’s concerns about the state of the planet when his eldest granddaughter will be the age he is now, in 2071. That year gives the play its title.

This is not the first play of its kind. In 2012, the Royal Court Theatre was host to Stephen Emmot’s neo-Malthusian play-cum-lecture, Ten Billion, in which the Cantabrigian professor of computing imagined the disaster that would unfold on a world with a slightly larger population. Oh, the Humanity!

It is fitting that 2071, like Ten Billion before it, has a number for a title. Such glib numerical nomenclature reveals these productions’ lack of substance. You could mash the scripts of Ten Billion and 2071 together to get a play called 10,000,002,071. And you could divide it again into two, to get Five Billion, One-Thousand and 35 and a Half.

These performances would be, like their augend and addend, just lists – litanies of green whinges – given a sense of order only by a superficial narrative – numerical – arc. Like Sesame Street, ‘this episode of climate alarmism was brought to you today by the number…’

If you really want to know what this stage play formula is like, imagine a compulsory lecture on climate change at a low-tier university. On Saturday night. With Powerpoint. A city… no a world… of better offers exists outside. But you are trapped.

This is no exaggeration. Chris Rapley is keen to qualify his role as lecturer by professing his expertise in many things during the opening ten minutes (they felt like hours). One of those things is the cryosphere (the frozen parts of the planet), which is so-called because Rapley went there and bored entire mountains of ice to tears.

Rapley has since given up his snow mobile. Now he sits in a chair, from where, almost motionless, he freezes the brains of hundreds of people, each of whom seem to have volunteered themselves for this 70 minute ordeal of skull-crushingly dull ‘untertainment’ for up to £32 each. By the end of its ten-day run, some 3,600 individuals will have witnessed Rapley’s sedentary call to action.

Rapley reads his lecture from an autocue in a monotonous drone over a generic moody musical score, punctured by monochromatic and mostly meaningless abstract computer-generated visuals.  

We learn in what year a particular environmental organisation was established… How many scientists worked on a particular discovery… How many years remain before a particular feature of the environment would be reduced to what percentage of its former magnitude… How many years of unsustainable practice can be sustained before we commit ourselves to a particular form of apocalypse… How many governments have signed up a particular environmental treaty… And how many tonnes of blah can be blah-blah-blah before we blah blah blah blah blah. That’s it.

No really, that is it. That’s the ‘play’.

Even environmentalists have worked out that the scientist-turned-bureaucrat-turned-playwright is no entertainer. But even the critics who have called this play ‘dull’ have been kind. Dull but important, they stress. Really? Which one of those 3,600 willing saps didn’t already believe that ‘climate change is happening’, and that it is ‘the biggest challenge facing mankind’? Who went to this show unpersuaded, to learn something new, which they hadn’t already absorbed from the Guardian’s environment pages?

Other than the fact of the lecture-play being a relatively new format after Gore’s lecture-film, there has been very little innovation in climate alarmism since Gore. Post Climategates, post Copenhagen, post Kyoto, post Climate Change Act and post global warming pause, we might expect at least a hint of circumspection.

And there is plenty to criticise Rapley’s understanding for. His telling of the facts – if not his grasp of them – is strangely weak for a man with such alleged expertise. And it is because he is a scientist that we are supposed to take his stream of factoids as unimpeachable fact.

But climate alarmism, be it in book, movie or play form, does not do caution, and does not improve itself by yielding to criticism. The way these things are written is exactly as a dull cascade of factoids. Some are true. Some are half-true. And some are outright BS. The point is not persuasive argument, but the endless retelling of the green litany.

The environmentalist’s weapon is dull, mindless repetition. 2071, like so much before it, is neither a play, nor a lecture; it is a ritual. Nobody came to the ritual to learn something new any more than Rapley came with anything new to tell them. This is how environmentalism has infected the world: by boring it into submission, with its catalogue of imagined disasters, spreadsheets of doom, and Powerpoint presentations of despair.

It is not hard to work out how this latest miseryfest might have come about. The offices of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change are located just five second’s walk from the Royal Court Theatre. The luvvies and the Gaia-botherers were bound to converge in one of Sloane Square’s many opulent joints. The finest wine would be quaffed, and the most sustainably-sourced, ethically-reared food would be munched. Conversation would inevitably turn to how the Great and Good of Belgravia, Kensington and Chelsea could commission something to stop the rest of the world consuming so much.

Rapley’s play, if that is what it is, sounds like a Committee on Climate Change report being read out in a theatre being read out by a boring old man, because that is all that 2071 is.


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