There’s humour, science and a dash of radical politics in the climate show from Hello Collective. It pulls us in with early laughs before nudging us with satire and finishing with some important thoughts on where we should focus our efforts to save the planet. It even gives us a glimpse of those pesky climate activists who are forever getting in the way of people who want to make loads of money from their disposable planet.
Opening with a series of questions about climate change projected onto a back screen, the cast lip-syncs the answers to prerecorded voices with exaggerated facial expressions and bodily contortions. They are a kind of ABC checkpoint of “How do you feel about climate change” and “Do you know how global warming works.”
That section had most of the audience laughing at what I suspect was meant to indicate complacency among the public. It was quickly followed by a television-style game show to involve the audience. Next comes a dance, taking us to the plastic dumped in the oceans which you can eat for the delights of its carcinogenic properties. That leads to news of fashion industry productivity causing 10% of carbon emissions.
Things get more serious when they conjure up a show that mentions its CO2 sponsor, which irritated a woman in the audience enough for her to walk the aisle reading some stuff about climate change. Anyway, the staff cleared her from the room, accidentally knocking her to the ground. I guess she was part of the show, so no harm done.
Apart from this, we had the more important matter of a staged debate between Jim Johnson of the Democrats and John Jimson of the Republicans. Such a pair of lads they are! You could laugh at their pointlessness all night if it weren’t that one of the cast chairing the debate suddenly took us to real politics those politicians preferred to dodge.
What follows is an intense parade of frightening information about the climate crisis, including its immediate consequences of climate refugees from undeveloped countries created by the rich West such as the UK. Of course, if that means they can’t find food and water in their own country, our last government generously offered to send them to Rwanda.
We are reminded that all the talk of individual responsibility, of watching what we recycle etc, can be distracting from the 57 corporations responsible for climate change. It was, we hear, a fossil fuel company that invented the term “carbon footprint” to encourage us to think individual not collective or even corporate.
But the government are so concerned about this issue, they have in recent years locked away 125 climate protesters for more than six weeks each, and as for the Just Stop Oil five who chatted on a Zoom call about blocking a road to draw attention to government inaction, they got up to five years.
As far as I know, there has never been a fossil fuel boss even slapped on the wrist for destroying the planet. That demonstrates government priorities.
As the show ends with the cast telling us “there is no theatre on a dead planet”, we can hear the sound of crowds of protesters outside.