Listen to any politician campaign for longer than a few minutes and they will speak of growth, usually economic growth. They, along with the media, are forever talking about the need to increase our production. It is taken for granted that social development is always in one direction, towards more and better.
Those with an eye on climate science point out that such an approach is neither inevitable nor necessarily a good thing.
The Climate Fables The Trash Garden imagines a world that has gone into reverse. Species are almost entirely extinct, the planet is suffering fantastic heat and the last two humans, Evelyn (Kristen Hoffman) and Atlas (Luis Feliciano), spend their time messing about in a garden full of cardboard and plastic waste. Evelyn would like to write but they are illiterate.
They wear thin black plastic bin liners and even live on a diet of plastic. Sometimes they try to play games they recall from childhood. They are unable to have any children. They see no future for themselves beyond perhaps a return to God. Occasionally, they imagine figures from a past that might never have happened.
Sitting before a cardboard creation labelled “Oija board”, they conjure up David Attenborough (played by Padraig Bond on the occasion I saw the play) who briefly comments on the backward disintegration of the human world.
Eventually, in a scene reminiscent of the biblical origin story, an unnamed stranger tempts Evelyn with an apple. Atlas is visited by his dad and has a dream of an exploding oil rig.
There are moments of humour in this dystopian end-of-the-world glimpse of what humans are creating. It should act as warning. However, as a story or satirical sketch, it has only a slight narrative and no dramatic tension.
The Climate Fables: The Trash Garden is a companion piece to The Climate Fables: Debating Extinction taking place on alternate days in the same venue.