The philosopher Bruno Latour is a showman of difficult truths. In his strange performance-cum-lecture Moving Earths he depicts “social and cosmic order lurching towards a parallel political and ecological collapse”. Latour has extensively used theatre to communicate arguments concerning microbiology, political speech, geology, cosmology, democracy, theology and all the aspects of existence that – he states in this show – are “trembling” to their roots because of the climate crisis.

Equal parts spectacle, sermon, experiment, hypothesis and incantation, Moving Earths relates Galileo’s heretical heliocentric beliefs to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of a self-regulating, dynamic, intimate Earth. It concludes with two stark images: a Last Supper-like shot of the Biarritz G7 climate summit table, with an empty chair for Trump-Judas; and the iconic glimpse of Greta Thunberg scowling as Trump eclipses her at the UN. For Latour, these two protagonists “inhabit different planets – Trump’s is without limits, and Greta’s is trembling and terribly finite; we realise we hardly know it, and it is changing out of control.”

Lowering his massive eyebrows for dramatic effect, Latour says that science has “always had to theatricalise proof” in order to change perceptions. “Pasteur was quite a showman, flogging a non-vaccinated laboratory sheep to prove it had really died of its ailments, taking a crowd into a vineyard to prove – to an incredulous Burgundy winemaker – that he could sterilise bad bacteria. Unfortunately though, in France, our rationalism has now flattened out this kind of thing.”

Moving Earths at the Odeon in Paris. Photograph: Patrick Laffont de Lojo

There is nothing remotely flat, however, about Latour’s considerable, rambunctious, haunting work in the theatre, and nothing flat about the suffering Earth it urgently brings to our attention. Latour made his name – as a sociologist – questioning the construction of scientific truth, and now finds himself ardently defending it against multiple agents of division and obfuscation. He cites Brexit and Trump as parallel forces seeking to unravel a richly networked, cooperative world. Aged 72, with nothing to prove professionally, he is accelerating his efforts to bring these difficult questions before a broad, non-specialist audience.

Latour has inspired an unusually wide range of thinkers and creators. The sociologist Richard Sennett describes him as “the most creative intellectual of our generation” and adds: “He has always opened doors, showing unexpected scenes and spaces which need thinking about.” For his inner circle, Latour is considered a masterful pathfinder who encourages others to find their own ways. Frédérique Aït-Touati, co-creator with him of five theatrical performances including Moving Earths, is a historian of science and runs SPEAP, the experimental school of political art at Sciences Po. Actor Duncan Evennou, who performs in Moving Earths, is a graduate of SPEAP with his own theatre company, which produces work about scientific discourse.

“My first work with Frédérique in 2003 was to ask her – as a theatre director trained at Cambridge – to help my students act out their theses,” says Latour, “to bring to life the characters and dramas of scientific inquiry, and to help them develop their ideas.” He and the Cambridge professor Simon Schaffer “used to enact the great speeches and discoveries, he as Newton, me as Pasteur, to relive these important moments of witnessing proof, of changing reality in public.” Latour believes that science is “far better communicated” in Britain. “I still have dozens of cassettes of BBC’s Horizon, which was enthralling in terms of storytelling, detail and drama. They did 10 hours on microbes!’

Moving Earths. Photograph: Patrick Laffont de Lojo

The jolly am-dram character of his approach would eventually prove valuable in dealing with urgent contemporary matters. Aït-Touati explains: “Everything changed around 2009 with the growing climate crisis. When Bruno was preparing the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures [which became his book Facing Gaia], we were studying science dramatists such as Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, and simultaneously improvising what became our next show, Gaia Global Circus. Bruno’s research and the theatre work were mutually supportive. We realised that – on a stage, unlike in a lecture theatre – you can show uncertainty, complexity and contentious arguments. A theatre audience – in real time, with all the riskiness of live performance – can somehow metabolise more levels of meaning, and experience deeper feelings.”

In contrast to film and TV, says Aït-Touati, in theatre “you can work fast, and with minimal means; all you need is people. What we do is genuinely experimental theatre: each show is a learning experience with a different format. The times are moving very fast around us, we have to keep up, to help difficult concepts to emerge to the public.”

These formats have indeed been diverse: besides the knockabout, sketch-driven Gaia Global Circus, and Inside (in which Latour was presented as a tiny figure adrift in massive projections of geological strata and astronomical diagrams), the pair convened a parallel-reality COP 21 over three days at the Nanterre-Amandiers theatre in 2015, in which fictional delegates of the soil, air and seas rubbed shoulders with students role-playing the representatives of nation states. Their hard-debated summit protocol was ceremonially handed to the president of the “real” COP 21.

Perhaps the theatre can seduce too easily, though: as a non-specialist, I found the Lovelock–Galileo parallel convincingly presented whereas, according to Latour, “I can count on my fingers the number of scientists who concur.” But you never know who might be at the show: Aït-Touati recounts that a leading astronomer approached her afterwards, lost for words, thrilled and surprised.

Latour lets out a hearty, satisfied cackle. There is hope – it seems – that science and art can be allies in the crisis of our moving Earth.

Moving Earths is at the Collège des Bernardins, Paris, on 6 February. Then touring.

The grand Latour: in praise of the French thinker

Richard Powers: Bruno Latour has encouraged me to think of all living systems – technological, social and biological – as interdependent, reciprocal and additive processes where there are no mere objects and where the composite subject continues to be produced by negotiations among all its enfranchised parts. He has taught me to forego commodities in favour of communities. With vigour, freshness, invention, honesty, expansiveness, art and playful humour, he is moving us out of our fantasies of control and mastery back into an embrace of evolving democracy.

Olafur Eliasson: As an artist, I am inspired by Latour’s insistence that humans are not on Earth but in Earth. In his writing and performance-oriented work, he makes the invisible visible by highlighting the networks that everyone and everything are a part of. He is adamantly against silo-thinking, looking instead at interconnectivity and intermingling. I think this kind of thought is really needed today, in the age of climate emergency.

Kengo Kuma: I learned from Latour that architecture is a loose assembly of small objects, and the product of collaborative work that takes place between objects and people. This enabled me to completely break away from the egotistical point of view of many architects who think they are absolute and hold a privileged position. My architectural designs changed when I started to think in this manner. It allowed my designs to be clearly visualised as an assembly or ensemble of small objects. Therefore, philosophy has the potential to change the shape and form of the world, in addition to changing how the world is viewed.

Robert Macfarlane: Latour’s thought threads through much that I’ve written, particularly over the past five years and especially in Underland; his challenges to the distinctions between modern and pre-modern, and between human and more-than-human, as well as his identification of a “new climatic regime”, in which social justice and ecological crisis must be recognised as aligned, and short-term interest must (somehow) be subordinated to long-term survival.