The playwright behind Kill Climate Deniers is back with another work about ecological catastrophe – and a message of hope

You're Safe Til 2024: how can theatre help us come to terms with climate change?

How can chickens teach us about the great acceleration of human activity on the natural world? What can Kate Winslet show us about human survival if we fail to act on human-made global warming?

Canberra-born theatre maker David Finnigan last year began what he decided would be a six-year stage project, You’re Safe Til 2024. To begin his research, he asked 30 scientists two simple questions: What’s the biggest change happening in the world today? What’s going to happen in the future?

Thus briefed, the playwright employs symbolism and metaphor on stage to communicate climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and the planet’s ecological future, to try to get past the defences of those who switch off from climate “preaching” and to give hope to climate activists who fall into “numb despair” over government inaction. He wants the subject to “flare in the chests” of his audience rather than be lost to abstraction.

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The first version of You’re Safe Til 2024 was presented over the weekend at Sydney’s Griffin theatre company. Finnigan’s new work is in essence a lecture he hopes will be inspiring in its own lo-fi way, which he breaks up by dancing to pop songs nominated by his scientist interviewees as inspirational, including cuts from Alanis Morissette and Faithless, played on stage by DJ Reuben Ingall. Later, by email, Finnigan says he nominated the year 2024 because “it’s the year my niece turns 18”, something he doesn’t explain in the show. “In a lot of ways, she’s the person this piece is to and about.”

Neither a scientist nor, he says, a climate activist, Finnigan’s concern with future generations began when he grew up with lots of science books in the family home as the son of a CSIRO micrometeorologist. His father would open doors for Finnigan to talk to other scientists ahead of an infamous earlier stage project, which the playwright perhaps unwisely called Kill Climate Deniers, the satirical story of an ecowarrior attack on the Australian parliament.

Before it even had been staged, the title sent conservative News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt into a predictable rage over taxpayer funding of the script’s development, sparking a chain of indignation to rightwing United States media outlets. Finnigan responded by working the punditry outrage into his final script, but not before being assailed with online death threats, such as suggestions to change the title: “What about, Kill David Finnigan?”

Despite attempts to muzzle it, Kill Climate Deniers has had a long and varied life, constantly retooled and reinvented as a radio play, a stealthy audio tour of parliament, a performance lecture-DJ set and, finally, a funny, well-received play with a mostly-female cast in Sydney, with Australian comedian Felicity Ward set to take it to London in June.

Now, after all the fireworks have died down, Finnigan is back on stage himself, alighting on the humble chicken to illustrate the concept of the great acceleration of human impact on the planet that began in the second half of the 20th century.

Consider, he says, that the average weight of a chicken in 1945 was 1.4kg. Today, the average is 5.2kg; a four-fold, hormone-boosted growth over the lifetime of a human being. Over the same period, the chicken population has risen from 18 million to 23 billion. Many years from now, Finnigan predicts, archaeologists will find trillions of fossilised chicken bones discarded from our era.

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But the playwright says he has learned the lessons he gleaned from the advice of the Climate Communication Project, such as don’t preach about the meat we eat, and don’t overload with facts and figures. He certainly doesn’t admonish the substantial number of audience members who raise their hands when prompted to admit they have run over wildlife – several kangaroos and even one wombat – as a neat way of demonstrating animal habitat destruction.

Finnigan then pours some sand through a sieve, just like professor of ecotoxicology Tamara Galloway of the University of Exeter did with sand from the presumed pristine Galapagos Islands, finding countless tiny bright microplastics washed up from the ocean. Each of us is full of plastic more than any previous human generation, Finnigan notes, thanks to our waste making its way into the ocean food chain.

Next, to illustrate the future if we don’t act to mitigate climate change, Finnigan asks us to consider the Titanic’s disastrous striking of the iceberg in 1912, when more than 1,500 people drowned, and lifeboats were in short supply. Passengers in the lower classes were much more likely to die than those in first class.

The Hollywood film version (spoiler alert) has Kate Winslet’s character, a first-class passenger, survive, while Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a “plucky young scamp in steerage”, drowns.

And so it goes with the catastrophic future impact of climate change. “The human race is not going to be extinct,” says Finnigan, before pointing to the largely white, middle-class audience. “We are Kate Winslet.”

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Small wonder then that, with our collective privilege, Finnigan finally abandons the idea of being our inspirational guru, after showing some cheesy pictures of children installing solar panels – his interpretation of the Climate Communication Project’s advice for instilling hope about the pending climate meltdown.

It is then that the whole exercise clicks. We need to shake ourselves out of our torpor, our “numb despair”, whether we’re activists or people simply not too selfish in a neoliberal economy to care for future generations. We don’t need to panic, nor do we have to be too scientifically literate to grasp the urgency of the matter, nor do we necessarily need stories about geese being sucked into the engines of planes that belch carbon as we head to our next holiday.

Instead, we need to lead by example in our own lives by consuming less, voting for those with the planet’s future in mind, and demanding that they follow through by prioritising the environment, reducing our collective carbon footprint and grasping the world as a global community.

“You give yourself hope,” Finnigan concludes, and he’s right. “You make yourself useful.”

• You’re Safe Til 2024 is at Bunjil Place, Narre Warren in Melbourne May 10 to 12 during the Art + Climate = Change Festival

• This article originally stated that the cast of Kill Climate Deniers was female only. This was corrected on 1 May 2019