Chris Rapley on stage in the stage show 2071 (Image: Alastair Muir/Rex)

2071, Chris Rapley’s understated one-person London stage show on climate change, gives our correspondent the chills

As a former director of both the British Antarctic Survey and the London Science Museum, Chris Rapley has been to the ends of the Earth, curated one of the great expositions of science and technology, and tracked half a century of growing scientific angst about climate change.

Now he has a show at London’s Royal Court Theatre, written with playwright Duncan Macmillan. Rapley’s name is emblazoned in neon over Sloane Square. This is science as showbiz.


Rapley’s piece is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth without the cheap shots, and not a polar bear in sight. He sits on stage and speaks for 70 minutes as graphics whizz around him. And he does it very well.

I have thought for a while that scientists should let go of climate change a bit, and give some space to people who can make it something other than a “scientific problem”: lawyers, artists, economists, priests and playwrights. I hadn’t thought of the scientists becoming playwrights and perfomers themselves.

His message won’t surprise New Scientist readers. It is a rigorous but impassioned cri de coeur about how Earth’s energy balance has been upset by our greenhouse gas emissions, and where this disruption might be taking us. Conveyed in a single voice, founded on a lifetime’s experience of the workings of the planet, it has real power.

Antarctic tale

Part of its persuasiveness comes from Rapley’s personal story. He begins with the day when, as a young boy in the 1950s, he was given an atlas and noticed that most of Antarctica was marked as a “region unknown to man”. Much of his narrative follows the adult Rapley as he explores that region as a scientist, interprets satellite data, flies over disintegrating ice shelves and drills ice cores to penetrate the planet’s past. He describes the thrill of breathing in air from half a million years ago, as cracking ice cores brought to the surface released their bubbles. So much for scientific objectivity: this is a boy in heaven.

And heaven is receding: even Rapley’s low-key delivery falters as he describes how the extra heat in the atmosphere and oceans threatens to rip apart slabs of ice up to 4 kilometres thick.

He bristles at the world’s failure to appreciate the gravity of what his science tells him is happening, and he ends by pondering where we are headed. That’s where the title comes in. His eldest granddaughter, he tells us, is now the age he was when he received that atlas. In the year 2071, she will be the age he is now. Such things make a grandfather think.

As the lights dim, and this unlikely star of the stage takes a bow, we are left with the testament of a man deeply fearful for the future of his granddaughter and his world. He ends by asking: “What kind of world do we want to create?”

It is a scientist’s question: one that most of the rest of the world is too busy to think about.

Thanks to Rapley’s generation of scientists, we know so much more about our planet and how it works than when he was a boy. But there are few signs that we will act to bring its energy back into balance. As it happens, the show’s first night was just hours after US voters put a phalanx of climate-change deniers into Congress. Perhaps the last great “region unknown to man” is in our collective heads.