Canberra playwright David Finnigan has been treading the world’s stages for some years now with his environmental explorations and one of those works, Scenes from the Climate Era, is about to surface at The Q, reports HELEN MUSA.

David Finnigan is one of a kind. A cross between intellectual bad boy and Canberra-boy-made-good, when I catch up with him I find that lately he’s been zipping between London and New York.

And also Manila, where for the last few months he’s been working with fellow Canberra playwright Sam Burns-Warr and the Philippines art collective Mahiwaga St on a project called Shooting Stars, dealing with Filipino pop music. 

“But mostly I’m creating performances, workshops and games in collaboration with climate and earth scientists in different parts of the world,” he says.

Before leaving Canberra he was already famous enough for the work he and his mates Jack Lloyd and Michael Bailey did in their science-theatre company, Boho Interactive. 

But in 2018, he took on the self-imposed challenge of creating a series of linked shows that look at climate from different angles.

The whole series, Finnigan says, goes together under the heading, You’re Safe. 

“The first show, You’re Safe Til 2024, looked at how we talk about climate change,” he says. “The second show, Deep History, was about the deep past of humanity in conversation with the Canberra bushfires.

“The third show is Scenes from the Climate Era, which comes at the topic from a whole array of different angles, and is the first of the series I’m not performing in. 

“The next iterations of the work are still in development but should be coming out in the next couple of years.”

I saw and reviewed Deep History at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, where, surrounded by piles of Demerara sugar used to demonstrate the world’s increasing population, Finnigan outlined the destruction of the 2019 Australian bushfires.

The play won a Fringe First award and was later presented at the Barbican London, also playing at the Public Theater in New York last November. 

Play three, Scenes from the Climate Era, was premiered by Belvoir Theatre in Sydney two years ago and has been revived by its original director, Carissa Licciardello, for touring. 

Audiences can expect the following adjectives – thrilling, frightening, invigorating, uncomfortable, and thoughtful – to be involved in their responses to a play that features 65 small scenes covering everything from scientists trying to bio-engineer a new reef system to a couple discussing whether it’s ethical to have children. 

Other scenes show a family taking to the water to find a new home, landholders in Borneo confronting western environmentalists, a scientist being coached on how to speak to the media and a group of friends reminiscing about the last time they took a flight. Most scenes are briefly introduced with a timestamp and description of the characters about to surface.

Designer Nick Schlieper’s set is spare, with a table and five chairs onstage, but his lighting does the work, as a tight cast of five – Violette Ayad, Nic English, Meg Hyeronimus, Abbie-lee Lewis and Brittany Santariga – capture the excitement of living in interesting times while looking forward to the “difficult beauty” of tomorrow.

Finnigan’s Edinburgh show, came up with a near-optimistic conclusion that the climate-change era may pass, so that future generations can enjoy a happier future than ours, so the nouns gloom and doom will surely not be to the fore. 

We are promised comedy, tragedy, artificial reefs, mirror clouds, zombie mice, new beaches and travelling the world when aeroplanes are gone. Quite a journey.

Scenes from the Climate Era, The Q, Queanbeyan, June 4-5.