Play developed from conversations with climate activists
Co-produced by Pigfoot and Gate Theatre, commissioned and supported by Camden People's Theatre, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Hot in Here celebrates action taking place around the world for climate justice. Developed from conversations with climate activists.
Hot in Here, at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford, on Thursday, October 13. Review by JON LEWIS
Pigfoot Theatre and the Gate Theatre Camden’s touring production Hot In Here attempts to alert its audience about rising global temperatures leading to catastrophic droughts and floods. The show, directed jointly by Hetty Hodgson and Bea Udale-Smith, incorporates short scenes that are initially comic with content that becomes progressively darker in tone. They blend in multiple filmed interviews with young people from across the world who talk about the effect of global warming on their countries.
The production aims to practice what it preaches (and the production is very preachy at times) by being carbon neutral. Sascha Gilmour’s set includes surfaces on springs that literally generate the electricity used in the play, the cast bouncing and jumping liberally in a semblance of a techno rave. Performers AK Golding, Elizabeth Ayodele and Keziah Joseph take on characters who interact with a heat wave in London in different ways. A pregnant woman worried about how the heat will affect the birth of her first child, a posh social media influencer unable to travel to Costa Rica due to travel disruption and an impoverished single mother working in a centre for recycling plastic items tell their stories in scenes that are infused with irony.
There’s no humour in the filmed excerpts from activists who somehow radiate positivity despite the overwhelming nature of the problems their countries face. One scene takes aim at Tory prime ministers from Cameron to Truss as they announce grand plans to reduce emissions, supposedly leading the country towards a carbon neutral status. Separate projects from press clippings then reveal how these promises were just hot air. The content is both didactic and patronising.
An early sequence introduces 20th century environmental activists to the audience, the performers stating ‘you haven’t heard of me’. It’s possible that some audience members are new to these names, but one of them, Benny Rothman, who led the mass trespasses in the Peak District in 1932, was referred to copiously in a recent play at the Burton Taylor Studio, These Hills Are Ours. Less po-faced telling and more showing would make this play more compelling.
