Afloat on a sea of laughs

THE HERETIC
Library Theatre Company, Lowry, Salford
SOMETIMES you get the idea that a playwright just wants to get something off his chest. That’s definitely the case with Richard Bean’s award-winning climate change comedy.

Not only is it very smart and very funny, it counters all the “we’re killing the planet” scaremongers with a healthy and lavish dose of scepticism that seems to come from a far deeper place than just a guy with an idea for a play.

The set-up is actually quite simple: earth scientist Dr Diane Cassell (Cate Hamer) has failed to find any rise in sea level over 16 years in the Maldives — some of the lowest islands on earth — despite the local government being convinced it is gradually drowning.

When she reveals her sceptical views she gets death threats and her own earth-sciences faculty, courtesy of boss and former lover Prof Maloney (the wonderfully deadpan Stuart Fox), disowns her.

Along the way Bean wades into Al Gore and the “hockey stick” graph that supposedly shows how CO2 has soared since we started consuming fossil fuels, shows how climate science is subject to the same lies every other element of life endures from vested interests, abhors the turning of science into political argument... and has a go at media studies, sociology and a couple of other maligned disciplines while he’s at it.

All this under the layer of one of the funniest comedies of the year: it’s as if Tom Stoppard had chosen his successor.

Along for the ride are a much-derided human resources manager (Polly Lister); a security man (Andrew Westfield); Cassell’s student Ben (Ciaran Kellgren) and her daughter Phoebe (Sophie Robinson) — planet-loving and the most mixed-up of them all, just to show even pure scientists have no control of the beliefs of others.

The play’s first half is a lesson in theatre comedy, with laughs almost too numerous for the audience’s health, but the second, when Cassell retreats to her Yorkshire outlands home, loses its grip a little, with a scene you wouldn’t expect in a comedy and an ending so abrupt it looks like director Chris Honer lost the last few pages of the script.

But that’s climate change; there’s no satisfactory resolution.


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