Lewis Hetherington is a Scottish playwright and performance maker whose work is rooted in collaboration and story . His latest project is a Fringe world premiere called no one is coming to save us, in partnership with the multiple-award winning Pepperdine Scotland. Lewis likes to explore questions that we don’t have answers to, and invite audiences to re-imagine the world around them. In this new play he addresses the climate crisis, and the limits of legitimate protest against those in power when they refuse to act.
Writers need to wake up and smell the wildfires
I am full of admiration for the way young people are trying to make change and to fight for a better future. As a playwright, I believe theatre has a vital role in creating space for society to face the most urgent, complicated and challenging issues of our time.
In no one is coming to save us, I have been weaving these two things together, in collaboration with the theatre department at Pepperdine University, California, to create a transatlantic production that finds compelling ways to address climate change.
It feels urgent because, as a society, we are failing to face and respond to the scale of the climate crisis on any level: politically, socially or culturally. We’re involved in mass denial, we know the monster is lurking but we’ve locked it in the basement. It’s time to face the monster.
I often hear that the climate crisis is not a good topic for theatre,;it’s too big, too far away. But I can’t think of anything more universally human, and immediate. It’s happening right now, to all of us. It’s a real failure of our craft if we don’t find ways to tell engaging, compelling, human stories about this defining crisis of our time.
Audiences and writers express fears of being preachy, or depressing. Whilst I understand audiences being wary, I think writers need to wake up and smell the wildfires. It’s our job to make theatre which makes difficult, remote and complex stories feel immediate, accessible, funny, human and engaging - and intimately connected to our lives. And not be preachy!
That was, in some ways, our starting point. We all wanted to make a piece of theatre which tackled this on a human scale, which saw characters who are trying to live their lives, to navigate love, ambition, family dynamics to try and find meaning in the world in the landscape of environmental flux we are in. Something which explored the internal weather of being human, as well as the shifting and increasing wild external weather of planet earth.
Its cast of students are from a generation and geography facing the impact of climate change - floods, vast storms and (often most terrifying of all) immense wildfires. The development of the play hinged on their real-life experiences of the climate crisis, but also their hopes, their sense of humour, their humanity. They are also the generation rallying to demand change from politicians and institutions that can be indifferent or actively complicit in the environmental calamities.
We have worked together to meld their experiences and questions into a piece of theatre that not only looks at the climate crisis but also at protest, how can it manifest? How far is far enough? It’s not the job of theatre, or any one thing, to try and solve these problems. We need a mass collaborative and concerted positive effort across the world. But theatre can play its part as a space where we come to imagine, and sit with our emotions.
The aim is not to provide easy answers but to create what is so often missing, a sense of urgency and an awareness of our own potency in demanding change. But it’s also a play about friendship, love and hope. Theatre provides us the chance to face our humanity, in all its messy, overwhelming and beautiful glory, and try to find peace with it.
