Review: A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction (Touring)

Thursday 28th September 2023 at York Theatre Royal.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

In A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, writer Miranda Rose Hall offers something between an impassioned academic lecture (with a few choice expletives thrown in for good measure) and a confessional solo show. It packs in an awful lot of information and offers probing monologues about death, the state of the natural world, and the hand we all have in the next inevitable “Great Extinction”.

The premise? Naomi, the theatre company’s dramaturg arrives on stage looking utterly lost. The cast won’t be able to perform she tells us: there’s an impending death putting the scheduled show on hold. The “show” is now Naomi’s, and she takes the opportunity to tell us about what inspired the show we “should” be seeing tonight: the one exploring what we’re doing to the planet.

The show primarily sells itself on two decidedly intriguing USPs: “a brilliant touring production model, the first of its kind, where the production tours but the people do not”, with all lighting and sound for the show produced live, by on-stage cyclists sourced from the local community at each tour stop. It’s impressive to watch the output of the cyclists as it is projected on stage, and it’s impressive to think that their leg work powers not only the basic lighting and the intermittent sound effects, but also quite a lengthy montage of projections at one point. I did think the whirring wheels might detract from the script, but I was wrong: that whir becomes quite an ominous drone as the merciless facts and figures plough onwards…

So, for York, we have Mingyu Lin directing and Stephanie Hutchinson starring as Naomi. Hutchinson is a compelling lead and gives us a Naomi full of passionate pacing and intensity. Nailing the gravity of this play’s biggest messages, she also creates welcome balance with gentler moments of reflection.

For me, the flaw here is that while having the stage filled with bikes helps to give light and sound, it also massively limits what our Naomi is able to do, and she ends up moving ten paces back and forth over the same spot for the full 80 minutes. The monologues can be lengthy and our only respite from the onslaught of facts and rumination about death and mass death, are snippets of personal background or some pedestrian questioning of the audience about their favourite things in nature. I’m not sure the intensity of the script marries well with such limited opportunities for physical expressiveness and if I had to pick, I’d probably prefer to see a fuller narrative play out to deliver the same messages.

All in all though, this is an interesting piece seeking to highlight vitally important information and a demand for action in the face of impending ecological disaster. It carries massive cognitive load and massive messages about how we’re choosing to live and die. The staging is pretty unique, even if it is self-limiting in its ingenuity, and Hutchinson delivers a classic feat of solo performance in her assured, seemingly spontaneous delivery of such a demanding script.

A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction is at York Theatre Royal until the 30th September 2023 – more information and tickets can be found here.