Jay Miller On … Devising a Show About Climate Change

The show, which is the company’s first, tells the story of
three tourists who find themselves adrift in the middle of the ocean after
their cruise ship sinks. Drawing on European traditions including Comedia
dell’arte and mime, as well as acrobatics and circus-style clowning, the
company illustrates the trio’s battle for survival, creating in the process
what they call an ‘entertaining journey through complex issues’. Here Miller
tells WOS about how that journey came about.

We started conceiving The Forecast back
in May, coming up with the idea of climate change, what we wanted to talk about
and play with and coming up with a situation. Then in the summer we relocated
to our resident theatre, ARC in Stockton-on-Tees and spent six weeks developing
the show. We premiered it there and it was brought down to London as a
consequence of that. We’ve been re-rehearsing and developing it further for
another three weeks down here. Because the show is devised it’s constantly
changing and developing. It’s very much a live experience; it’ll probably
change from night to night. We’re at the stage where we’re busy tweaking things
but I imagine we’ll be at that stage until the show finishes because we think
that’s what makes good theatre.

What we did in the summer was a show about what we want to
say about climate change, and how we respond as people to an imminent, but
unquantifiable, threat. Since then we’ve really pushed the story. There’s a lot
of devised theatre that tells stories, but not so much in this country that
takes political issues and illustrates them, and that’s what we hope to
achieve. We’ve decided that our stories should be about things that are a huge
concern to us as people, rather than being based purely in fiction.

From the beginning, we absolutely did not want to focus on
the science of it. We’re under no illusion – we’re theatre practitioners, not
scientists – so although we did a lot of research, we’re not qualified to tell
people about the science, to tell people what they should do, or what they
should think. That is absolutely not what The Forecast does.
What we wanted to do was explore what we feel about climate change as a notion,
as a threat. It’s a threat that we’ve created so it’s about society, it’s about
us, coping with climate change. We always knew that we wanted to illustrate
that and mirror it and, the thing that’s fundamental to our work, make people
laugh with it.

It’s about entertainment and performance as much
as the issues we address. We know that the issues are of interest, but we put
it in a form that is entertaining. It’s funny and people can just sit back and
be entertained by the skill of the performers. It’s got lots of clown elements
to it and that’s what brings the humour.

We don’t want our show to be a lecture at all, but we do
hope to create a piece of theatre that people will talk about, that people will
go out and think, ‘how does that relate to me, how does that relate to what I
do and the decisions that I make?’ So to that extent, we do want to make an
impact, but the show will absolutely not make people feel bad for their
actions, because we’ve got too much of that anyway these days. We want to fuel
thought, which will then hopefully lead to action.