I’m trying to sell my theatre show to my neighbour, a retired farmer. He’s out walking his small dog. ‘What’s it about?’ he says, with a nervous grin. ‘Climate change’, I reply. ‘Sounds depressing, I won’t be coming to that’, he says, gently pulling his dog away from a pile of rubbish on the footpath. Over his head, black storm clouds fill the sky to the south. ‘Better get going’, he says, as the first fat raindrops splatter on the road.
My neighbour’s response doesn’t surprise me. Not only is theatre a hard sell in the depths of a Wellington winter, there’s now a destructive climate event occurring on average every eight days in Aotearoa New Zealand. We lie awake listening to the gutters overflowing and the ferocious wind trying to tear the windows from their frames. We see the smartphone footage of floodwaters sluicing through people’s homes and knocking them off their foundations. In January, we watched in horror as people at a holiday camp were buried alive by a landslide following torrential rain.[i] Every time someone in the media uses the word ‘unprecedented rainfall’ a new precedent is set. There are no borders or limits to how bad the weather can get. As the climate crisis deepens in Aotearoa, it seems many people are quietly ignoring it, hoping it won’t affect them. When we toured our climate show Don’t Look Now around schools and community centres last year, we encountered what some called ‘climate fatigue’. Adults and children alike are tired of hearing about the climate, and feel powerless to do anything about it. In the early 2020s, New Zealand School Strike 4 Climate marches attracted tens of thousands of young people and adult supporters, but the latest schools strike at parliament buildings on 15 May 2026 was attended by only two hundred.[ii]
Don’t Look Now is the umbrella title for a programme of short plays by Angie Farrow, a prolific playwright and Professor Emerita of Theatre at Massey University. Farrow contributed one of the plays—Inferno—to the global Climate Change Theatre Action movement, which over the past ten years has created a rich resource of climate change plays which are regularly performed around the world.[iii] Farrow’s ten short climate plays were published last year[iv], shortly after she asked me to direct a community tour of seven of the plays with a company of five actors playing multiple roles. The tour went well, with each performance followed by a workshop or discussion in which audiences were invited to explore positive actions people can take to reduce their carbon footprint and help out with the environment. In June 2026 we received curation funding from BATS Theatre, Wellington to re-rehearse the show for a season at BATS’ upstairs theatre The Dome.
Bethany Miller in Inferno by Angie Farrow. BATS Theatre, Wellington June 2024. Photo credit Kirsty Macleod.
Directing a few short plays might seem like a gentle breeze compared to the tempestuous process of directing a full-length play. But I found it demanding, and so did the actors. A mix of monologues, duologues and ensemble pieces. Seven different stories told in different styles from naturalism to absurdism, seven different worlds to create, a total of fifteen characters played by five actors. Demanding for audiences too, requiring extra concentration as they were flipped from one scenario to another every ten minutes or so. And subject material that is becoming increasingly traumatic for many.
Ironically, we had to cancel our first rehearsal when a state of emergency was declared in Wellington due to extreme weather. Over two days in April, ‘unprecedented’ flooding in our city severely damaged hundreds of homes and killed one person.[v] Everyone knew someone who was displaced by the storm. The producer, playwright, stage manager and myself aimed to create a safe space in rehearsal for exploring deeply unsafe themes. We researched climate change events locally and internationally, studied environmental issues, wrote backstories for the characters, made collages of imagery found in the plays, plumbed the subtext, improvised around the texts, created ensemble movement to enhance the world-building, and explored ways of physicalizing and abstracting relationships. At the same time we built a playful, supportive atmosphere in rehearsals which we hoped would transfer into a positive production encouraging hope rather than despair.
Liz Kirkman-Jenkins as Melanie and Mairanga White as Māia in Disobedience by Angie Farrow. BATS Theatre, Wellington June 2026. Photo credit Kirsty Macleod.
In her plays Farrow depicts the familial and societal pressures to conform to a conspiracy of silence about climate issues, to not make a fuss. In Disobedience, a nurse who is imprisoned while participating in a climate protest, is berated and shamed by her husband and her boss. In Poverty, a high-profile environmentalist clashes with her working-class mother over their conflicting values. In Mad Meg, an elderly woman leads a protest against the felling of native trees, ignoring her husband’s pleas to return to her safe, bourgeois lifestyle. In Lucifer, Farrow’s writing cuts to the heart of massive moral issues of climate justice, foregrounding the dilemma facing residents of Pacific Islands becoming uninhabitable as sea-levels rise. The monologue Inferno depicts the aftermath of a bushfire, in which a woman embarks on a lone cross-country trek after losing her home, her marriage and all of her possessions.
Robert Lloyd as Gavin in Lucifer by Angie Farrow. BATS Theatre, Wellington June 2026. Photo credit Kirsty Macleod.
Farrow’s dramatic vignettes succinctly encapsulate monumental existential issues. They celebrate the spirit of climate activism and encourage people to keep active and not give up hope. Saving the World is set in a ‘neutral’ space, possibly some kind of near-future apocalyptic landscape. In this playful parable, a curious woman struggles to connect on a personal level with an alpha-male ‘eco-warrior’ who labours to solve the planet’s environmental challenges. At one point the woman explodes with frustration: ‘Can’t you save the world and have a relationship at the same time?’ For me, this play suggests that intimate human connection with all that entails— empathy, compassion, forgiveness, love—is essential in order for humanity to survive.
Bethany Miller as Beta and Robert Lloyd as Alpha in Saving the World by Angie Farrow BATS Theatre, Wellington June 2026. Photo credit Kirsty Macleod.
The final play in the performance—The Thing—shows two people trapped in a room terrorized by some vast, unexplained threat outside. In our production the room is defined simply by a border of light on the stage. There are echoes of Ionesco and Beckett as they dither and bicker. One evokes memories of a happy, dream-like past in which the world seemed more stable, while the other fails to remember anything. As they procrastinate, the ‘thing’ becomes louder and more oppressive. Finally, they decide to climb out of the window and confront the threat. The performance concludes with them stepping together out of the light and into the unknown, an invitation to the audience to do likewise.
Ralph Johnson as Li and Robert Lloyd as Lo in The Thing by Angie Farrow. BATS Theatre, Wellington June 2026. Photo credit Kirsty Macleod.
The late Jane Goodall famously wrote, ‘the greatest danger to our future is apathy’. Everything about the production was designed to activate audiences and spark conversations. The playwright launched her book to a large crowd in the theatre foyer. In The Dome, a theatre usually set up in an endstage configuration, we added seating on either side of the stage to create a thrust stage so there was more direct engagement between actor and audience. Each performance was followed by an audience discussion aimed to stimulate debate and to use the plays as a catalyst for creating fresh ideas and some sense of hope in the face of what seems like a hopeless situation. On one evening we held a public forum with two members of parliament and four academics with expertise in environmental issues. Judging by the conversations and emails that have flowed since the show closed, Don’t Look Now has certainly created a bubble of conversations, challenges, arguments, questions—within the theatre community and beyond.
The short play is an excellent form for engaging audiences with a multitude of points of view. The frequent changes of narrative perspective prevent the audience from becoming complacent, while the brief transitions between plays provide some opportunity for reflection. By writing short, intense stories featuring numerous characters of different ages and social classes, Farrow gives audiences multiple ways of identifying with the dilemmas portrayed. She writes with great intelligence, humour and humanity. Most people can relate to the family and/or intimate relationships that lie at the heart of the plays. She takes climate change off its hard science pedestal and presents it on a domestic scale, showing how it affects individuals and families. Climate change is an immensely complex problem, with no straightforward solutions. It was clear from the post-show discussions that certain plays appealed to different people. If spectators were intrigued by any of the plays, they might go out and discuss it with a friend or family member. When audiences see actions or solutions being played out onstage it could give them inspiration to take that into their own lives, to educate themselves, to connect with others, to make a fuss. And all of these actions and conversations could help to make sense of a crisis which too many are putting in the ‘too hard’ basket.
In an age dominated by digital screens and AI everything, theatre is an anomaly. The audiences for Don’t Look Now had already made the commitment to buy a ticket, get up off the couch and go into town on a stormy winter’s night to see the show. Many stayed on after the curtain call to join in the discussion. As theatre people we cannot come up with scientific, legal or policy solutions to climate crisis, but we can use dramatic storytelling to keep the dialogue going, to encourage empathy with climate victims, solidarity with environmental activists, to discourage apathy, and to keep working for meaningful political change.
Don’t Look Now written by Angie Farrow, produced by Sarah Thomasson, directed by David O’Donnell, set design by Lucas Neal, sound design by Isabel Pecora and Lighting design by Sean Fa’aiuaso. Stage Manager Will McMorran, Publicity Anna Barker and Zoe Harris. Cast: Mairanga White, Robert Lloyd, Ralph Johnson, Liz Kirkman-Jenkins, Bethany Miller. The Dome, BATS Theatre, Wellington 16-20 June 2026
[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje11x527n4o
[ii] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/education/595350/striking-students-call-on-the-government-to-do-more-to-fight-climate-change
[iii] https://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com/play/inferno/
[iv] Farrow, Angie. Disobedience and Other Climate Plays. Wellington: Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2025.
[v] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/weather/593848/more-than-1800-properties-impacted-by-wellington-flooding
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by David O’Donnell.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
