While I watched the climate change scientist getting steamy on stage with with the up-and-coming government advisor at the Copenhagen Conference, I must admit that I didn’t even get vaguely hot under the collar- which is odd for a play that’s all about climate change.

The National’s production of ‘Greenland’ shows that thespians care about the environment too, and aims to prove it by introducing us to a number of characters who, in various ways, represent a society engaging in the climate change debate. Cue the go-getting Civil servant and the climate change scientist, both of whom are getting sexed-up over his damning conclusions on global warming, and who co-author its epilogue by getting between the sheets at COP15. But there are others too. Like the concerned teenager, who flies above the stage in a shopping trolley, upsets her uncomprehending parents with her views on profligate waste, and turns eco-activist to either rave at festivals or chain herself to a table in an environment agency. Then there’s the lesbian couple who’s relationship just can’t last the fuelled panic associated with every switching off of a bulb or chucking out of a plastic bottle; a black hoodie relates ‘Deal or No Deal’  and Andrex usage to climate change, and finally there’s the arctic-based Guillemot spotting anorak who links their nesting habits with what’s becoming a perennial polar summer.

The five stories have been written by Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne, ‘four of the most distinctive and exciting playwrights in British theatre’ to collaborate on what should be an important play about one of the most pressing issues of our time. But the problem is that this is theatre; and as theatre this play simply doesn’t work. There is a sense that in fact five plays were written here, but each was reduced to their core elements and then all thrown into the pot to sink or swim. Characters are isolated, each with their own story, but at no point is there any dramatic interplay between them, and there is certainly no sense of their individual developments through the play. Explaining issues around climate change to the general public is no mean feat, but turning characterisation into a mere vehicle for a climate change argument is not the way to do it. Only at the odd point- when the scientist leaves a message on his lover’s mobile telling her that she’ll have to get used to the road tarmac melting every summer, or that temperate birds are now nesting hundreds of miles into the arctic circle- ‘There’s no word for ‘Robin’ in Inuit’- does the play convey the gravitas of the unfolding situation rather than come across as a mode of lecture. Other than that, because you don’t really care about the characters, you can’t really care about what they care about. 

Thank God for the production values, which on the whole are good. There’s plenty of smoke and mirrors to distract from the dialogue, which at times verges on the turgid. My brain was saved from atrophy during a lengthy explanation about the logistical mechanics of the Copenhagen Conference, by a dramatically lit rainstorm front stage. Amongst a gathering flock of Guillemots, a hammy James Cameron ’ I’m king of the World’ moment is thankfully curtailed by a very convincing polar bear sauntering onstage, and at the play’s coup, thousands of pages from all the reports that have ever been written on climate change flutter down around the audience like Kennedy just rolled into town. However, these are more distracting than they are revelatory. I ended up just wanting to know whether the water in the downpour was recycled every night, how much electricity and paper was going to be wasted cleaning up the faux ticker-tape parade, and whether it was one guy or two midgets in the polar bear costume. And thus the crucial message of the drama was lost in the clunky mechanics of its communication. Before the evening performance started, an ominous quote from a climate change expert was projected on the safety curtain saying that if nothing changed, by 2017 a disaster might be unavoidable. By my reckoning, I’d say his conclusion was optimistic-by about half an hour.

The Royal National Theatre’s ‘Greenland’ runs at the Lyttelton Theatre from February 1st to April 2nd 2011