Bearing witness to the need for climate action

 Daniel Nelson

F*ck the Polar Bears

Image by The Bush Theatre

It has some fun on the way, but it’s an odd piece: an unhappy, unlikeable couple with a young daughter, an Icelandic au pair, a drug rehab brother, plenty of money and no social conscience spend most of the play stepping into the hole of marital disintegration that they have dug for themselves, before the mood switches to apparent farce that turns out to be a serious mental breakdown and emotional confrontation.

There’s a running, rumbling joke about au pair Blundhilde’s earnest efforts to live a more environmentally sound life – she sweeps up a broken bulb while her self-centred, body-sculpting employer uses a dustbuster  –  but that doesn’t prepare us for the abrupt switch of mood for the final section of the play, in which the couple discuss abjuring hubby’s lucrative fracking deal with the government, ditching their selfishly energy-wasteful life (“a half-hour shower is basically the same as picking up a gun and shooting someone”) and adopting recycling and renewables.

There’s no shortage of ambition here. The transition to carbon-neutral lifestyle is going to be awkward for some (though liberating for others) and the discussion is worth staging. And there’s imagination and ideas. But the play’s elements and approaches – sitcom, thriller, farce, surrealism, drama – seem bolted together, with the political stuck awkwardly on to the personal rather than being convincingly enmeshed.

It just doesn’t hang together – which is what we’re all going to do unless writers and artists find effective ways of engaging us with the issue.  

·         F*ck The Polar Bears is at the Bush Theatre,   7 Uxbridge Road, London W12 8LJ, until 24 October. Info: 8743

·         30 September, Can the world economy survive without fossil fuels?, Alison Tickell, Juliet Davenport, Alistair Harper, Danielle Pafford, 6pm (pre-performance), £5 (deductible from ticket price)