Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett

Earthquakes in London was first performed after a disappointing climate summit; in its final scene, a Thunberg-like teenage girl walks barefoot to London to speak to the nation on the climate emergency; it's about the painful intimacies of family life and the catastrophe of world consumerism. Mike Bartlett's play should have been written yesterday, but in fact it was completed over ten years ago, after the Copenhagen summit of 2009, which, like Glasgow 2021, failed to ensure our world's future.

It's an intricately structured, thematically coherent, and, in Bartlett's words, excessive play about generational responsibility, consumer culture, and human hope for the future of the planet. Its climate change topic, painfully intimate plot-reveals, and the humour of its social commentary, make it a hugely compelling piece for performance and study by young people.

The text

Bartlett was commissioned by Headlong Theatre and the UK's National Theatre to write a large-scale play on significant world themes and he felt that climate change was something he had to tackle. Reviewers remarked on the shift from his previous intimate work about family tensions and office relations to this epic, with its large cast, choral scenes and questions of political, personal and generational responsibility. Each exchange between characters contains an astute character revelation as well as feeding the play's broader theme, so that watching, performing and studying the play can be both an activist experience and a psychologically engaging one.

Plot

Earthquakes tells the story of the Crannock family: compromised and cynical climate scientist Robert, and his three daughters. Sarah is environment minister in a fictionalised version of the coalition government of 2010-15; Freya is a teacher of deaf primary school children, who is delivered of her own daughter Emily during the play; and the youngest is Jasmine, a sharp and sarky burlesque-dancing student, who has been expelled from university for throwing a bookshelf at her lecturer. The narrative is held together by Freya's ramble round an increasingly surreal London of street performers, outdoor swimmers and yummy mummies, as she awaits an earthquake that is predicted to hit the city, and asks herself whether she should be bringing Emily into the world.

Themes

Bartlett wrote the play not long after having worked with Stagecoach theatre school, for whom he created theatre pieces with multiple roles for large numbers of children, so he had had some practice at creating large-scale, strong theatrical stories for big casts. As the playwright has commented, he wrote it at a time when television audiences had proved their capacity for following complex plots across multiple episodes, in series like The Wire; and in the wake of Cushner's Angels in America, which deals with the AIDS epidemic on both an intimate and epic scale.

The play's sense of excess, Bartlett argues, also reflects our hyper-mediatised world, in which we deal with life's crucial dilemmas while constantly interrupted by messages, images, trivia. In Earthquakes, moments that reveal the daughters’ lives, their troubled family history, and their relationship with the climate crisis, collide with each other and with a series of scenes from contemporary life that range from the painful to the absurd – dancing students watched by a man trying to see off a midlife crisis, a chorus of entitled mothers who parade their babies as fashion items, a girl working in the high-end fabric and fashion store Liberty who has changed her name to Liberty.

Design

One of Earthquakes’ theatrical challenges is how to manage the play's dual intimate and epic scale spatially. The first production was designed by Bartlett's long-time collaborator Miriam Buether, who brought the audience right into the action. They sat among a set of winding walkways and platform stages as if at a cabaret, and were bombarded with huge projections and a soundscape of contemporary music which commented sharply on the action. Everything about the production reflected the commentary on consumerist excess which underpins the play. How might this sense of excess be created by human bodies and soundscape alone?

When the 2010 production went on tour, the immersive design environment had to be adapted to fit proscenium arch theatre spaces, and Bartlett has commented that the simpler stage/auditorium configuration might have helped audiences to engage with the complexities of the plot. But the constantly shifting scenes and rhythm of this play ask us how we focus for long enough to decide what is valuable in our lives and cultures, and the initial immersive design pulled the audience into a direct relationship with its difficult questions.

I hope Earthquakes is revived and studied by many groups of young people whose futures have been compromised by adults like the ones in this play, and whose passion for the planet matches Emily's as she strides towards the capital to make the speech of our lifetimes. Epic and intimate, realist and surreal, personal and political, Earthquakes in London will be a play for our time as long as parents fail their children and as long as the current climate crisis remains unresolved.