The Stage

The Contingency Plan: On the Beach/Resilience

Published Friday 8 May 2009 at 11:25 by Aleks Sierz

What if the worst-case scenario actually happens? Set in the near future, Steve Waters’s gripping double bill - On the Beach and Resilience - sees Britain as threatened by catastrophic flooding due to accelerating climate change.

In the first play, Will, a glaciologist, returns to his East Anglian coastal home to introduce his new girlfriend, Sarika, a top civil servant, to his parents.

He also needs to tell his father Robin that he has accepted a job advising the government about climate change. This is tricky because 40 years previously his father had fallen out with a fellow scientist, Colin, about the causes of global warming. Colin has gone on to become the top government expert while Robin has retired by the sea, whose levels are relentlessly rising.

In the second play, Resilience, the location is Whitehall and, under the eyes of two new Conservative ministers, Tessa and Chris, Will and Colin fight over the contingency plan. Written with a wonderful mix of the personal and the political, Waters’s intelligent and engrossing drama shows how the motivation for scientific research sometimes comes from familial wounds, and how politicians have mixed motives.

But as well as cerebral stimulation, the plays also offer theatrical delights. On the Beach, directed by Michael Longhurst on Tom Scutt’s bare in the round stage, has a glorious scene in which the obsessive Robin wheels out a model that, using real water, shows the effects of rising sea levels. In Resilience, directed by Tamara Harvey, Colin illustrates the interdependence of nature using metres of bright green twine.

Although On the Beach suffers from a noticeable deflation in its second half, the cumulative effect of both plays is energising, due principally to Waters’s use of hilarious one-liners, as well as an appealingly ironic doubling of two actors. Robin Soans, who plays Robin in the first piece, then plays his rival Colin in the second. Susan Brown is firstly Robin’s homely wife and then the sternly ambitious Tessa.

Geoffrey Streatfeild’s sincere and geeky Will grows visibly through his confrontations with Soans as both his father and then as his fellow-scientist while Stephanie Street’s Sarika is excellent throughout. As Chris, David Bark-Jones oozes the typical politician’s emollience. Whether seen as stand-alone plays or taken together, Waters’s vision of climate change is both grimly convincing and highly entertaining.