Climate change is often treated as a topic to be explained with graphs, statistics, warnings. But how do you communicate a crisis that is slow, invisible and too vast for any one person to grasp? This talk explores how contemporary theatre has tackled that challenge, not by lecturing audiences about climate change (though at times it does this too), but by making them feel its presence in everyday life. Through plays about oil, nuclear disaster, and quiet domestic anxiety, playwrights have found ways to dramatise something that resists easy storytelling, urging audiences to confront complicity while cultivating imaginative resilience in the age of climate emergency. Drawing on examples mainly from Irish and British contexts, this talk asks what theatre can do that statistics and scientific reports cannot — and what that might teach us about communicating and responding to Anthropocenic dilemmas more broadly, on stage and off.

Lecture is given by Clare Wallace from the Faculty of Arts, CU.

This lecture is one of the outputs of the CoRe project, Beyond Security: The Role of Conflict in Building Resilience (Project No. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595).