Decommissioned – Lives on the edge

A new play explores what so-called managed realignment means for people and places most vulnerable to coastal erosion and rising seas. Karen Thomas meets playwright MA Sweeney

Molly Sweeney has long wanted to write about climate change. As the London playwright turns 30, she sees climate change as a looming weight and darkness that hangs over her generation. That does not shift.

Artistic responses have traditionally paired creatives and climate scientists. Sweeney was daunted by translating complex science into drama. Perhaps climate change is too big – too weighty – to create a drama to engage an audience.

Then a director friend sent her an article from The Guardian. In it, reporter Tom Wall visited Fairbourne, the North Wales village whose shoreline-management plan could make it the first UK settlement surrendered to the sea.

Sweeney re-read the article as a writer. Through that prism, it becomes a two-act drama. On the first day Wall finds blazing sun, benevolent seas and blasé locals. On the second, a bleak day of grey skies and driving rain, the weight of Natural Resources Wales’ decision reveals itself.

“There was something about that – how life can be going on, on a nice, normal, even keel,” Sweeney tells The Environment. “And then suddenly there’s torrential rain. Or you realise it hasn’t rained in ages. Or you feel too hot, or too cold, and it freaks you out.

“It’s that sense of something gradual, that becomes quite creepy in a horror-movie kind of way. Suddenly, you feel very frightened. The play raises questions about fairness – about who gets what resources. We live in an incredibly unfair world.”

Deciding not to maintain Fairbourne’s sea defences already affects the community. People risk life and limb if they stay, but can only sell their homes for next to nothing. It is almost impossible to sell up and start over somewhere else.

That leaves 850 souls who live in Fairbourne trapped on a plain between sea and mountains, as the rising sea inches higher towards their homes.

Climate impacts

And so Sweeney wrote Decommissioned, a play inspired by – but not set in – Fairbourne. It explores how climate impacts will affect places and people. It explores the real-world impacts of decommissioning – of leaving a settled coastline to the mercy of the seas.

“The writer Jessi Jezewska Stevens argues that every book or play written now is in some way a climate-change book or play,” Sweeney says. “Anything that responds to the world now has to be in some way about climate.

“People my age and younger have never experienced a normal climate, in the sense of statistically normal. That’s two generations already living in statistically unusual times for climate and for weather.”

Last summer’s rain-bomb storms hit home that point. Caught up in flooding on London Underground, Sweeney ended her journey cycling through sheeting rain.

In the play, the main character returns to her childhood village, bringing a secret that will change the lives of everyone who lives there.

Gwen reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Elis, who teaches a class of noisy ten-year-olds. One is Jackson, a character staged but not cast, who sees climate change as something real and frightening. As Gwen and Elis struggle to manage their relationships with the older and the younger villagers, the weather gets weirder.

Art that addresses current events wrestles a conundrum; how do you explore something as complex as climate change without preaching? In one scene, Gwen and Elis argue about whether she should buy a car. Gwen says it’s wrong, in a climate emergency, to own a car. Elis says you can’t survive rural North Wales without one.

“There are so many questions – about personal choices and things like offsetting,” Sweeney says. “If we decide to put a factory here, not over there, who takes responsibility? How far have we built our lives to suit this climate? We haven’t structured our lives to respond to climate change, or to mitigate the damage it causes.”

Child’s-eye view

Jackson is unseen but central. He embodies the climate anxiety Sweeney sees in so many children. She drew on a podcast by comedian Adam Buxton, who talks about seeing a documentary with his daughter, aged ten, where David Attenborough looks at melting Arctic sea-ice.

“She stopped watching and pulled a blanket over her head,” Sweeney says. “Because it is frightening – and for a child tuning into that, properly terrifying. It picks up on events during the pandemic, too.

“I remember taking a tube, hearing a mother tell her kids to put their hands in their pockets and not to touch anything. When you tell a story through a child’s eyes, you tone your language down. Which can make it even more frightening.

“Children and young people are so engaged with climate change. That’s amazing. But it’s also sad for them. It’s devastating. I wanted to end the play with Jackson, aged ten, saying something beautiful and wise and true. When in fact that’s the adults’ job.”

A graduate of Exeter University and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Sweeney grapples big themes. Her online play Peer Support explored the mental-health impacts of lockdown. She has presented her work at the Arcola Theatre, Bunker Theatre and Southwark Playhouse. Arts Council funding helped her to write Decommissioned.

The play is cast, Sofia Bagge directing Geraint Rhys as Elis and Marina Johnson as Gwen. After work-in-progress performances in London this spring, the play should go out on tour this year.

Meanwhile, a small northwest Wales community lives from storm to storm. “Fairbourne will become the first community in the UK to be decommissioned as a result of climate change,” Wall’s report noted. “While other villages along England’s crumbling coast have lost houses to accelerating erosion, none have been abandoned.

“It may create hundreds of British climate refugees. The residents of Fairbourne are not expected to receive any compensation for the loss of their homes and resettlement plans are unclear.”

With Decommissioned, Sweeney hoped to create a safe space “to hold those emotions”. Her mother worked for the NHS throughout the pandemic. Many months in, she called to say she finally had an appointment for a vaccine.

“And I burst into tears. I realised that I’d worried for months about her being safe and hadn’t stopped to admit it to myself. The worry was such a part of my life that I’d forgotten it. And maybe when you live in a time of crisis, you don’t think about it, just try to live your life… It can be easier to repress those thoughts – but they don’t just go away.”

Which means Decommissioned is also a play about facing up to things.

“It’s a play about living now – which makes it a play about climate change,” Sweeney concludes. “Writing it has made me realise how much climate is on people’s minds now. As something we factor into our daily experiences.”

Find out more: https://www.masweeneywriter.com/

@CIWEM