I remember the time my father came home from his job as a printer on a Napier newspaper and began talking about the ozone hole over Antarctica. It was the early 1980s, when I was a teen obsessed with boys, skating and swotting for school exams. It felt like a moment – until then, we hadn’t worried too much about the planet and our abuse of it. Afterwards, though, we carried on with our lives, and the only difference was we worried about applying sunscreen a bit more as we learned the gaping ozone hole meant we would get sunburned more quickly.

What I didn’t know back then was that it was thanks to a woman – pioneering US female atmospheric scientist Susan Solomon – that we started to understand what was causing the ozone hole to expand. She blamed this on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), pollution-causing chemicals like those found in refrigeration and repellents. [More] 

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Apart from offering compelling theatrical experiences, the first two plays to be produced in Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s long-gestating Antarctic Trilogy are a salutary reminder that the climate issues we humans are still trying to confront, let alone resolve, have been known about for more than 60 years.

Presented by Ice Floe Productions Tapui Ltd, the plays are coming to the stage in reverse chronological order, with the yet-to-be producedHEART set in the summer of 1957-58, amid the fallout from intensified nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Set in Antarctica in 1989 (31 years later), amid the endless daylight of summer, HOLE is a prequel to HEAT which happens during the endless night of winter in 1999. (HEAT was commissioned by Circa in 2002, premiered as a BATS STAB show in 2008 and was finally reproduced at Circa in 2011. A development season of HOLE was part of last year’s WTF! Festival at Circa.)

Common to both plays is scientist Stella. In HOLE, Stella is an atmospheric scientist monitoring the ever-growing hole in the ozone layer.

(Ten years on, in HEAT, Stella has changed disciplines to observe the breeding patterns of Emperor penguins while her husband, John, monitors climate change. Their attempt to come to terms with their grief at losing a child, to meningococcal disease, and recover their love is thwarted by Stella’s obsessive compassion for a penguin that has been ostracised from its colony.)

When I reviewed HEAT (see links above) I had difficulty reconciling its poetic elements with what I saw as its naturalistic conventions and objective authorial viewpoint. Now I see HOLE (and would reframe HEAT) as dramatisations of Stella’s subjective experiences, allowing them to play out as if in memory and be commented on poetically.  

This time the non-naturalistic set (designed in collaboration by Jason O’Hara, Kerryn Palmer and Sally Richards) evokes tall slabs of a splintering iceberg. Four red trunks, a larger brown one and a small white medical box serve as furniture, and tucked in a corner is a communications set-up. As Gareth Farr’s exquisite music sets the mood, andRachel Neser’s AV projections of a windswept icecap, surging ocean and shadow of an ascending weather balloon set the scene, Isadora Lao’s lights slowly illuminate three immobile people.  

Belgian Bonny is the first one we meet, as she chats on satellite phone to a distant lover called Marcus (I think; it may be Margeaux – Bonny’s heavy French accent takes some getting used to). Passionately personified by Stevie Hancox-Monk, we come to know Bonny as the leader of the Greenpeace corps occupying their World Park Base in the Ross Dependency. They are campaigning for an Antarctic Treaty that will declare the entire continent off-limits to commercial exploitation and pollution. The only rules Bonny respects are those that align to natural forces.

Elle Wootton’s bright-eyed and lively Stella, relishing her southern sojourn, is watching her balloon ascend when she literally stumbles across Bonny. Instantly attracted to each other, they soon realise they are breaking a rule that bans the scientists from consorting with the ‘Greenies’. As they get to know each other, we do too, and Stella’s chats on the phone with her mother in Wellington reveal more of her backstory.

The testosterone factor comes on strong as US Navy Seal, Ioane from American Samoa, confronts us over his discovery of hallucinogenic drugs on the base. He has confiscated them and, once found, the miscreant will be on the next plane out. As embodied by Sepe Mua’au, gentler and more vulnerable parts of Ioane are revealed, not least in his phone calls home to his mother and nan. But given his commitment to service, US Military-style, come first, the integrity of his relationships with Stella and Bonny is always in question.

As a cleverly crafted allegory,HOLE personifies humanity’s fallibility, vulnerability and flaws at personal and political levels. Abetted by Farr’s music, Phil Brownlee’s sound design, Nesser’s visual imagery and Lao’s lighting design, co-directors Kerryn Palmer and Sally Richards ensure the action plays out with the rhythm and flow of an isolated lifestyle susceptible to sudden weather events.

The humour inherent in culturally disparate strangers seeking connection is skilfully blended with explicit and implicit drama in ways that enhance the dramatic value of both. All three characters compel our compassion and empathy while challenging us with questionable behaviour.

As for those illicit drugs – let’s just say the short term pleasure they may offer (unless your mental state is not conducive or you’ve scored a bad batch) and the irrevocable long term damage they cause are a powerful metaphor for the behaviours humans are addicted to on a global scale. And when we are the unwitting recipients of their effects … Just because consequences are unintended, the damage caused is not less severe.

There is a mixed blessing in our being able to watch HOLE, HEAT and the forthcoming HEART – named, I think, because Antarctica is where we monitor the health of the planet – with the wisdom of hindsight. Now we cannot ignore the fact that urgent action must be taken, but what took us so long and why? Can we hope COP26 has achieved a genuine breakthrough?

I suspect the elements of Ioane’s back story, relating to the unforeseen (or were they?) effects on aiga of nuclear fallout, will come to the fore in HEART. Meanwhile HOLE is bound to engage your head and heart in positive ways, both short-term and long-term.

Footnote: An impressive programme note sets out Ice Floe Productions Tapui Ltd active commitment to sustainable energy by creating “the world’s first innovative eco-powered solar and wind system” – currently situated out the front of Circa Theatre – to bring their productions to theatres around the country. Having toured HEAT in 2008, they now dream of touring HOLE emissions free, but an Electric Cargo Van is currently beyond their modest means. Any electric Vehicle companies keen to support HOLE’s dream to tour emissions free, please contact us at: icefloetapui@gmail.com.

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