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In these days of ever-encroaching climate crisis, we desperately want scientists to be the heroes. Alice, a glaciologist just back from Antarctica, knows that. After all, she wants it too: “To find the answer. Invent something. Discover something. Flick a switch and solve it all.”
Playwright Martha Loader, who won last year’s George Devine award for The Town, has spent two years interviewing Antarctic researchers not just on their work, but the impact it has had on their personal lives. In Albatross, the home Alice returns to is one where her mother Eve has been caring for her five-year-old daughter. And their tense middle-of-the-night reunion – made comically awkward by the presence of Eve’s new boyfriend, Martin – allows Loader to explore the moral dilemma of what each generation owes to the next, and whether the greater good outweighs personal, even maternal, obligations.
At the heart of Menagerie Theatre Company’s production is Agnes Lillis’s warm performance as Eve, a woman who has spent her adult life caring for others and would like, now, to enjoy a penguin-spotting trip of her own. We feel her frustration as she struggles to reconnect with Caroline Rippin’s tightly wound Alice (“like hugging a tennis racket”, Eve observes). There’s sympathy, too, in the way Loader portrays Eve’s drift towards the misinformed, wishful thinking that distances so many of us from oncoming existential threat. It is, after all, easier to shrug that “the Sahara might become like Portugal” than to face the frightening reality.
But as Alice insists, that reality has already arrived – and that’s evident in the recently flooded kitchen of Chris Dobrowolski’s set, where furniture is marooned on small patches of white linoleum that look like icebergs. Director Patrick Morris (who also plays Martin) hints that more than ice shelves are cracking here, although even this doesn’t quite make sense of the play’s too-hasty denouement.
Still, there’s plenty to enjoy, including an explanatory demo of warming ice caps delivered through the medium of ice-cream. And seeing this production at UEA – whose campus houses one of the UK’s leading climate-science departments – underscored its rallying call of courage for us all.
