Director Claire O'Reilly deep dives into Malaprop Theatre’s long-awaited climate change play, Hothouse – a production which finally makes it to the stage three years later than originally intended, and now a hot ticket at the Dublin Fringe Festival this September.
Every Malaprop show has germinated differently, but the process tends to begin with a broad topic and initial conversations before we fully commit. Truthfully, in 2019 when co-founder and performer Maeve O’Mahony expressed an interest in exploring climate change, I didn’t immediately jump. It made me nervous to embark on something so huge and scientific and almost definitionally unsexy.
Such is the beauty of directing in a collective. When concerted research began into 2019’s global state of play, I remember being baffled, horrified, and totally absorbed. One of the key early components was discovering luxury cruise ships had found new pathways in the Arctic where ice used to be. From this, we shared ideas like a 6th of all bird species are heading towards extinction, or that a coastal village in Wales was being ‘decommissioned’ because of rising tides, or that actually there might be windsurfing in the north pole by 2040 as the summer sea ice will have vanished entirely.
Another co-founder, playwright Carys D. Coburn, took this research and created three generations of the same family who are trying to understand and survive the ever-changing domestic and global environments in which they find themselves. As a huge priority in our work is the playful theatricality with which we like to probe our subject, we also encounter horny songbirds, grotesque cabaret numbers and of course, an unhinged captain of a cruise ship. Set and costume designer Molly O’Cathain, and composer and sound designer Anna Clock, have fully embraced these elements in the show’s visual and aural world.
Something I love about the piece is there is compassion for how we got here and hope for where we're going.
Hothouse is a ‘new’ piece, but not without its ghosts. We were a week away from our first public performance of an earlier iteration of the show in March 2020 when gatherings were canceled nationwide. It’s a strange privilege to return to a piece of work after a few years and a generation-defining global catastrophe, one which was wrapped in many of the ecological issues we’d been discussing. At the point of cancellation, we had no idea what the future would hold for our health, our livelihoods, or our understanding of art in society. Those three years also provided an opportunity to reshape the work, informed by shifts in our own artistic priorities, and the endlessly changing backdrop: the ongoing discussions of refugee crisis accommodation on cruise ships in Irish waters, or 2023’s summer of 10,000 heat and rainfall record breaks across the world, or film releases like Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, which helpfully proved our cruise ship consumerist mania concept.
I don’t believe Hothouse lets us, the present-day human audience, entirely off the hook. I don’t think it should. But something I love about the piece is there is compassion for how we got here and hope for where we’re going. This is why, for me, you make work about the huge things.
I particularly enjoy Carys’ exploration of an imagined future and how we might do things differently. These are not points of action you would find on an activist website, largely because there are actually activists in Ireland – like Friends of the Earth – doing that more effectively than we could. It’s just an illustration of a world that isn’t perfect either, but approaches big, fundamental human practices with some consideration for the generations to follow. While the specifics there can become easy to thwart, it’s hard not to look at the basic idea and think, wow, that’s it. Some consideration for the generations to follow. That really could be, simply, gloriously, profoundly ashamedly, it.
Hothouse opens at Project Arts Centre, from September 9th – 16th, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2023 - find out more here.
