The theatre maker David Finnigan’s new show, “Deep History”, is part of a decade-long project about planetary transformation in the face of climate change. Photography by Sarah Walker. At the end of 2019, David Finnigan, a writer and performer from Canberra, agreed to do his father a favour. John Finnigan, a climate scientist, was being treated in hospital for a spinal infection, and the drugs made him too foggy to work on his paper about “six key moments in human history, six turning points where we changed course”. The premise was that humanity is “an adolescent species”, still growing up, but by examining these turning points in our collective past we might be able to glean lessons, or morals, to help us secure our admittedly precarious future. How, for instance, had Homo sapiens survived the catastrophic eruption of Toba, a supervolcano in Sumatra, which nearly wiped out humans (and 13 other mammal species) some 74,000 years ago? What might the history there teach us about resilience?
John couldn’t focus while he was recovering, so he asked if his son would type his notes into a rough draft. As the new year approached, Finnigan agreed to create what was, in theory, “a guide for how humanity can get through the climate era”.
The one-man show “Deep History” dramatises Finnigan’s engagement with his father’s notes. Staged at the Public Theater in New York through this month, it unfolds like an idiosyncratic TED talk. Barefoot, casually dressed in a T-shirt, Finnigan skitters around the stage for 70 minutes, cycling through a slide deck and playing snatches of pop music. He describes each of humanity’s “turning points”, like the Toba eruption, and then offers his proposed findings on a handy flip chart. (“1. Survival is possible.”) He pours sugar into an oversized funnel, each grain representing 100 people on earth, so that sugar cascades over the table and onto the floor. As the show progresses, he becomes increasingly jittery, agitated — so agitated, in fact, that the central premise threatens to break apart, because something else is going on here too.
In 2019, when Finnigan sat down to write “Deep History”, bushfires were ravaging New South Wales. He was dividing his time between London and the English countryside, but his best friend, Jack Lloyd, was back home on the front line. “He was in this situation,” Finnigan recalls, “where he needed to make a decision between evacuating on a highway through a forest that was going up in flames, or staying put with the fires approaching, and with three kids in the back of the car.” As Finnigan worked on his script in England, Lloyd was texting photos and video from an unfolding apocalypse. “All of those stories about deep history suddenly became very real, because in this exact moment, my friend was making life and death decisions,” Finnigan says.
He wrote the dissonance he felt into his show, which is also set in 2019. On stage, as he tries to talk his way through each of humanity’s turning points, he becomes sidetracked by what’s happening at that moment in Australia, a horror defying any attempt to draw out reassuring lessons.
“We seek comfort by understanding what we’ve already survived,” Finnigan says. “But there is also the experience of going through a shock like this.” “Deep History” makes space for both comfort and shock, and the result is as powerful to watch as it is difficult to categorise. Is this a play? A presentation? A call to arms?
Finnigan has been making experimental performances about the climate crisis since the early 2000s, when he got involved in Canberra’s do-it-yourself theatre scene. It was “very punk”, he recalls, with little interest in high-end production values or in appealing to an older audience. “We were really making work in this sealed bubble, and because of that it became really odd. Our reference points were science fiction and punk music, electronic music, video games.” In the atmosphere of anything-goes, Finnigan and his friends began to approach scientists at institutions such as the CSIRO. “One of the great secrets I always want to share with people is that if you email a scientist, they’re probably going to email you back,” he says. “We were these nobodies, but we just said, ‘Hey, can we meet with you?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ” The scientists were happy to share their work, and Finnigan responded to what he learned by crafting shows about game theory, complexity theory, ecology and so on. By his own admission, some of his early efforts were misfires — too didactic to be effective — but he finally found a footing as an artist by approaching the work as an open discussion with an audience.
In 2014, he was commissioned by the Aspen Island Theatre Company to write a play exploring climate change in the context of Australian politics. His pitch-black comedy, “Kill Climate Deniers”, caused an outcry before it even reached the stage. Right-wing pundits complained that the title was an incitement to terrorism. “I was referred to the police,” Finnigan recalls, still clearly astonished.
At first no theatre company was willing to take on the risk, so he reconceived the play as an album, a dance party and as a Parliament House walking tour. (Finnigan is nothing if not resourceful.) In 2018, Sydney’s Griffin Theatre finally agreed to stage a first production. By then, Finnegan had incorporated the controversy into the play, so that it now included a layer of meta-commentary. “I actually brought in the comments from these climate deniers, the attacks from these right-wing pundits, as well my response to those people, the ways I found myself questioning the work,” he says.
More recently, in 2023, another of his productions was staged at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney. “Scenes From the Climate Era” attempts to grapple with the sheer velocity with which our thinking about climate change has shifted over the past five years alone. “There had been so much movement, in both good and bad ways,” Finnigan says — people are more aware of the science, but disinformation has also run rampant. “I really spent the first couple of years of the 2020s just trying to keep up. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been in this space for 20-plus years and now things are going so fast.’ ” He is now working on “The Seventh Assessment”, an epic eight-hour staged adaption, in three parts, of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Seventh Assessment Report, which is due to be published in 2028.
“Deep History” was initially performed just days after it was written to raise money for Australian bushfire relief. Finnigan wanted to help friends and family as they struggled with the chaos back home. He has since performed the show at the Barbican in London, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and during a brief visit to New York’s Public Theater last year. The Public programmers were so impressed that they invited him back for the full run of performances this month.
Finnigan sees his role in “Deep History” as a kind of catalyst. He tries to salvage meaning from the distant past and he confronts his confusion about the turbulent present, but it is all with the hope that something will resonate with the audience. Indeed, the most interesting part of the whole evening happens after a performance, he insists, over drinks at the bar. “People come to the show with their own stories, their own ideas, their own experiences, and the conversations are electric,” he says. Finnigan’s goal is to spark discussions about what it means to be alive during the Anthropocene. How do we make sense of a planet where ecosystems are literally transforming as a result of human intervention?
“There are so many stories happening in the world today,” Finnigan says. “A lot of the theatre I make is just wanting to share those stories. It has nothing to do with trying to communicate any sort of message. It is simply a case of, ‘Have you heard about this? Because it is wild. Let’s talk about it.’”
The show will play at the Public Theater in New York from 5 to 10 November 2024.
