Andrew McFarlane Forum

keksle · Administrator Messages: 1594 Location: Bodensee, Germany

Sorry, that I haven't shared a lot of news here lately but most stuff is posted on the FB page. But here a few articles about the Play:

Cold shoulders and hot flushes

'I'M a scientist. I don't believe in anything," quips Noni Hazlehurst as Dr Diane Cassell, the English climate change and sea level expert in Richard Bean's play, The Heretic.

Diane is the heretic whose research findings contradict the quasi-religious doctrines about climate change in Professor Kevin Maloney's (Andrew McFarlane) university faculty.

In Bean's irreverent and often hilarious play, the politics of science, the idiocy of academia and the chaos of family life collide in a quirky version of a family drama.

We forgive Diane her academic arrogance and avoidance of emotional engagement because she is so damned clever and entertaining.

Bean's writing is impudent, satirising all players in the climate change debate from academics who manipulate data for funding to eco-terrorists who threaten anyone who disagrees with them.

Director Matt Scholten and his capable cast keep the arguments clear, the comedy swift and the comical characters engaging.

THE HERETIC

MTC Sumner Theatre, Southbank, until June 23

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keksle · Administrator Messages: 1594 Location: Bodensee, Germany

Friday, May 18, 2012
Review: The Heretic

Because Richard Bean's play The Heretic is about climate change, it attracted the notice of hardline climate change denier Andrew Bolt in the weeks running up to its opening. There was a minor flurry of polemic that at once excoriated the "arts community" for its leftie lockstep, and on the other jubilated that at last a climate change denier was being granted her proper prominence. (Granted by whom? That very same "arts community" - apparently an identikit bunch who dress in black, live in Brunswick and plot the downfall of the RSL.) The logical absurdity of this sums up Bolt's usual modus operandi, and is hardly worth addressing. But I assume, operating on the basis that "no publicity is bad publicity", that this kind of controversy is why The Heretic was programmed. I can't think of any other reason.

It's hard not feel a kind of colonial resentment that so many resources - an excellent cast and design team, a main stage budget, hours of work and attention - have been thrown at a British play of such unrelenting mediocrity. Bean's play is given a much better production than it deserves. If we're going to support mediocrity, let's at least keep it local: we have budding Williamsons aplenty here, with the added bonus that they're at least addressing regional specifics. But let me not get carried away with reactionary nationalism, a hat that doesn't really suit my complexion.

The Heretic, as is known to anybody who has followed the jejune controversy, concerns Dr Diane Cassell (Noni Hazlehurst), a climate scientist at the University of York who specialises in measuring sea levels. She has written a paper which questions the consensus that sea levels are rising and which, according to everyone around her, means that she is about to topple the whole edifice of scientific consensus around climate change. This alarms her boss and former lover, Professor Kevin Maloney (Andrew McFarlane), who is trying to swing a lucrative sponsorship for his Earth Science department and believes that publication of the paper will queer his pitch. She also starts receiving death threats from an extremist environmental group called the Sacred Earth Militia.

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