You're Safe Til 2024 @ Pleasance Courtyard

A sexless climate melodrama, You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History has all the excitement of a stuffy TED talk. One part lecture, one part autobiography, this one man show created by David Finnigan mixes geology, climate science, and family into one clumsy cocktail that is as bleak as it is bland. 

Weaving together a double-layered narrative dominated by a quest to find six lessons about humanity from moments in our history, it is an ambitious undertaking to say the least. This expectedly doomed task quickly devolves into a bland spiel about human history and the increasingly volatile climate we live in. A second metatheatrical narrative underpins this by unpacking the real-life story of Finnigan’s friend escaping a forest fire in Canberra in 2019. Climate change exists and it is already devastating communities – but this is nothing we do not already know. Finnigan doesn’t give audiences anything new to chew on nor does he provide a new angle to illuminate the issue. 

But the fundamental problem here is one of form. The lecture format structuring the two accounts is an unsteady foundation: all it can do is spew facts at its audience. It cannot get under the skin of the issue and wrestle with the emotional themes at its core in the way that a more theatrical narrative can. Finnegan is undeniably passionate, but he does not channel his energy into a pulse that gives the show life behind the history lesson. His delivery is mostly monotone, and the poetic sequence designed to flesh out the six lessons in human history does little to ground his message in emotion. 

You’re Safe Til 2024: Deep History doesn’t do enough to justify its own existence. Of course climate change needs to be discussed – but is this format the right way to do it? 

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You're Safe Til 2024: Deep History, Pleasance Courtyard (The Green), until 29 Aug (not 23), 7.45pm, £9.50-13