COMEDY
ECO-FRIENDLY JIHAD
***
UNDERBELLY (VENUE 61)SILENT Spring, by the American biologist Rachel Carson, is one of the seminal texts of the ecological movement. Another Kind of Silence, a one-woman play written and perform
ed by Liz Rothschild, is a thoughtful attempt to understand her life and her motivations.
Carson wrote the book in the early 1960s after becoming concerned about the unrestrained use of pesticides and their pervasive effects on wildlife and on human beings. The book became an instant bestseller, though Carson, who was already seriously ill with cancer, died two years later.
Rothschild paints us a picture of a determined, self-contained woman who found that the natural world stimulated her imagination as a writer as much as it fascinated her as a scientist. She gives an adept, restrained performance, but has a tendency to tell rather than show, never quite drawing us into Carson's complex personal life, or to the drama of her struggle with her illness.
At least in part, Carson's story is a vehicle through which to highlight the fact that pesticide problems continue. Fifty years on, big business still calls the shots, chemical residues are pervasive in all forms of life, and the public is too easily reassured by Government-led initiatives. It's enough to make you want to go and live under a rock, if you can find an organic one.
That is perhaps the single biggest problem with confronting environmental problems. We accept, for example, that climate change exists, and that we should do something about it, but how? Is it worth buying low-energy bulbs and turning off domestic appliances if you drive a car or make frequent flights? How do we achieve anything meaningful without a complete change of lifestyle?
This is the question Irish comedian Abie Philbin Bowman – the man behind Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, a hit on the Fringe two years ago – is engaging with in his new show, Eco-Friendly Jihad. Like The Guantanamo Years, it is a vehicle for his particular brand of comedy, a series of jokes (with some serious bits thrown in ) woven around an unlikely narrative which his blarney makes believable. This one has to do with meeting a pretty, young Scots-Bangla woman who adheres to the view that the best way to reduce carbon emissions is to kill as many rich Westerners as possible.
Bowman has a gift for winning an audience over, and coaxing original, friendly humour from subjects that are neither friendly nor funny. He's done his homework, and there are plenty of facts here, but the underlying message is a bleak one: as long as we continue being middle-class consumers, it ain't looking good for the human race.
The difficulty of addressing a problem as big as this is also the underlying premise of Iain Heggie's satirical new play, Global Warming is Gay. Loosely based on Ostrovsky's The Handsome Man, and directed by Heggie himself with a mixed cast of students and professionals, it seems to question the value of trying to be green at all.
Andy Orbison (younger brother of Green MSP Graham Orbison) is determined to reduce his carbon footprint to zero. Unfortunately, this means buying a lot of expensive green gadgets, while creaming money off his girlfriend Kirsty's sick father. He is not the first man to use a higher cause (and what could be higher than saving the world?) as an excuse to treat other people badly.
It's a confrontational piece which probes areas the Green movement would prefer to ignore: how the scale of the problem tends to induce powerlessness; how the desire to be greener has opened up a whole new sector for scam merchants; how a truly carbon-neutral life might turn out to be neither enjoyable nor sustainable.
There is no-one in this play to whom we feel drawn: not scheming Andy, or fun-loving foul-mouthed Kirsty, nor Graham the camp politician, nor Olivia, Andy's neurotic, ever-apologising ex. While stereotypes are the stock-in-trade of the satirist, it's also worth moving beyond them to get to the guts of complex and important questions.
• Another Kind of Silence and Eco-Friendly Jihad run until 24 August. Today 1:45pm and 3:55pm respectively; Global Warming is Gay until 25 August. Today 7:35pm
