The Heretic

Richard Bean’s new play The Heretic focuses on a climate change sceptic. Typical of Bean, the play is keen to stir up the settled liberal consensus and tip over sacred cows and all that kind of stuff.

Dr Diane Cassell is an academic in the Department of Earth Sciences in York, an expert in sea levels and she has discovered that in the area she’s been studying, the Maldives, the seas don’t appear to be rising. The university is very keen to attract the sponsorship of  an organisation with a lot staked on the conventional climate change picture, and Professor Kevin Maloney asks her to delay publishing until the deal is done. She disobeys him and, worse, goes on Newsnight to denounce climate change academics as a ‘small cohort of hippies who ... have suddenly become the most powerful people in the world’. She is suspended. The second half of the play moves to her rural cottage on Boxing Day. Diane has been receiving death threats and we see the campus security guard, in balaclava and combat fatigues, make his way into the cottage and hide himself upstairs. meanwhile Diane  has been bickering with her anorexic daughter, Phoebe, and is waiting for the arrival of her neurotic student, Ben, who she is trying to turn into a scientist, and who fancies Phoebe. He does turn up and so does Kevin, whose wife has left him. More important, Ben has hacked into the files of an academic at the University of Hampshire who has recently published evidence of climate change based on tree-ring findings. They discover that the recent evidence is very slight and that he’s doctored the evidence. Phoebe and Ben fall for each other and when Diane tries to talk to him about the relationship, Phoebe attacks her mother, which brings on a heart attack. Her life is saved by the security guard/green vigilante who does CPR on her. In the final scene, it begins as if Phoebe’s died, but in fact it’s her wedding day. Diane reads her speech to Kevin.

Richard Bean’s a very funny writer. The play is packed with huge laughs. He is very good on university politics and both Diane and Kevin are excellent characters, cynical, tart, bolshy and quick. The curtain line that ends the first half - ‘Maureen says that in the twenty seven years she’s worked in industrial relations she’s never met a bigger pair of cunts’ - got a response of shocked hysterical delight from the Royal Court audience. There are moments in the play that are very touching and, of course, he’s picked a great subject to write about.

I think quite often the play goes for the laughs to the detriment of the play. I don’t think Bean would deny that this is a pretty old-fashioned play. It’s got five acts and solid sets and a plot and entrances and exits. But that’s just the coat hanger. What Bean’s really interested in is sideswipes on various topics. There are dozens of little digs at various politically correct nostrums - grammatical errors in the Koran, eating disorders, paedophilia. And it becomes very clear that this play is not really interested in its story, which is only there as a vehicle for the gags and the aggro.

Not interested in the story? Well, lots of it makes no sense. Why does the academic invite her student to her house for Christmas? Yes, it’s true, he’s threatened to self-harm in front of her, but that still doesn’t convince - this character is very self-assured and confident in her dealings with students; I didn’t buy that she’d be cornered so easily. And anyway, it’s just inviting an unstable student - who says he fancies your daughter - to your home.

And then, the student. He’s an environmental fanatic. He won’t get on a minibus. He worries about the CO2 emissions produces by breathing. He worries about the methane emissions from farting. And yet a couple of tutorials with Dr Cassell and he’s gleefully hacking into a climate scientist’s computer to discredit the global warming thesis. He’s written Phoebe a song (a very good one, in fact) and this neurotically awkward boy decides he will sing it to her in front of everyone. ‘shouldn’t this be in private?’ asks Phoebe and she’s right, it should. It makes little sense of his character that he does this.

And the Professor. He gives Diane and verbal warning. Then he is involved in getting her suspended. Then he turns up on Boxing Day and that story is forgotten. And the security guard - who is somehow also a member of a quasi-terrorist green activist group - hides through most of Act 4 but bounds in to save the daughter’s life. That’s not completely improbable, but Diane’s reaction is: she says virtually nothing. It just becomes a comic, absurdist, farcical moment, with Green activists being shooed off with pitchforks, an air ambulance trying to land and a khaki-clad intruder pounding Phoebe’s heart.

Because he always goes for the laugh and everything else comes second to that: plot, story, character, argument. He elaborately sets up moments of conventional drama and then fucks them up because he’s thought of a joke. Ben holds a Stanley knife to his wrist and Diane’s response? ’Do you always slash your wrists in front of people?’ Really? She really says that? The play is an other example of Dominic Cooke’s stated desire to put the middle class on stage - and the middle classes filled the auditorium too, some around me mmm-ing in knowing approval at the various sabre thrusts against the pieties of the liberal left. Despite that, it’s in a very noble Royal Court tradition. The play was very reminiscent of John Osborne, especially the later plays where the old-fashioned carpentry is all carving out space for characters to be waspishly offensive at everything the author senses its audience might hold dear.

And then there’s the environmental debate. He’s created a composite renegade climate scientist out of various contemporary figures and added in a thinly-disguised version of the media-spun ‘Climategate’ affair at the University of East Anglia - which no one who knows anything about how research is actually conducted would have thought of as worthy of the -gate. We hear all about doubts and nothing about the overwhelming evidence. It begins as a play about the need to separate politics and science (a similar debate is had in Greenland) but by Act 4, it’s a conspiracy theory play about how the evidence for Global Warming is all made up. Believers in climate change in this play are either ineptly violent thugs, pusillanimous academic careerists, or socially inadequate teenagers working out their own narcissism by posing as environmentalists.

In fact if the play has a thesis - oh God I’m slipping into Billington language - it’s that environmentalism is a kind of narcissistic religion. Diane has a couple of speeches to that effect. But what does that mean? Fucking nothing, as far as I can see. Why isn’t climate change denial also narcissism? Any belief will have a self-regarding element because our beliefs aren’t separate from our sense of ourselves; we are the things we believe. So it sounds like a beefy call for some more robust kind of politics - who knows what that might be? Revolutionary socialism? Common-sense pragmatist centrist politics? Entrepreneurial capitalism? - but doesn’t really say anything. The final speech, Diane’s mother-of-the-pride address, is a touching tribute to human beings as the most special force in the universe that sounds good but is unanchored to the rest of the play and so it’s vacuous phrasemaking.

There’s nothing wrong with a sceptical attitude. Real knowledge and understanding needs to face out sceptical questions and they’re made stronger by it. But I’m not sure this play is so much sceptical as cynical. It prefers to ask only the questions that encourage us to do nothing. It’s riding on a general public cynicism which may well, really, destroy us in two or three generations’ time. Like English People Very Nice, I just worry that Bean is hitting at soft targets because he’s got no real opinions, he’s just a contrarian. I can imagine him being pleased that I am pissed off by the play; that’s probably the point, to annoy liberal leftists like me. But that strikes me as a dumb and trivial thing to aim for, unless he just is a right-wing provocateur. I’ve liked some of his plays - Harvest, for example, is one of the best plays of the last decade - but he’s on course to become the Jeremy Clarkson of British playwriting.