Staging Climate Science: No Drama, Just the Facts

“I cry every time,” says my friend about hearing Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speak. Thunberg first heard of global warming at the age of eight. That humans were capable of disrupting planetary systems—and failing to treat those disruptions as serious threats to planetary survival—struck Thunberg as “unreal.” She spoke up about it at her high school, hoping to convince her classmates to join her in a strike called “Fridays for Future” during the early autumn months of 2018. Images of her protest quickly spread on social media, and by November of that year, she had amassed a global following. At TEDxStockholm, her first appearance on a major platform, she explained why she had spent so many Fridays on the steps of the Swedish parliament: “What is the point of learning facts in the school system, when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society?” Ever since, Thunberg has spoken often—and with stirring conviction—at conferences, conventions, summits, strikes, and protests around the world.

In late 2019, Thunberg spoke at the 25th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Spain, just a few hours after Time magazine named her Person of the Year. At COP25, she discussed the rhetorical strategies that she had found more or less useful during her long year of public speaking. “When you talk in public,” she began, “you should start with something personal or emotional to get everyone’s attention, say things like, ‘Our house is on fire,’ ‘I want you to panic,’ or ‘How dare you!’ But today I will not do that, because then those phrases are all that people focus on.” When she used heightened language, listeners seemed to forget what was most important: the expert consensus on the state of the climate. In order to underscore the significance of scientific research and its hard-won conclusions, she went on to share the dismal findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C from 2018—a litany of percentages and page numbers—before finally asking: “How do you react to these numbers without feeling at least some level of panic? How do you respond to the fact that basically nothing is being done about this, without feeling the slightest bit of anger? And how do you communicate this without sounding alarmist?” That audiences were roused by her pithy appeals, but not by the actual assessments of scientists, troubled her.

Thunberg’s predicament is clear: people prefer beautiful rhetoric to scientific reports, but to replace meticulous descriptions of global warming with captivating interpretations of global warming is to lose too much.¹ There’s a faint anti-theatricalism to Thunberg’s thinking, a desire to separate the plain facts from the rapturous entreaties that too often outshine them that recalls Jonas Barish’s influential book The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981). She has grown impatient with the vexing obligation to gild science with storytelling and speechifying, elements conventional to rhetoric and theatre alike. Thunberg wouldn’t say so in these terms, but with its capacity to stir audiences to fear and pity through embodied imitation, theatricality might just get in the way. The data alone ought to be enough to affect people and effect change.

The problem Thunberg raises is one theatre practitioners know well. A sense of unease has long attended the theatre for its ties to dissimulation and deception, conferring upon it a bad reputation for passion, spectacle, and artifice. In announcing her decision to ditch those phrases that audiences happily commit to memory in lieu of scientific facts, Thunberg, like others before her, makes a subtle turn away from the value of theatricality.

Thunberg holds what we might call a weak version of the anti-theatrical prejudice: the perspective that the elevated gestures common in theatrical performance are excessive and ecliptic, though not necessarily contemptible, particularly in the context of ecological crisis. Though her brand of anti-theatricalism does not cast theatricality as...