The Heretic

The study of climate science is the cool degree at the university where Dr Diane Cassell is a lead academic in Earth Sciences.

At odds with the orthodoxy over the cause of climate change, she finds herself increasingly vilified and is forced to ask if the issue is becoming political as well as personal. Could the belief in anthropogenic global warming be the most attractive religion of the 21st century? What evidence do we need before deciding what to believe?

Richard Bean’s black comedy questions whether the science is settled. Richard’s last play at the Royal Court was Harvest in 2005. His previous plays at the Royal Court include Toast,Honeymoon Suite and Under the Whaleback. His recent work elsewhere includes The Big Fellah for Out of Joint at the Lyric Hammersmith, England People Very Nice at the National Theatre, The English Game on tour and In the Club at Hampstead Theatre.

Jeremy Herrin is Deputy Artistic Director of the Royal Court, where he is currently directing EV Crowe’s Kin. His previous productions have included Anya Reiss’s Spur of the Moment, Bola Agbaje’s Off the Endz, Michael Wynne’s The Priory, Polly Stenham’s plays Tusk Tusk and That Face, as well as the UK premiere of David Hare’s The Vertical Hour. He was formerly an Associate Director at Live Theatre Newcastle, where he specialised in directing new writing. His other credits include Marble (Abbey, Dublin), The Family Reunion (Donmar), Statement of Regret (NT), and the South African premiere of David Harrower’s Blackbird.

Running time 2hrs 40mins approx, including one interval.

£10 Monday tickets are available on the day of perf from 9am online, 10am in-person, and in advance to Friends and Supporters

Reviews

4 stars Paul Taylor, The Independent, Monday 14 February

The National Theatre’s current extravaganza about climate change, Greenland, shows the drawbacks of trying to write a play by committee (there are four authors involved).

In contrast, The Heretic, the Royal Court’s first foray into this theatrically tricky subject, has been produced on his tod by Richard Bean, one of our drama’s most wittily maverick voices.

It’s a riotous comedy about another nonconformist, Dr Diane Cassell (Juliet Stevenson), who, as a leading academic in the Earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university, specialises in measuring sea levels in the Maldives. Since these have not risen in the last 20 years, she has become a climate-change sceptic. As a result, she gets death threats from the Sacred Earth Militia.

She’s locked in wrangles with her anorexic Greenpeace daughter (Lydia Wilson) and eventually she is suspended by Kevin, her head of department and former lover (James Fleet). Reluctantly, though, she finds herself rather taken by a new student, Ben. Portrayed in an edibly appealing performance by Johnny Flynn, he’s a gormless-seeming eco-obsessive (his idea of the perfect death would be to blow himself up on Top Gear) whose klutzy attempts at acting cool conceal a lonely heart and brilliant mind.

As it keeps the great one-liners whizzing and the scientific arguments airborne, Jeremy Herrin’s extremely engaging production lets it gradually steal over you that this is principally a play about love. Nothing is resolved intellectually, nor is it clear whether Ben admires Diane, to an extent, because she is a stubborn individualist or because he thinks she is right.

The whole question is elided here in the resolution of the mother-and-daughter conflict, with the mother recognising that she has been too extreme and the daughter that the eco-addiction and the anorexia were part and parcel of the same problem. Where does that leave the science, though? Rather obscured at the end in the golden haze of humanist uplift. 4 stars Charles Spencer, The Telegraph, Friday 11 February 2011

This play on climate change is an absolute corker

You expect a play about global warming to be deeply serious, and if you have had the misfortune to endure that current fiasco in the National Theatre’s repertoire, Greenland, probably anticipate an evening that is incompetent and punishingly dull as well.

I caught a glimpse of the playwright Richard Bean at the premiere of Greenland and thought he was wearing a slightly smug smile on his face. Now I know why.

His own play about climate change, The Heretic, proves an absolute corker, funny, provocative and touching, and absolutely resolute in its refusal to lapse into the apocalyptic gloom that usually attends this subject.

What makes this even more remarkable is that it stars Juliet Stevenson, a superb actress, I know, but one who usually favours angst and tragic misery over the belly laugh. Here however she is often in wonderfully funny, sarky form as Dr Diane Cassell, an earth sciences lecturer at a northern university who is – and I can hardly describe the feeling of relief when one first discovers this – a climate change sceptic.

She’s not convinced that sea levels are rising. She is not sure that man is causing the Earth to warm to dangerously high levels. She points to the fact that the Romans grew vines as far north as Hadrian’s Wall and, best of all, she drives a petrol-guzzling Jaguar. She is indeed so non-PC that a pressure group called the Sacred Earth Militia has issued her with death threats.

Bean has serious points to make, not least, that scepticism about anthropogenic global warming is these days regarded by many as an unforgivable modern heresy. Indeed our heroine is actually suspended from her job when she goes onto Newsnight (the great Paxo himself puts in a highly entertaining appearance on a video screen) and airs her views.

Some might also complain that the play is a muddle. Detailed debate about global warming is combined with an almost sitcom-like narrative about a hilariously gauche student and the crush he develops on the lecturer’s anorexic daughter.

This is mirrored by Stevenson’s vexed relationship with her craven boss and there is even a moment when the play seems to be on the point of turning into a hostage drama.

Yet all this seems symptomatic of unfashionable high spirits on the part of the dramatist, a former stand-up comedian who here proves exceptionally generous with the jokes. The Heretic is a play on the side of life and optimism, with a faith in humanity that goes markedly against the grain of current thinking.

Stevenson is clearly having a ball as the sceptical scientist, delivering put-downs with great aplomb, but also becoming genuinely moving in her care for her troubled daughter, played with sparky attack by Lydia Wilson. James Fleet is a comic delight as her compromised boss and Johnny Flynn turns in a tour de force as a fanatically sincere, hilariously awkward environmentalist.

Jeremy Herrin’s production is blessed with an infectious exuberance, and it is great to see the Court putting on a play which will vastly offend a large section of its audience. 4 stars Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard, Friday 11 February 2011

Climate change comedy that warms the heart in The Heretic

Richard Bean’s delicious new play has been billed as a controversial view of climate change, but while it has some intriguing things to say about environmentalism it’s at heart a romantic comedy, larded with excellent jokes and peppery satire.

The central figure is Dr Diane Cassell, a lecturer in earth sciences at a fictional university in Yorkshire. She’s a businesslike scholar, whose scepticism about aspects of green orthodoxy makes her a target for a pressure group called the Sacred Earth Militia. The role is ideal for Juliet Stevenson, who invests it with a cool intelligence; she’s poised and pragmatic yet also engaging.

Diane’s research is focused on measuring sea levels in the Maldives. Her findings don’t fit with the beliefs of her colleagues and rivals, but when she airs them, she’s treated as a dissident.

Her head of department (a delightfully rumpled James Fleet) wants to silence her. After she makes an unauthorized appearance on Newsnight, trading quips on screen with Jeremy Paxman (the real one, not an actor), her career nosedives.

Director Jeremy Herrin neatly marshals a cast of six. Adrian Hood is spot-on as a university services manager with peculiar ideas about how best to “facilitate excellence” on campus. Lydia Wilson sparkles as Diane’s bolshy, anorexic daughter who cultivates an elephantine crush on one of her mother’s students. And as this tree-hugger and occasional self-harmer, Johnny Flynn is pitch-perfect, a study in clumsily inarticulate charm.

Above all, though, it is Bean’s writing that scintillates. Pulsing with shrewd humour, it’s risqué and linguistically rich. There are some blissfully surreal touches, such as an explanation of cognitive dissonance that involves Gary Glitter, and a hilarious sequence in which Diane is advised during a disciplinary meeting by a cuddly toy polar bear called Maureen.

Diane is suspicious of agendas polluting research. Bean seems to feel the same way; this isn’t a concertedly polemical piece. But it does contain pungent observations about the imperilment of academic freedom by market forces, and the need to sequester science from dogma. It’s also strikingly humane.

The first half is brilliant. In the second some themes are underdeveloped, and the play mutates into a townies-in-the-sticks thriller. The ending is rather cluttered with incident, and there are a couple of twists that don’t fully convince. Yet The Heretic is clever, imaginative and entertaining theatre. 4 stars Michael Coveney, whatsonstage.com, Friday 11 February 2011

Suddenly, I feel a climate change coming on: The Heretic, Richard Bean’s entertaining new play, picks up on the dreadful slack left behind by Greenland at the National and delivers a very funny, topical new take on earth sciences, which have come into their own as a subject in universities after the blah-blah years of psychology and media studies.

The heretic in question is Juliet Stevenson’s self-contradictory, self-deprecating Dr Diane Cassell (“I’m a scientist. I don’t ‘believe’ in anything”), a paleogeophysics lecturer in a Yorkshire university who is challenging orthodox views in her field and undermining sponsorship.

She’s suspended, and then sacked, by her professorial head of faculty, Kevin Malone (anxiety-ridden James Fleet) – with whom she is vestigially in love after a long-ago one-night stand – in a hilarious scene featuring a pre-programmed human resources officer (Leah Whitaker) and Diane’s lawyer, a puppet polar bear – Sooty reborn as “Whitey.”

Diane, who’s been studying sea-levels in the Maldives, is at the centre of another spider’s web involving her grungy Greenpeace activist, anorexic daughter Phoebe (Lydia Wilson, following through strongly from Blasted at the Lyric, Hammersmith) and her brilliant new flaky, self-harming student Ben (Johnny Flynn).

And the lumbering security officer Geoff (Adrian Hood), who speaks plain Yorkshire and has been in the army, proves a convenient hidden weapon when the Sacred Earth Militia come to call and Phoebe goes into heart attack mode: only the outer farce lines of this play need a little sorting.

Diane goes on Newsnight unauthorised – filmed insert complete with Jeremy Paxman saying he knows all about chaos after 30 years at the BBC) – and the play shifts from designer Peter McKintosh’s functional departmental office to Diane’s country retreat on Boxing Day: a round of Scrabble becomes a family internet hacking game into the rival university’s tree ring data, and a Mel Gibson cinematic climate change blockbuster charade.

Mr Bean makes mighty fine jokes all along the way – I like Ben’s idea of the perfect bloke-ish death being extravagant suicide on Top Gear – and Stevenson glows like an agreeable firebrand all night, reminding us how rare is her onstage mix of intellectual probity and heart-breaking concern. Only the cheap-looking celebratory red dress at the end is a fashion error. Otherwise, she surely needs to lead this play into the West End, following the Court successes with Enron, Jerusalem and Clybourne Park.

Libby Purves, The Times, Friday 11 February 2011

After the preachy hysteria of the National Theatre’s Greenland (“Mum, the ice is melting and I’m really scared”), we were owed a sharpener: an affirmation that we may question the new religion which says that global warming is our fault.

Richard Bean’s painfully witty play will annoy some, but even believers may enjoy briefly cocking a snook at the Monbiotocracy. Especially in a play so artfully recognisable: from the first snap of “Stop sighing Mum, you sound like you’re in The Archers”, through references to Paxman, WikiLeaks, Gary Glitter and “Caroline Spelman’s fish pie suppers”, it strikes home. The first act is one of the sharpest, funniest, most engaging hours you could spend.

We start in a university department of Earth Sciences, surprised at its new fashionableness. In a clever set which shows clouds, rain and snow through skylights, Professor Kevin (James Fleet, with a moulting air) observes that Arts once ruled, then Sociology , until Psychology supplanted it in the Seventies and “made bullshit respectable, which paved the way for Media Studies”. Now Earth Sciences is the trendy faculty, and big business is knocking on the door offering consultancy contracts, so he prefers to forget that his first book was about the coming Ice Age. But his colleague Diane (Juliet Stevenson) is wedded to hard empiricism, and finds from research that sea levels are not rising.

For commercial reasons she must be stopped from publishing and kept off Newsnight (we see her with the real Paxman on screen). Her furious anorexic daughter is in Greenpeace, and her grungy pupil Ben refuses to go in a fossil-fuelled minibus and threatens self-harm because if he lives entirely on local organic vegetables he might cause increased emissions of flatulent methane. He dreams of blowing himself up on Top Gear.

Meanwhile Diane is getting death threats from the Sacred Earth Militia, the enormous ex-Marine security guard seems strangely unconcerned and keeps turning the light off in a marked manner and droning about his role being to “facilitate excellence” and a Human Resources lady comes to sack her, in one of the funniest scenes of all.

Jeremy Herrin directs elegantly and Stevenson is a marvel, managing to contain her innumerable witty lines within a warmly believable, brittle character (not easy: Bean’s addiction to jokes could scupper a lesser actor).

Johnny Flynn as the student does wonders, alternately inarticulate, tormented, or spouting jargon about “student-centred learning””. Above all, that starry first act makes its point that the doctrine of global warming — true or false — has a powerful and dangerous attraction for several constituencies: neurotic self-hating kids, depressed misanthropists, opportunists who build careers round it, and politicians looking for tools of social control.

Michael Billington, The Guardian, Friday 11 February 2011

Climate change drama is the new growth industry. But, while the National’s Greenland is entirely issue-driven, Richard Bean’s new play uses characters to explore ideas. The result is provocative, funny, contrarian and stimulating. It is also overlong; by the end of three hours, you feel Bean has not so much lost the plot as provided almost too much of it.

He starts from a promising premise: the isolation of Dr Diane Cassell, a leading light in the earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university. Her speciality is measuring sea levels in the Maldives, and her pragmatism leads her to conclude they have not risen in 20 years. Inevitably her climate-change scepticism lands her in trouble: she gets death threats from Sacred Earth Militia, is at odds with her anorexic Greenpeace daughter, and is eventually suspended by her faculty boss and former lover. Her consolation is a student, Ben, whom she induces to share her strictly scientific approach to global warming.

I found the first half of Bean’s play pugnacious and entertaining. He is good on the dangers of heterodox thinking, the absurdity of academic bureaucracy, and the problems of treating climate change as a quasi-religion. He also writes one bitingly funny scene in which his heroine finds herself grilled by Jeremy Paxman in an exchange that spreads more heat than light.

But one question kept nagging me: does Bean admire his heroine because of her courageous independence, or because he believes she is right? Would he extend the same charity, I wondered, to a flat-earth advocate?

Juliet Stevenson brings a crisp intelligence, a steely wit, and just the right hint of inflexibility to her portrayal of the science-driven Diane. Johnny Flynn is totally magnetic as the gangling Ben, whose trendy rap dialogue conceals an original mind, and there is good work from James Fleet as the line-toeing faculty boss who is as anxious to get into bed with commercial sponsors as he is with Diane.

Susannah Clapp, The Observer, Sunday 13 February 2011

Richard Bean’s new play is – hurrah! – the opposite of what we’ve come to expect from the climate-change dramas washing over the stage: the opposite of what we had last week from Greenland and, earlier, from Earthquakes in London. It’s a tsunami of jokes, a meltdown of piety and po-facedness; it has at its centre an unexpected heroine: a concerned scientist who is seen by her fellow academics as a climate-change sceptic.

It’s not simply the foregrounding of this view that’s unusual, but the fact that it’s held by a woman, emphatically not a David Hare woman. She is played with a beautifully calibrated, level conviction by Juliet Stevenson: you believe each of her rational taps on the laptop.

Jeremy Herrin’s trim production doesn’t attempt to visualise climate change: this is a play about the debate rather than the events that inspired argument. Greenland gave us a full-size elegantly ambling polar bear; The Heretic gives us a stuffed toy called Maureen. The emphasis is on the rapid-shooting of the dialogue. There’s a good joke about The Archers and an admirable crack at the Almighty, who is, it is pointed out, not actually an atheist. At the same time, there is a disconcerting shift at the vivid personal centre of the play from scepticism to awe. James Fleet and Johnny Flynn are particularly strong; what’s especially pleasing is the combination of unremitting intelligence with unremitting laughs. The Heretic makes most plays look underwritten.

Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times, Monday 14 February 2011

The publicity for Richard Bean’s play features a bemused polar bear on top of an iceberg. It’s a playful reference to the Fox’s glacier mints icon, but given the play’s subject, the stranded bear soon seems to symbolise not only shrinking ice caps, but also the predicament of the central character: an academic at odds with the prevailing climate change consensus.

As a playwright, Bean seems to relish putting his hand into hornets’ nests, so his take on climate change was never going to be restrained. Instead, it is provocative, thoughtful and very funny. And while Diane, the eponymous “heretic”, might publish inconvenient findings, Bean’s aim seems not to side with her. Rather he examines why people believe what they believe and how personal motives, and political and financial expediency can muddy a serious issue or compromise rigorous study. As the play proceeds, he unpicks everyone’s agenda and we realise that this is a drama about unhappiness and loneliness: he presents us with four lonely souls bobbing about in the choppy waters of scientific research.

Diane, our sceptic, is a lecturer who has been measuring sea-level in the Maldives and not finding any rise. She is countered by Kevin, her professor, who calmly makes the case for anthropogenic global warming. Academic differences become critical, however, when Diane receives death threats and Kevin realises that her stance might jeopardise crucial funding. Add in an unusual eco-warrior, Diane’s daughter and an earnest student, and the temperature in the department shoots up.

Bean depicts his characters with compassion while also gifting them some fabulous comic lines, and Jeremy Herrin’s fine cast relishes this. Juliet Stevenson has brittle wit and cool exactness, but also real passion as Diane, while James Fleet’s wonderfully rumpled Kevin has a steely core. Lydia Wilson is painfully defensive as the chippy daughter and Johnny Flynn steals the show as Ben, the surprisingly astute student.

After an excellent first half, the play unravels somewhat in the second. It leaves too many threads unpursued, cobbles together melodrama, farce and thriller in an unlikely climax, and struggles with an unconvincing romantic comedy ending. A shame; but this is still an acerbically funny, challenging drama.

Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, Sunday 13 February 2011

In Richard Bean’s new, provocative seriocomedy, her Climate Change Sceptic or CCS stance infuriates her funding-driven university boss and ex-lover (James Fleet). She simultaneously receives death threats from eco-guerillas who’ve found out her home address, as has Johnny Flynn’s Ben, a twitchy student apparently taken with Diane’s bolshy daughter.

Accompanied by whiteboard graphs demonstrating how statistics can be manipulated to look scary, the CCS arguments are certainly thought-provoking. It’s quite frequently hilarious and, when death becomes an immediate danger, the suspense and raw emotion is startling.

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