David Finnigan explains how to tell stories about climate change

The theatre writer spoke to Yahoo News Australia's environment editor Michael Dahlstrom from London.

Video transcript

MICHAEL DAHLSTROM: How does narrative storytelling impact people differently to news and protest when we're talking about the climate crisis?

DAVID FINNIGAN: Well, I'll speak specifically about theater because that's what I know.

MICHAEL DAHLSTROM: Yes.

DAVID FINNIGAN: My experience with the news, particularly in the 2020s, is it's a sort of-- it comes at you in small bursts. It comes at you on your phone. It comes at you in conversation. It comes at you on screens. And it comes at you in this sort of-- it's very rare that you'd really go deep into a new story.

Maybe you'd read a book every so often about a particular story and really kind of immerse yourself in it. But primarily, you're getting it kind of like fired at you, bombardments, top surface level. I'm sure there's a psychological result that comes of experiencing news and updates about the world at this very rapid fire surface level, coming at you from 360 kind of angles.

Theater is a very unusual art form in that it's one of the few spaces, I think, in kind of the present day where you will go somewhere and you'll sit for an hour. And you'll be in kind of darkness. You'll be away from your screens. And you'll just sit with one story.

And you'll kind of immerse yourself in it. Only hits a few people like a news story on a website and might be read by hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Theater show, maybe a few hundred, but those people are going to go deep. And they're going to sit with it for a long period of time.

And something happens, I think, when you're in a space, particularly maybe in a dark room with a whole bunch of other people. And the craft of theater-making and the Belvoir team are incredible here. They're sort of hitting you with all these sorts of triggers and prompts that bypass maybe some of the intellectual defenses that you have.

What comes out of that, who knows? But I think it's like a fascinating emotional experience. It's one of the sort of more sacred spaces that I'm aware of in my life simply because I don't go to church, but this is a space where you do kind of sit in darkness and kind of think and feel for a period of time as part of a community. So there is something special that comes out of that.

And of course, we're a narrative species. We're wired to kind of connect with narratives and characters. So it does sort of speak to us on that level. Who knows what the result of that is?