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Playwright David Finnigan explains why audiences are ready to watch climate change shows

Yahoo News Australia spoke with the author of Scenes from the Climate Era.

Video transcript

DAVID FINNIGAN: You know, making shows like this in the 2000s, no one would want to come and see it. And if they did, they kind of came with this sense of almost self-flagellation. People came to be told that we're fucked, and it's their fault, this real kind of Protestant kind of guilt ethic.

And I'd say about five years ago or so, that really shifted. Suddenly people came wanting to talk about it. And the energy in the space just became extraordinary. You know, a decade ago, you could not get people to come to a climate show under any circumstances. But now it's younger people coming to these shows. It's people from all walks of life, all kinds of people.

And it doesn't feel like they're coming to be punished with bad news. It feels like they're coming to be part of this conversation. I feel like, you know, audiences are not blank slates. And they're coming now to these shows with their own stories and their own ideas and their own experiences of climate change. And so now there's a real conversation after the show, which is just electric.

So it's not about telling an audience about some grim tragedy or lecturing them. Maybe a decade or two decades ago, there was this sense that, oh, we need to explain what climate change is. We don't need to do that anymore and probably haven't for most of the time. People understand.

And now it's sort of just sort of about saying, OK, the world we live in is not the world that we thought we lived in. And we're starting to see that, and that's incredible. You know, we grew up in a world that we thought was a certain way. We were educated for this world that no longer exists. Maybe it was already gone before we were even born.

But now we're actually taking stock of the world that we live in. And that kind of means rethinking everything. And you can't do that on your own. So, you know, you kind of need an audience, a room full of people to come together and to sort of figure out what is this world that we're living in and how are we going to get through it.