Imagining Britain's first climate refugees - Chichester play

Emily White admits that she writes about the things that make her angry, the things that frighten her, the “knotty issues” that will strike a chord.

She has certainly done that with the play Atlantis, a co-production with Theatr Clwyd which comes to Chichester's Minerva Theatre after a month in Wales.

It plays Chichester from Saturday, July 18– Saturday, August 15, the tale of Bryn and Gwen who learn they will be forced to abandon their cherished home in a small coastal village in Wales in the face of rising seawater.

Their crisis rekindles Gwen’s crusading spirit, cradled at the Greenham Common protests in the 1980s – a commitment inherited by her granddaughter Rhiannon. But as the years pass, their passionate activism threatens to divide mother from daughter, sister from brother, husband from wife.

“The play opened at the beginning of June and it had a deep effect on people. There were lots of standing ovations and people crying and people laughing. We had lots of people coming up afterwards and talking about it, and we had people saying that they wanted it to be shown in their local theatre. It was all really positive.

“The response that you hope for as a writer is that people will care about the issues in the play, and I'm just happy that it went down so well.

“The play goes back about six years ago. I started writing it in February 2020. I was commissioned at the end of 2019, and I knew that I wanted to write about climate change but I didn't know how. I always want to write about the things that frighten me or that make me angry, the really knotty issues but it was also a subject that I felt had not been written about before in many plays at that time. There are a lot more plays about it now than there were back then but I wanted to do it in a way that really reflected just how complex the subject is.

“I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do it but then I heard about Fairbourne, a town in North Wales on the coast that had been told by the council that no more would be spent on sea defences because it was not cost effective and that the entire town would have to leave and become Britain's first climate refugees. I read about that and then I was talking to one of the cast of the play that I was doing at the time, and he told me about Cantre'r Gwaelod (a legendary, sunken kingdom off the west coast of Wales, famously known as the Welsh Atlantis). It is a story that might have been based on a sea level rise in the past. So I started looking into myths and legends everywhere about other cities and towns. There were lots of them, and obviously the most famous is Atlantis. I read that the stories were passed down orally from person to person before they were written down but the word Atlantis had been written on the walls of a temple and they dated the original story to a time when there was a big sea level rise so it seems that Atlantis could have really happened.

“I took these legends and weaved them through. What was happening in Fairbourne inspired a modern-day story. It is about a family over a 30-year period. We see the characters age. I'm just observing them. It is about examining the subject from lots of different sides using the characters and how they respond to it differently. I'm not trying to provide any answers. There is nobody who is right and nobody who is wrong. I just think that it's something that is going to affect all of us and that we should think about it more.”