Lungs (Modern Plays)

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It’s right of them to be afraid of the future; thething is, the future is scarier than it used to be; and the play’s deft final scenes confirm that ‘Lungs’ is serious about being a climate change drama, without actually going overtly dystopian on our asses.

The split-screen, socially distanced format becomes devastating at times. Subtle additions to the script (‘Why are you standing so far away from me’) only add to the tender presentation of the trauma of miscarriage, and subsequent relationship breakdown. The distance only highlights the ways the couple cannot quite connect, and the performances are at their best when reflecting the difficulties caused not by climate change but the occasionally bleak turns of everyday life.

Macmillan’s Lungs illuminates ways in which our society can become more environmentally conscious and reduce our carbon footprint. The constant conversation between M and W sheds light on consequences many people do not consider when deciding to conceive a child. While the theme of this play revolves around over population and depleting resources, the production itself promotes environmental awareness through the minimal resources the set requires. Lungs is a play that had a great deal of momentum. If it were not for the events that took place during a year that we are not going to mention because of an issue we are not going to mention, there would have been even greater momentum for the performances and viewership of this play. There is a lot to build and it speaks a lot for our current generation and their way of thought. This play does a good job touching upon those issues, but it unfortunately does not do as good a job bringing that dimension to the characters within this play. The characters in this play as referred to as "W" (for woman) and "M" (for man), but it is directed that the playbill simply list the name of the actors that are playing each role.

In Warchus’s uncluttered, in-the-round production of Macmillan’s abruptly time-and-place-skipping play, the only scenery is Rob Howell’s stylised set of solar panels underpinned by quartz crystals. Nonetheless, the first scene is set in an Ikea, where she has an almighty freak out at the prospect of having a child. He remains relatively cool and detached and, well, Matt Smith-ish; she continues to fret, spewing great neurotic screeds about the rights and wrongs of bringing a new life into the world. ‘I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower!’ she splutters, contemplating the 10,000 tonnes of carbon a baby will eventually consume. Why did he have to find me? Why this bloody human dereliction? It’s mad isn’t it, not being able to think of anything to do with yourself apart from destroy yourself, drink yourself into the grave. But without labouring the point, our national vibes have gone a bit downhill since the year of the Olympics. In particular, fear of climate change has gone seriously mainstream. Arguably the unnamed couple’sworries marked them as having a certain right-on strand of neurosis in the original Paines Plough production; in 2019, existential dread about what we’ve done to the environment is consuming us all.

The play appears to be setting up an environmental debate as its central quandary, exemplified in the measuring of a human life against the future emissions they’ll cause. Yet Macmillan doesn’t actually seem interested in debating this subject. After all, the true environmental aim would be reducing carbon emissions per person until a human life is carbon neutral – zero Eiffel Towers. Even more importantly, any workable solution for sustaining human life inherently requires the birth of more humans. Lungs avoids working through the manifold complexities of such a debate. Instead, it implicitly asks whether it is fair to make a child live in a potentially unliveable world. Yet even this masks a deeper anxiety over their capacity to be good parents to their prospective offspring, and whether they are good enough in general.

Matt Smith and Claire Foy are doing a socially distanced live staging of 'Lungs' at the Old Vic". Time Out London . Retrieved 27 May 2020. He started working in the theatre in his native city Milano, where he worked in the production office of Teatro Franco Parenti and as an assistant technical manager at some theatre festivals. He moved then to Ireland, where he graduated in Drama and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin, with a An article on NPR outlines a speech made at James Madison University by Travis Rieder. This talk projects the harms of reproduction, harms that M and W cannot ignore. Rieder states that by the end of the century, the climate will rise four degrees Celsius making our planet largely uninhabitable. Right now I am looking at the sea for the first time in my life. He blindfolded me and took me all the way to a beach. Foy and Smith’s characters thus say something before immediately thereafter retracting it, or otherwise think through what has just been said and confirm that yes, they said what they meant, and they meant what they said. The press night audience, discerning and assuming as it was, let out a collective gasp towards the end of the performance, and even then, the plot twists kept landing. As Foy’s character said earlier on in the play, “It’s like you punched me in the face, then asked me a maths question.” Was there a happy ending? Well, I couldn’t possibly say.I don’t actually know where Margate is but I’m guessing it must be like… past Enfield coz we ain’t got anything like this in my borough or in any of the neighbouring boroughs I’m sure. Theatre artists, like all other members of contemporary society, have an opportunity to reconsider how we do what we do. This opportunity is not merely a question of reducing our carbon footprint, but is necessary for theatre to be a contemporary and relevant form of art” (Garrett, 201). His lips are thin, and soft, and very pink and one time we kissed for eight minutes, I know coz we started kissing when Craig David’s album was on, and it was like Walking Away, which is three minutes 27 seconds and then we kept kissing after that when Time to Party came on which is like four minutes and six seconds so all together that’s like eight minutes. Eight minutes.