You might not leave Venue 13 with a concrete Climate Emergency To-Do List, but you will depart with at least one new friend with whom to create one.
The Fringe’s home for Scottish-Canadian artistic collaboration, Venue 13 kicked off the first of Climate Change Theatre Action’s 20 days of play readings. This is the Canadian theatre company’s tenth year of commissioning short-form climate theatre. Throughout the festival month, CCTA will present a total of fifty of its commissioned works, including ten new ones specifically written for the festival and in response to this year’s theme: The Time is Now.
The artists, activists and change-makers from around the world that have been selected to take the stage at Venue 13 throughout the festival will each engage with at least one play from CCTA’s sprawling canon. They then have the opportunity to do whatever they want with the rest of their allotted time onstage.
In the opening afternoon, CCTA’s co-organizer Chantal Bilodeau introduced their first Fringe audience and then ceded the stage to Alchemy Theatre Paris, a company of New Zealand theatremakers who have come to the Fringe this summer to premiere their newest work ALONE. They chose to read two CCTA plays – Science is Dead! by David Geary and Space Cat by Lewis Hetherington – before mediating a discussion about the pieces with award-winning New Zealand playwrights Alex Medland and Luke Thornborough.
Fringe theatre at its most casual and reflective, the format of this late afternoon reading and discussion was exactly what I needed to kick off my first week in Edinburgh. Billed as a two-hour event, it was not immediately clear what length or depth of discussion could possibly fill the time after reading the two short pieces (the standard length of CCTA plays is roughly five minutes). What followed, however, was a conversation – about the ethics of art-making versus frontline activism, the purpose of art amid the climate emergency, and the importance of cultivating the emotions of grief and anger to guide individual and collective action – that was so rich and meaningful, it was difficult to leave.
The highlight was by far and away the reading of Space Cat by Scottish playwright Lewis Hetherington. An insidiously simple story about a cat who misses his owner (an astronaut millions of miles away on a mission to find a new habitable planet), this play slides a pin right into the impossibility of approaching the climate crisis from anything besides a deeply human perspective. Hetherington hits an ultrafine balance between poetry, Pixar short, and bare-bones theatre, capturing the divine sense of presence our loyal pets give us but which we humans often fail to appreciate (and leave in the unfamiliar care of others while we travel).
Alongside Culture for Climate Scotland and the Traverse Theatre, the CCTA at Venue 13 is a must-go Fringe stop, especially if you think you have no hope left for the state of our planet. You might not leave with a concrete to-do list, but you will depart with at least one new friend with whom to create one.
(Climate Change Theatre Action runs until 23rd August (except Mondays) from 4-6pm. Tickets here: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/climate-change-theatre-action-2025)