Letters To The Earth

What more can we, as storytellers, theatre-makers, writers, producers, actors, directors do, as creators of culture and thought leaders, to tell the truth about the climate and ecological collapse and act as though that truth is real?

We’re inviting you to write a response to this crisis. This could be a monologue, a Letter to the Earth, or a short script of up to 20 minutes. We want to hear from you all. A selection will be presented on 1 day of joint action in April across participating theatres including Shakespeare’s Globe, The Royal Court, The Gate Theatre, Arcola Theatre and The Bunker Theatre. They will then be made available for global download, rights free, for anyone to present anywhere in the world from 15th – 28th April, coinciding with the global Extinction Rebellion and School Strike For Climate.

We invite you to think beyond the human narrative and to bear witness to the scale and horror of this crisis. This is an opportunity to ask how this existential threat affects the way we wish to live our lives and the action we take.

In putting this story front and centre and making space for this emergency we have the ability to shift the global narrative and generate the necessary political will to act.

“As Sophocles and Shakespeare and Moliere and Ibsen and Brecht wrote plays as interventions into the major political crises of their worlds and of their time, so we now need plays that not only record and reflect this probably biggest ever global challenge, but that help us understand what to do about it, how to prevent climate disruption from destroying so much that the west, the east, the north, the south have struggled to create over millennia. The time has always been now.”

- David Lan, former Artistic Director of The Young Vic Theatre