Atlantis review – the Welsh climate crisis drama is an example for our times | stage

IIn 2014, residents of Fairbourne in Gwynedd discovered that the local council had decided that maintaining the sea defenses was no longer possible. Instead, as part of a “managed retreat” process, this small Welsh coastal village will be abandoned and thrown into the sea by 2055.

This timeline has since changed and is disputed, but although the village is not identified by name, it served as the inspiration for Emily White’s Atlantis. Focusing on the hunter Brain and his wife Gwen (Richard Elvin and Vivian Barry), the action spans from 2011 to 2039, depicting what has already happened and imagining what will happen next as weather systems and society decline.

These are certainly pressing and consequential concerns, and there is lyricism in the play’s sense of time, from the daily to the generational to the geological. But the rhythms of the domestic drama through which this catastrophe refracts are often contrived. Dramatic tension is created through conveniently antagonistic exchanges, and the exposition is over-the-top.

They point to deeper, more provocative issues such as the burden of environmental awareness and the imperatives and sacrifices (and indeed the privileges) of activism. But despite its expanded time frame, the narrative compresses too much into two acts, and the rich potential of these themes seems underexplored with dramatic details ignored.

The committed staff does a good job of filling in the gaps. Barry’s motherly Gwen serves as an emotional foil to Elvin’s more skeptical and fearless tendencies. Catherine Aaron as their daughter Claire, with Alfie Llewellyn and Earlie Lovell-Jones particularly poignant as grandchildren Philip and Rhiannon, maintain a compelling if sometimes inexplicably crude family dynamic, which Sarah Otong as Philip’s friend Astrid tempers with quiet dignity.

This production, directed by Jay Jones, occupies a register reluctant to be documentary but not symbolic enough to be universal. As a result, through Cariadsand a long timesand com. cwtchIn the 1950s, one senses that Wales has become sentimentalized as a timeless land of myth and legend, rather than as a modern nation that – like every other nation with coastlines – will have to make decisions about what to do with climate breakdown hitting its shores.