No bees to pollinate the crops. Every day, a different species is driven to extinction…

Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying
at Pegasus Theatre Oxford
on Saturday, July 20

Review by JON LEWIS

American writer Jessica Huang’s 2019 play Transmissions in Advance of the Second Great Dying is set in 2045 when it is far too late to turn back global warming. There are no bees to pollinate the crops. Every day, a different species is driven to extinction. Snow is a distant memory.

Directed by Yasmin Sidhwa for Mandala Young Company as part of Mandala’s Uncaging Our World international festival at the Pegasus Theatre, the subject matter is relevant to many of the performers and audience members who will be in their thirties or forties come 2045 and have to overcome scenarios raised by Huang.

The drama fuses fantasy to a post-apocalyptic scenario explored in other American plays such as Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns. An enigmatic ‘being’, Onthium Klarcks (stage name for regular cast member Nelvin Kiratu) who is in communication with the earth spirit Gaia (Amber Lewis) is tasked with finding the last of every species as they are dying and praising them for their contribution to the world. Klarcks is a charismatic actor, fully in tune with his character’s ethereal, perhaps neurodivergent, thought processes.

The human characters – pregnant Katrina (Mya Fraser), her feckless boyfriend Hugo (Ramy Hassan), a widow who becomes an unlikely potential saviour of humanity, Carla (Celestine McCauley) and Luka (Luis Ribeiro), a pragmatic refuse worker, and two wealthy food scammers, Sandy (Will Lee-Allen) and Maria (Lewis, doubling) – populate the stage with endangered animals. The most prominent of these is a Canadian lynx whose main prey, a showshoe hare, has just become extinct, the last one turned into dinner by the scheming Sandy and Maria. The lynx plays an unlikely role in Sandy and Maria’s eventual downfall in a scene where the violence is comic.

With the animals being north American, the characters including an online newsreader, and the environments, overtly American, the occasional well-intentioned attempt to localise the text with references to pounds, UK cities, and phrases found in many of Mandala’s young company plays like ‘oh, my days’, decontextualises the drama somewhat.

However, this long play is well-performed and gained a deserved standing ovation.