Steve Waters’ double bill The Contingency Plan comprises a diptych of plays, set in the “near future”, at a time during which severe tidal surges begin to submerge parts of coastal Britain. Bristol suffers an onslaught of water, while the entire plot builds in suspense around a growing storm surge in the North Sea, eventually decimating the frail alluvial Norfolk coastline and much of East Anglia. Despite this panoramic context, the narrative (for both plays) focuses on the struggles of a young expert glaciologist, Will Paxton. Returning to England, fresh from an expedition to the West Antarctic ice sheet (which, he concludes from his observations, is melting at an incredible rate), the first play On the Beach documents Will’s visit to his Norfolk home, while the second piece Resilience portrays his agon to convince inept government ministers of the imminent danger of a storm surge.

The scope of Waters’ two plays (which are performed on alternate nights) deserves praise. On the one hand, these are two plays of waiting; waiting for a catastrophic event to happen which Waters chooses not to directly portray. There is no indulgence in apocalyptic images of environmental devastation, but concentrated focus on the personal disputes and struggles of eight characters. Yet despite portraying only a few scenes in approximately four hours of theatre, dramatic tension is sustained through a swift-moving narrative which generates increasing suspense in the face of approaching catastrophe. The dialogue is generally characterised by an intelligent wit which punctuates the fraught tension (between Will, his parents and Sarika, his civil servant girlfriend) with bathetic lampooning of government responses to anthropogenic climate change. A dextrous cast, some of whom double up and play different characters in the two plays, do the naturalistic (although occasionally formulaic) dialogue a good service.

On the Beach is a more emotionally intimate piece, at the core of which lies the conflict between Will and his (formerly an expert glaciologist) father, Rob. The shadow of the father lives on in the son. Rob stokes Will’s inferiority complex, grilling his son over the latter’s conclusions about the melting Antarctic. Rob would seem to be the archetypal "climate change sceptic", but it turns out that (back in the 1970s) he was one of the first scientists to recognise the melting of ice caps. The fact that nobody in government would listen to his warnings, in addition to the chaos of apocalyptic scenarios filling his head, led Rob to mental breakdown and life-long retreat upon the disintegrating East Anglian coast. A fallen maverick, he can no longer trust in the idea of scientific conclusion, and like some exiled Prospero he now finds a bitter enchantment in the egrets and lapwings of the Norfolk seascape.

Exactly where the women fit into this exclusively male, science-obsessed relationship is another question. The headstrong Sakira, a young civil servant in the climate change ministry, asserts her presence (in both plays) through tactile trysts with Will. The flooding of Bristol provides a ministerial crisis demanding her return to Whitehall, so she and Will make their prompt escape from his father’s madness. Jenny (Rob’s ever-loyal spouse) nurtures a repressed acknowledgement that there is no place for her in either her husband’s deluded mind or on the Norfolk shore. Soothing her melancholic loneliness with the palliatives of green living (off grid, organic food, carbon foot-printing), she eventually announces her conclusion that science (specifically its neurotic demand for data, models, objectivity, etc.) is a “human madness” where she does not wish to belong. Nonetheless, as the North Sea storm brews she commits to staying with her steadfast husband, who remains darkly adamant that they will not be hit by the tides (a belief masking his ‘ecological death wish’ to be destroyed by vast natural forces). Susan Brown and Robin Soans make an excellent duo in voicing this quietly neurotic, deeply dependent relationship.

The self-inflicted helplessness of two wealthy English retirees dining on the decaying shore possessed strong echoes of Chekhov, and Waters achieves a similar, simple poignancy of eternal indecision and unsaid things. Indeed, as indicated by the script’s epigraph from The Cherry Orchard, it suggests that behind the writing of The Contingency Plan is Chekhov’s conviction of human failure. From this perspective, nothing can ever be achieved in solving a problem; through inaction prompted by nonchalantly deterministic attitudes, human ineptitude becomes consummate when the surrounding natural environment inevitably begins to crumble. Just as the distant trees of Ranyevskaya’s once-great estate begin to fall, the comfortable Norfolk home is washed away by the storm. It’s not that pessimistic scepticism with regard to the current state of climate change politics isn’t needed. But Waters’ choice could be seen as a rather peevish approach, which sets the tone for the predictable failures and inevitabilities running throughout the drama.

Resilience, as the play records, draws its title from the concept of ecological “resilience” – “‘The capacity of a system to maintain its stability in the face of change and external shocks’”. Waters shifts the perspective towards Whitehall, and to Will’s attempt to achieve what his father never could – convince government top brass of the severe and imminent danger of sea-level rise. The tenor of the drama also shifts from irresolvable psychological tension towards satire. Cynical sniping and icy put-downs amongst inept Eton-Oxbridge politicians (epitomised by the Minister for Climate Change, the foppish Christopher Casson) pepper this play, in contrast to the more earnest attempts of Will and Sarika to demand that they get their political priorities right. Will lambasts the conservative machinery of the IPCC, demanding visionary (yet “politically impossible”) changes to the infrastructure of Britain:

“Gear all farming land to local food production and move towards zero carbon imports. Restructure the economy to local goods and services. Turn schools into centres of resilience-building”.

But at the heart of this play lie the intractable differences between scientific practice of stating only probabilities, and the media’s/ policy-maker’s demand for tangible certainties. The frustration, even aggressive rage it causes Will is performed well by Geoffrey Streatfeild. But while On the Beach deals well with some of the emotional complexities of humans in a warming world (denial, apocalyptic despair, attachment to place, etc.), Resilience doesn’t convince in exploring the politics of it. The lampooning of ministers and scientific advisers, which seemed halfway between Gogol’s The Government Inspector and the recent British satirical film In the Loop, felt somewhat like the easy choice in the face of a more difficult challenge of representation. Then again, Waters’ clever comparison of the 1970s scientific discovery of anthropogenic climate change and contemporary climate politics reminds us not only how long we’ve known about global warming, but also underscores the replete political inability to tackle it for over thirty years. It is fairly evident that Waters (quite rightly) finds laughable the global political failure to react to the overbearing evidence of climate science. However, the satirical aspects of these plays are neither hilarious, nor do they make incisively sharp points. Will’s tirade against shallow, careerist politicians towards the close of Resilience feels a little bit overdue and somewhat textbook.

The plays are attempting to be zeitgeist, to provide a documentary realism intended to eclipse distinctions between fictions of the stage and the audience reality. There are pointed colloquial references to swine flu, James Lovelock and Ed Miliband (to the extent that it feels a bit strained), and a highly plausible environmental scenario provides the context for the play. Proleptic documentary-esque scenarios have proved to be a popular artistic approach to climate change, as The Age of Stupid recently attests, and Waters extends this approach into the theatre. It is pleasing to at last see a play taking anthropogenic climate change head on, and Waters has clearly buffed up on his environmental science, with figures and sound bytes from contemporary climate discourse surfacing throughout the play. But unlike The Age of Stupid, power is not achieved through arresting scenes of ecological disaster. Not at all that these should be a pre-requisite for art that deals with climate change. However, Waters chooses to focus narrowly on certain individuals, and I think that this is to the detriment of his two plays. The satire was not enough to give the production a cutting or subversive edge, while some of the emotional twists of the script were good, but in the end unchallenging. Waters should indeed be praised on the account that theatrical interpretations of the science of climate change have been conspicuously absent from the Western stage. In The Contingency Plan the playwright succeeds in threading accurate scientific understanding through a good yarn, without turning it into an overly-didactic piece. But unlike, say, Stoppard’s Arcadia, the narrative was not enough to give the science a more penetrating, provocative artistic interpretation. The Contingency Plan struggles, on the whole, to find a deeper sentiment other than the Chekhovian poignancy of loss and failure.

The point about any contingency plan turns out to be that there isn’t one. A slight feeling of dissatisfaction – of seeing something good but wanting more from it – accompanies these productions, particularly Resilience. The precise reason why these remain two plays, and were not condensed into one long one, remains a bit beyond me, since the effect was of an unfinished trilogy. I wonder if they were not originally intended to be one play. But if a work of art is to play the role of a "climate scenario" itself, which is what I think this play is doing, it should perhaps be asked how different an artistic scenario should be from a scientific one. Unfortunately, The Contingency Plan felt like a scenario plucked straight from Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. One is informed, but not compelled.

The Contingency Plan @ The Bush Theatre runs until June 06

Tom Bailey is a freelance environmental and arts writer, living in London. Besides writing regularly for Conservation Today (www.conservationtoday.org), he also works for BASH Creations, London's first eco-entertainment company, and is a press officer for Botanical Gardens Conservation International. He is particularly interested in interpretations of evolutionary theory and the events taking place during Darwin 200. He recently wrote about the artist Tania Kovats for RSA Arts & Ecology.