People pleaser Maddy (Fatima Reyes) is worried her sister Lily (Chloe Higgins) isn’t having any fun at her mountaintop party. Recognising that Lily’s the person you can rely on to share the untarnished truth, she wants to coax her down from her lonely tree to join the festivities. Bear (Joshua Rogers), the archetypal Jock, is too busy enjoying the party to notice that his best friend, Darryl (Nathan Skenderian) keeps trying to carve out time for the two of them to chat. Shy (Gabby Montejo) wishes she had a bit more faith in her own opinions. Lucy (Tessa Hemphill) wishes her parents thought she was something more than sweet and stupid. And Zoe O’Donnell‘s Becky is just worried that her mum is drinking too much.
no one is coming to save us is first and foremost an ensemble piece offering a very rare thing in Fringe theatre – a cast of thirteen. And this cast are super. Lewis Hetherington‘s vibrant script treads a lovely line between offering an insight into these teens’ heads and creating a creeping sense of dread about the impending climate crisis. Hetherington reminds us of the beauty and majesty of the nature that houses us – and in the next heartbeat, reminds us of how quickly the natural world can and does turn against us.
Another impressive thing about this production is the effortless way that these thirteen young people engineer themselves around this compact space. Director Hollace Starr‘s choreography makes full use of all thirteen bodies – there’s a lovely moment when the actors form a circle and breathe in unison, mirroring the first breaths of the world as it was born – and she also allows a miraculous amount of space for the individual stories to breathe.
All of that said, the best reason to see this show is to hold yourself to account. Using young people to encourage those more set in their emission-intensive ways to confront their personal response to climate change isn’t a new idea. But Hetherington has his characters questioning their own responses to climate change, questioning the futility of individual action in the face of the scale of the problem and questioning whether acts of violence in protest can ever be justified. At the end of the play, we return to the mountain top. The young people look out at the expansive view and reflect on how they might find a way through this. It’s enough to give you hope that we can fix this.
no one is coming to save us has now finished its run