CamFest Speaker Spotlight

Steve Waters is a playwright and scriptwriter whose many works include The Contingency Plan and the acclaimed four-part drama Song of the Reed for Radio 4.  He is also Professor of Scriptwriting at the University of East Anglia. He will be speaking at  Creating a livable future: positive action to avert climate catastrophe on 28th March from 7.30-9pm with Emily Farnworth, Director of the Centre for Climate Engagement and Ariel De Fauconberg. 

You've been writing about climate change for years. What sparked The Contingency Plan, your series of plays in 2009, which was recently revived, and was that your first venture into writing about climate change? 
That's a long discussion...I had, like many people, been mindful of the approaching threat of what we now think of the climate crisis from the 90s, but it was a hard sell in the theatre when it was seen - wrongly - as a problem for the future, rather than a present dramatic question (which shows how much has changed, and not for the good, since I started writing the plays in 2007/8); I had a number of useful provocations - I gatecrashed events held by a brilliant organisation called Tipping Point which brought artists and scientists together to share research and became very involved with that; I was part of a carbon reduction initiative in the village I then lived in, Impington - just north of Cambridge - which brought me into contact with many neighbours working in the British Antarctic Survey and other relevant fields; and the specific prompt was reading James Lovelock's strange and interesting book The Revenge of Gaia which gave me insights into a fault line which would open up in scientific and political circles...but the plays are their own thing, more than the sum of their sources. 

How can the arts and science work together better to address the climate catastrophe and what do the arts bring to the discussion of climate change that science can't? 
As a non-scientist, one of the few virtues of the environmental crises more broadly is how they have prompted many writers to get closer to the work of say, conservationists and glaciologists - and it's clear that what our colleagues in those fields know far outstrips what they can convey professionally and even politically. Writers have much more lee-way and also don't have to get it RIGHT in the quite the same way - a scientist's career can be ruined by approximation, but we live in that space; and also we can personalise, dramatise, turn data into story, fabulation and the like - we deal with emotion and scientists are being compelled to strip that out of their work - so negotiating those differences is our task. 

Have you seen your students becoming more interested in political playwriting over the last years? 
Definitely - the world is not short of politics right now. There's hardly a way of not writing about it but how that occurs is in the gift and talent of the writer, what they can imagine, what they care about. So the question is how forms with clout such as TV can accommodate those politicas. 

Tell us about you work on conservation with nature reserves in the Fens. How did that come about and what was the aim? 
I have been getting ever closer to specific environments. As someone who has lived in East Anglia for years, the indigenous landscape is the fen or the Broads and I am gripped by the urgent work of conservationists to future proof these landscapes against disaster - eg sea-level rise-driven floods - and I got a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work on site at places such as Wicken Fen  in Cambridgeshire and Strumpshaw Fen in Norfolk, tracking the work of conservation. Out of this came my BBC R4 drama Song of the Reeds with Mark Rylance (still on BBC Sounds), all recorded in situ; and my outdoor theatre work with Tangled Feet, 'Murmurations', which is touring nature reserves. This is my passion I guess, not least because i derive hope from that work and those places. 

What are you currently working on?
In the Spring I will be touring a show I have been developing called Phoenix Dodo Butterfly which tries to dramatise contradictory scenarios of climate change in the lives of its characters, with a view to developing precise conversations with audiences about the risks to their vicinities. It's coming to Cambridge in July...and I am also writing a farce!!!