HOTHOUSE

Claire O'Reilly

30/03/2027

Duur: 1h35
Location : Salle de la Grande Main
Languages: In English, with French surtitles
Infos : Ages 14 and over

Premiere: 9 September 2023 at the Dublin Fringe Festival

How can we talk about the climate crisis when it is all around us? Is there a narrative capable of fully encompassing it? For to tell a story is always to choose, to reduce, to focus. Faced with the scale of the disaster, what remains to be said — and above all, what is the point? Listing extinct species, measuring rising sea levels, counting wildfires: do these repeated observations produce anything other than sadness and inaction? If grief paralyses us, then perhaps we must transform it. Turn it on its head, shift it, reinvent it — until something else emerges.

This is the aim of Hothouse: to tell the story of the crisis differently, via the detour of humour and the absurd. The Malaprop company takes us aboard a cruise ship bound for the Arctic, to bid farewell to the ice caps. At the helm, a madcap captain, a keen singer, guides this unstable journey between derision and vertigo. Cabaret acts featuring endangered birds, karaoke by a solitary whale, conga concerts and cancan shows all make an appearance on this improbable voyage.

For in the face of widespread apathy, it is becoming urgent to reawaken our emotions: what if laughter, after all other attempts, were still capable of setting us in motion?