Climate change is the big challenge of the day so we expect the theatre to address it.
The problem is how to approach a subject which is so huge and so complicated it dwarfs the concerns of any individual human.
Playwright Joe Edgar’s solution is to make it local: Big Cranberry is set in a newspaper office in Boston where a reporter, Marianne, has been sent to look into the collapse of the cranberry industry in the south of Massachusetts.
As a Friday night exercise the editor, Gloria, has her staff act out the story which Marianne is writing. Maybe they do this in US newsrooms, I would heartily advise no management to try it with journalists over here, but let’s go with the conceit.
Marianne is played entrancingly by Molly Hanly with stages of indignation, neurosis and pitiful hopelessness. Her verbal dexterity with the script is admirable. Her newspaper colleagues take on the roles of cranberry farmers while she endeavours to establish how global warming has hit the crop so farmers have turned to sand mining which undermines the ecology of the area and contributes to global warming.
This is didactic stuff played out as dramatically as possible with the Boston Globe’s in-office rivalries, but the plot really starts to come alive when there is a love interest.
Marianne falls for one of the locals and begins to explore radical action about climate change – fatally crossing the barrier between reporting and becoming part of the story.
Is it enough to be working on ‘syntax and framing and taste’ when the world is burning? The guiding light of the old editor, played with assurance by Juliet Welch, puts the case that it is.
There are some interesting moments here, there are real ethical dilemmas spliced with scenes of Marianne driving to the story in her car recounting her dreams to her therapist. There is some neat stage work to create different locations out of nothing but two tables and two chairs.
The question ‘does journalism make a difference?’ is not answered by this piece, but it certainly told me all I ever needed to know about cranberry bogs and blue-green algae.
Venue: Jack Studio TheatreÂ
Playwright: Joe Edgar
Cast: Molly Hanly, Juliet Welch, Xavier Starr, Sydney Crocker
Duration: 75 minutes
Until: 29 November 2025