The Theatre of Unsustainable Goals

By: Mike van Graan*

In 2019, I had the ambivalent privilege to serve as an artist-in-residence at the University of Pretoria in South Africa’s capital city.  Ambivalent for, on the one-hand, I would have six months of paid work and free accommodation, but, on the other hand, I was required to write a play about the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)!

The commission came with further specifications: it was to be performed by senior acting students in the drama department; it had to include as many actors as possible – at least 8 (the largest cast in my previously staged works was 5) and it had to be a maximum of 60 minutes as it would premiere at a Festival, where works were churned in and out of venues at a rapid rate.

There are 17 SDGs – end poverty, achieve zero hunger, reduce inequality, quality education for all, achieve gender equality, combat climate change, etc - with a collective total of 169 targets.

How to write a play about the SDGs?

Does one write about all of them?  Or only a selected few?  

How does one write about them?  As an educational, didactic exercise to educate both the participants and the audiences, or as theatrically interesting as possible with sufficient content to be true to the commission?  Does one use metaphor or realism?

What should be the overall form to engage the cast so that it is both an effective theatre learning exercise that also challenges the actors’ skills, is an opportunity for them to showcase their talents and allow them to learn about the SDGs (not a single actor had heard of the SDGs when they came to the auditions).

I eventually decided to produce a work that 

  1. recognises that not many people know about the Sustainable Development Goals so that the play would be a vehicle for awareness-raising and as a catalyst for debate

  2. notwithstanding this, the piece should pursue its educational role as theatrically as possible, so that the play will cover all 17 goals – some of them more cursorily than others – with different theatrical styles employed throughout the piece to keep it  interesting for the audience, and allow the director and cast to explore and participate in a variety of theatrical forms.

While being educational, the piece would also offer critical commentary on the goals and their capacity for being realised.

Theatrical form

Given that the play was a university commission for students to perform, it provided an opportunity to experiment with a number of things including non-racial casting i.e. roles are not “race”-specific and could in fact be cast exactly to counter racial expectations of the audience; non-gender specific i.e. women can play male roles and vice versa.

The play also employed a number of styles which needed to be integrated as seamlessly as possible.  These included forms such as the Greek chorus, children’s theatre, musicals, drama, satire, puppetry, post-modern commentary, storytelling, Shakespeare and courtroom drama.

Given the multiple styles of the piece as well as the need for it to be portable and struck in a short period, costumes and props were to be minimalist, with the emphasis on the acting, and with actors and their bodies being used as props where appropriate.  Where props and costumes are used, they would be bright and colourful, as befits a children’s play.

Children’s theatre as the basis

For the basic through-line, I settled on the fable of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, with Little Red Riding Hood having to walk through the forest to take a basket of goods to her grandmother who lived at the end of the woods.  She encounters the Wolf along the way, who does away with Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in order to get the basket of goods!

The fable morphed into Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Metaphors, with Redi no longer able to walk through the forest (thanks to deforestation) and she encounters the Wolf in the city, begging for food, since his natural habitat has been devastated in the name of ‘development’.  Redi wends her way through a series of bad, mixed metaphors – like the sea of poverty – en route to her granny who is one of millions of people who still do not have access to electricity and waterborne sewage.  In a scene that anticipated Greta Thunberg’s address to the United Nations, Redi pops in at the UN and berates the world’s leaders for doing little to address the major challenges threatening the future of her generation – not only climate change, but nuclear weapons that would do in a matter of hours, what climate change would do over years.

The director and cast tackled the project with great energy and it went down well with audiences, to the extent that it has now been prescribed as a text to be studied in some schools.

At a time when the coronavirus presents existential threats to the very practice of theatre, it is affirming to have a piece of theatre being studied by young learners, and which could inform their own actions in mitigating, and perhaps preventing the existential threats of climate change, inequality and patriarchy referenced by the Sustainable Development Goals.   

*Mike van Graan

Mike van Graan is an award-winning playwright with 34 plays under his belt.  He is the 2018 recipient of the Hiroshima Prize for Peace and Culture and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Pretoria in recognition of his body of work both as a playwright, and as a cultural activist.  A former expert on UNESCO’s facility on the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, Mike is currently a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) working on his first novel.