20.02.25
Dear Grif-friends,
I’ve spent the last few nights watching the previews of Alana Valentine’s Nucleus—marvelling at the dexterity of Paula Arundell and Peter Kowitz’s performances, as they wrestle with the complex and marvellous ideas at the heart of this play.
And each night, after the show, I’ve carried with me a sense of unrest. Troubled by everything Alana has provoked in me—a reflection of a society bitterly divided, unable to find common ground, while our species slips closer and closer to global catastrophe.
In Nucleus, Cassie Logart and her pro-nuclear antagonist, Gabriel Hulst, are locked in a lifelong struggle over humanity’s fate. Each believes extinction is inevitable if the other ‘wins’. In one scene, anti-nuclear activist Cassie states that radioactive waste takes 500,000 years to decay—a threat that will outlast countless generations.
Then, this week, an article in The Guardian led me to a Wikipedia page outlining a speculative timeline of the far future—what might happen to our species, our planet, and our universe over the next 100+ trillion years.
In 10,000 years, Earth’s axial tilt will shift, altering climates and ecosystems beyond current recognition.
In 100,000 years, the constellations we know will have changed.
In 1 million years, the Chernobyl exclusion zone may be habitable again.
When I showed Ang Collins, the playwright of Naturism, this speculative timeline she told me she found it horrifying. I find it comforting, and I’m not entirely sure why.
Maybe there’s relief in release from the illusion of control—the uneasy freedom of helplessness. Maybe, more worryingly, it is release from responsibility for what it happening to our species, and this planet, within the timescale of my own life.
But maybe the real question isn’t whether this is hopeful or despairing, but whether we can hold both truths at once.
I think this is also, in a way, where Nucleus takes us—with two characters who are bitterly divided, ideologically, but whose deep, complex love means they must find a way to hold this division in their coexistence. A release of hope, however complex.
Much love,
Declan xx
