Oh, My Green Soap Box

‘And what will we do on the days where there’s no wind?’ Lucy Foster asks addressing the solution of wind farms to the world’s energy crisis. It’s simple, ‘we’ll stay in bed,’ an answer the world leaders would chuff to like a gaggle of bankers, but in their hearts probably couldn’t think of anything more appealing. When did the economy become more important than love, anyway?

Oh, My Green Soap Box steps back from the racing protests and the urgent dialogues on how we need to act now, and thinks about our emotions. With a few well-crafted scenarios showing how we could be affected in everyday life, it made the climate change message even more poignant. It wasn’t preachy, nor did it require donations, and the point was more powerful for it.

On one occasion an audience member was called upon to take a walk across the farm; through the forest where the city stood, by the river where the motorway once lay, and into the farm where the banks used to be. The volunteer was shown what life was like on the commune picking apples, making pies, enjoying love. In fact it almost made climate change sound positive. As if it has the power to make us realize the error of a capitalist consumerist society, and get back to basics. Let’s face it; we never really needed all those handbags, IPods and celeb mags in the first place, eh?

Foster weaves in enough relaxants and jokes that remind us we don’t need to be militant to be revolutionary. At one point she wanders through London dressed as a Polar Bear to remind people not to forget about the beautiful creature and to demonstrate that it might be gone one day.

Unlike most climate campaigns out there, Lucy Foster’s isn’t after donations; her show wants us to understand it in a way that we haven’t considered before. It isn’t a pin-badge, or a plastic bracelet, a T-Shirt or a status update, but an actual organic thing that will change our lives. She opens the simple truth that in years to come we might need to teach children in schools what exactly the ‘white’ stuff was. As Foster points out from the start, ‘This is the biggest campaign ever’ and we are all going to play a part in it.