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Old Vic, LondonDuncan Macmillan’s two-hander is a frenetic portrait of flawed love in a flawed world, exposing the neuroses of a modern couple who struggle to put their principles aside
‘The world is fucked,” says one half of the earnest couple in Lungs, fretting about starting a family on an over-populated planet. Since Duncan Macmillan’s play about modern love and the climate crisis was first staged in 2011, it feels like the world has become even more so. The script’s debates on individual responsibility for saving the planet take on renewed significance amid the rise of public protest and Extinction Rebellion.
The unnamed couple, played magnetically by Claire Foy and Matt Smith, worry about the polar bears and eating imported avocados. Their hand-wringing carries its own middle-class hypocrisies. They angst over the carbon footprint of a prospective baby (“10,000 tonnes of CO2”) and consider planting trees to offset the damage. But they sound like helicopter parents from the minute she gets pregnant. Their neuroses and double standards are gently derided, but the idealism to be “good people” is not undermined altogether. Continue reading...