HEADLONG

With plays such as My Child and Contractions, Mike Bartlett has established a reputation as a theatrical miniaturist. Now he has written a big, epic, expansive play about climate change, corporate corruption, fathers and children. And, even if there are times when Bartlett seems overwhelmed by the sheer weight of material, Rupert Goold has come up with a gorgeously carnivalesque production that is more than a match for Enron.

Bartlett's play spans the period from 1968 to the distant future and, in essence, deals with our disregard for our planet. Wisely, it tackles a vast theme by pursuing the fortunes of a single family.

Robert, having become aware early on of the dangers to the environment of emissions from aircraft, sold out to the industry, only to turn in later life into a prophet of doom. He has also become estranged from his three daughters: Sarah, a Lib Dem environment minister; Freya, pregnant and suicidal; and Jasmine, a hedonistic student.

What we witness is both a partial family reconciliation and an acceptance of the need for positive action to save the planet. Far from being preachy, the play is humane, multi-stranded and generally engrossing; and my only reservation is that, in the later stages of its three-and-a-quarter hours, it descends into a speculative, futuristic whimsy.

In its first half, Bartlett beautifully combines domestic and cosmic issues. In one telling scene, Freya's distraught husband tracks down the doom-laden Robert and is sombrely told that "the planet can sustain about one billion people – there's currently six billion".

While establishing the gravity of Robert's pronouncement, Bartlett shows him to be a hard-hearted father. This ability to move between personal and public issues is wonderfully reflected in Goold's production, which has the atmosphere of a controlled dream. Miriam Buether's brilliant design is dominated by a serpentine catwalk and two rectangular stages at either end of the auditorium.

And, just as the action periodically erupts into song and dance, the performances have a heightened realism. Bill Paterson as Robert, Lia Williams, Anna Madeley and Jessica Raine as his daughters and Geoffrey Streatfeild and Tom Goodman-Hill as anguished husbands all combine naturalistic detail with a sense of being part of an epic fable. It is, in every sense, a big play that has the courage of its convictions.

I will be very honest; I have been looking forward to Earthquakes in London since it was first announced. The combination of rising playwright Mike Bartlett, the ever talent-nurturing National Theatre and the innovative, exciting Rupert Goold and his company Headlong, had my mouth watering.

The experience of walking into the Cottesloe theatre and finding it completely redesigned – its stage and seating ripped out and replaced with a snaking walkway, with cinema screen sized apertures cut out of the walls at either end of the room – had me feeling like a child on Christmas Eve. What treats could possibly follow?

The answer is a piece which feels epic in it scope and style, but which tells the story of one family; a piece that explores the possibly catastrophic effects of global warming and also the tensions and fears that can arise in family life. It somehow manages to be vast and intimate simultaneously, like a theatrical tardis.

Bartlett’s tale follows three sisters: Sarah is Minster for the Environment aiming to stop airport expansion but caught in a failing marriage put under strain by her career; Freya is a teaching assistant who is terrified about her pregnancy and hounded by a skeleton motif hoody-wearing pupil; youngest sister Jasmine is a student who is angry at everyone. Back in 1968, talented scientist Robert faces a moral dilemma with consequences he cannot possibly imagine.

Scenes overlap as they are played out on the walkway which, with the help of projected backdrops, becomes a burlesque club, city street or parkland, characters mingling and ignoring each other as they wander past. The focus of attention switches from the centre of the room to the alcove stages at either end. Dream sequences and internet surfing give way to musical numbers performed for and amid the audience. It is a treat for the senses that always offers something new or different, sometimes leaving you questioning where to look and what to focus on.

Style and vigour is nothing without content, and Bartlett’s writing is witty, engaging and fearless. Bill Paterson’s father figure Robert blends Sherlock Holmes’s gifts for analysis with the pessimism of Dad’s Army’s Fraser, Tom Goodman-Hill is hugely endearing as the downtrodden Colin, Lia Williams is heartbreaking as the torn Sarah, and Jessica Raine spits fire and brimstone as Jasmine. I could go through the entire cast.

Does it stretch credulity a touch too far by the end, the second half descending from warnings of doom to a world of myth? Maybe. But I was not the only audience member to be left holding back the tears. From devastation on every level grows hope.

This is one of the most audacious productions I have seen at the National Theatre. Previously known for intimate pieces, Mike Bartlett has created something completely different: a three-hour play of startling ambition.

Full of ideas and invention, it’s often hard work for the audience. But its messiness is brilliant, and Rupert Goold’s production positively drips with bravura. The action spans a period from the Sixties to — no joke — 2525. It mixes the humdrum with the profane and the surreal.

The main characters are three sisters: a glacial politician (Lia Williams); a woman wrestling with the physical and moral burdens of pregnancy (Anna Madeley), and a teenage rebel (Jessica Raine). Their father, played with withering precision by Bill Paterson, is a climate change expert whose fulminations have coloured their world.

Bartlett’s essential message is simple — we’re on the brink of environmental catastrophe, and young people today are paying the price for decisions made, sometimes in bad faith, by their elders. But the manner in which he conveys this is bold and strange. “There’s something going on,” says one character, and the uncertainty about what this something is will be shared by many, for Bartlett’s fireworks can bewilder as much as they beguile.

The earthquakes promised in the title don’t really happen. Yet there’s a constant sense of upheaval, and the action jumps around crazily. Arresting images are developed and then discarded. We see swimmers with ukuleles, miniskirted students dancing to Coldplay, synchronised pram-pushing and an articulate foetus. And we touch on subjects such as cryogenics, Christmas novelty books and the state of the present coalition government.

Miriam Buether’s design consists of two letter box stages at either end of a snaky plastic “river”. Besides embodying the play’s serpentine approach to storytelling, it’s a stunning transformation of the Cottesloe’s modest space, and at times it is hard to know where to look. Goold’s direction creates dazzle in several places at once, and its cinematic verve put me in mind of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, Magnolia.

True, it’s not easy to relate to the characters, and the intellectual arguments are less than heavyweight. But as theatre, the production is frequently mesmerising. Raine and Williams are excellent, and there’s a wonderfully moody turn by Tom Goodman-Hill as a man veering into mid-life crisis. Others feel underused. A cast of 17 performs more than 40 roles, and some of the smaller ones are superfluous.

Undeniably flawed, Earthquakes In London is sure to divide opinion. Some will find it exhausting, but this demented carnival confirms Bartlett, 29, as one of our most exciting young playwrights.

What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic, dazzlingly directed by Enron maestro Rupert Goold and which opened last night, the image of a foetus crying out in the womb seems perfectly reasonable. It’s that kind of show; fuelled by a wildly imaginative vision, when it ignites it burns like phosphorous. And, believe me, that changes your perceptions.

'Part of the joy of watching Earthquakes in London comes from not knowing what will happen next, or where' The main theme is climate change, and Bartlett asks, with varying degrees of urgency, those familiar nagging questions: is climate change irreversible? Is it already too late to save the planet? Are we all doomed? But this apocalyptic scenario is artfully packaged in a family story. Enter Robert, a boffin who in the 1970s started to research the Earth’s atmosphere. Sidetracked for some years by corporate sponsors, he finally shrugs off Mammon and retires to continue his research in the wilds of Scotland.

Meanwhile, his three daughters live in London and occupy different rungs in society. Sarah is the Environment Minister in the current coalition Government. Her marriage to the jobless Colin is on the rocks, and she is being fiercely lobbied by airline execs to expand the country’s airports. By contrast, Freya is a teacher who is heavily pregnant and her husband Steve wants to know why she has recently sought out her father, and what he told her about the future: the question is, is it right to have a child in a world that is about to end? Finally, Jasmine is a teenage student who resembles a human earthquake: she likes drink, drugs and sex. A lot.

The complex family conflicts between father and three daughters, and between the siblings themselves, and then between the sisters and their spouses, are confidently and convincingly sketched out, and Bartlett weaves all of these strands together in an epic tapestry of metropolitan life. It’s hard to convey the thrilling fragmentation and ambitious sweep of this amazing play, so you just have to close your eyes and imagine that the whole of the action takes place in a crowded bar. That’s right, a bar.

The Cottesloe space has been transformed into a trendy watering hole and a huge, bright orange bar top snakes across the space, surrounded by bar stools and room for audience members to stand. It's hot, it's crowded and it can get very loud. Simultaneously, the action also takes place in two proscenium spaces high up at either end of the theatre. Part of the joy of watching Earthquakes in London comes from not knowing what will happen next, or where. Spanning the years between 1968 and 2525 - yes, that’s right, 2525! - the play fields a fast-moving array of characters who talk, sing, dance, jump and, on one memorable occasion, ride a bike across the bar top, while pounding music lifts the spirits and fuels the action. It feels very exciting and a tiny bit dangerous too.

There are many vivid visual moments: the minister hides with her red box in a white loo; an environmental protester does a burlesque strip; an old woman evokes the old certainties of Britain in the 1940s; student girls party in one character’s fantasy; black-clad mums with shades and prams croon and dance; a paper plane flies across the theatre; there’s a confrontation played out by torch light. Yes, director Rupert Goold has pulled off another Enron.

Similarly, Bartlett’s writing is finely tuned and observant, witty and playful, articulate and imaginative. At more than three hours, it’s the kind of play that really shouldn’t work, but somehow does. A beguiling mix of social comedy, political discussion, family drama, sci-fi fantasy and energetic entertainment, it storms along at a cracking pace that constantly sets up contrasts and clashes so your interest never flags. One of the play’s chief delights is its kooky encounters, such as that between 14-year-old Peter and Freya, or Jasmine getting stoned with the minister’s husband, or a father and estranged daughter sharing a drink.

In one mind-bending moment, the play jumps forward in time by a decade and a half, at another it leaps into the 26th century! At one moment you are in the real world, at another inside the head of one of the characters. In one thrilling scene, a young man accuses the older generation of squandering the planet. It reminded me of a similar generational tension in James Graham’s The Whisky Taster, a sure sign that this is a hot contemporary topic. So yes, one of the many earthquakes in the story is generational.

With assured performances by an excellent cast which includes Bill Paterson as Robert, Lia Williams as the minister, Anna Madeley as Freya and Jessica Raine as Jasmine, this is an immensely absorbing and entertaining night out. And the perfect ending of the play demonstrates not only the power of idealism, but also the ability of fiction to resolve the insoluble contradictions of human life. Surely, this is the best new play of 2010.

With plays such as My Child and Cock, Mike Bartlett has made his mark as a laser-sharp minimalist. Now he's been encouraged to "think big", as they say, in Earthquakes in London, a sprawling, three-and-a-quarter-hour, five-act epic that, while set mostly in the present, spans the late Sixties and 2525 as it examines how life is lived under the threat of climate change and impending catastrophe.

"It's Weimar time, it's Cabaret across the world," declares Robert, the maverick scientist, who was quick in the Sixties to spot the danger of carbon emissions, but sold out to the aircraft industry. Now a latter-day prophet of doom, he has been a disastrous father to the three women whose fortunes form the focus of a piece that sometimes reminded me of Angels in America with its multiple perspectives and fantastical intimations of apocalypse.

The oldest daughter, Sarah (Lia Williams), is a Lib Dem minister in a coalition government who is striving to put a stop to airport expansion. The youngest, 19-year-old Jasmine (Jessica Raine), is all ripped tights and hedonistic rebellion. Pregnant and desperately unsure whether it is ethical to bring a child into such a perilously uncertain world, Anne Madeley's Freya has a moving imaginary encounter with her teenage daughter-to-be. Seeming to justify her mother's foreboding, this apparition's profession of pessimistic pointlessness is in sharp contrast, though, to the promise and air of purpose in the girl that we objectively witness in the final scene.

Rupert Goold's staging of the piece (a co-production between Headlong and the National) characteristically goes for broke in its flair and flamboyance. An orange S-shaped catwalk snakes through the punters, some of whom sit by it on swivel-chairs, transforming the Cottesloe into a phantasmagorical vision of a louche, moneyed bar and powerfully evoking a society bent on distracting itself from the truth through decadent excess.

The overkill extends at times, though, to the script. The fifth act is a case of not knowing when to stop, as Bartlett intercuts the affecting tentative reconciliation of the family at a birth-and-death with an irritatingly fanciful futuristic scene in which Freya, aroused after cryogenic suspension, pines to return to the past to deliver her earthquake-interrupted message to the planet. The intermittent outbreaks of song-and-dance can feel a bit too close for comfort to Enron (also directed by Goold) in the calculatedly cheerful cheek with which they offset gathering darkness.

What's impressive about the piece is its mix of zeitgeist-capturing ambition and irreverent refusal to lapse into tidy-minded preaching. For example, I liked the way in which Freya's husband, rightly horrified at his father-in-law's doom-mongering advice to her, is a just a touch compromised in this stand by the fact that he is himself the grumpy author of a stocking-filler called Fifty Shit Things about Britain. If not as theatrically penetrating, for my taste, as the best of Bartlett's miniatures, Earthquakes in London still scores highly on the Richter scale.

Whoooosh! And indeed wow! Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London is the theatrical equivalent of a thrilling roller coaster ride. It swoops and twists, rushes and soars, and provides a great shot of adrenalin-fuelled excitement. With a running time of more than three hours there are, as on a big-dipper, moments when you wish the bloody thing would stop, and at the end exhilaration gives way to a slight feeling of anti-climax.

But the sheer energy and ambition of the piece are irresistible, while Rupert Goold directs a brilliantly inventive, unashamedly flashy production that adds greatly to the excitement.

The play is an account of life, love and profound unease in present-day London, but it also looks back to 1968 and forward to the years 2026, and 2525, the latter, significantly, the title of a doom-laden 1969 pop song by one-hit wonders Zager and Evans. The nub of Bartlett’s play is that disaster may overwhelm Planet Earth long before then, and the show’s mood of febrile anxiety about global warming at times succeeded in niggling even a crusty climate-change sceptic like myself.

What’s surprising, however, is how much fun this dark show provides. In a co-production between the NT and Goold’s Headlong company, the Cottesloe auditorium has been spectacularly transformed. Many in the audience sit on bar stools at curvy counters on which the actors perform. At either end of the auditorium there are two raised proscenium arch stages for more intimate scenes, and throughout the play combines the political and the personal, bruising family drama and off-the-wall humour. One moment you are voyeurs at a burlesque show, the next watching appalled as a family of three sisters tear themselves to shreds, only to find yourself laughing with rueful recognition at Bartlett’s spot-on depiction of the nervy energy of life in our capital.

Goold’s marvellously well-acted and spectacular production is blessed with terrific visual coups, stirring rock music and a hurtling narrative pace, though Bartlett’s thesis that today’s youth have been betrayed by their baby-boomer parents is beginning to seem a touch over-familiar and glib. The father of the sisters is a scientist who accepted cash from the airline industry to hush up the dangers of global warming. Now he is a lonely prophet of doom, who has cuts off ties with his family and believes that unpreventable disaster awaits the planet.

Meanwhile his daughters struggle to make sense of their lives. Lia Williams is compelling as a harassed, emotionally steely, coalition Government climate-change minister (the play is satisfyingly up-to-the minute) whose marriage is falling apart. The middle sister, played with a moving mixture of tenderness and despair by Anna Madeley, is about to give birth to her first child and is driven close to madness at the thought of the world that awaits her baby, while the teenage wild-child Jasmine (a splendidly spunky Jessica Raine) rages at the older generation.

There is sterling support from Bill Paterson as the steely paterfamilias, Geoffrey Streatfeild and Tom Goodman-Hill as the sisters’ anxious husbands, and Bryony Hannah as a comic yet deeply disconcerting schoolboy. The play would benefit from cuts and the ending strikes me as grotesquely sentimental, but such reservations seem niggling in the face of such a rush of invention, humour and raw emotion.

This is a radical stylistic change of direction for playwright Mike Bartlett. Admired for his dark, penetrating chamber pieces 'My Child', 'Contractions' and 'Cock', he now delivers an extraordinary, sprawling and chaotic drama that runs at over three hours, spans past, present and future and, in Rupert Goold's eye-popping Headlong co-production, offers a vivid, sometimes surreal pageant of the personal and the political.

So dynamic is Goold's staging, that it has almost Artaudian sense of total theatre. In Miriam Buether's brilliant design, a narrow orange catwalk snakes through the auditorium, suggesting a chic metropolitan bar. Audience members seated alongside it on swivelling stools are close enough to feel in danger of getting kicked in the teeth by the cast, engaged in the flow of frenetic action; others stand behind curved rails, or watch from rows of upstairs seating. More contained scenes play out in two letterbox-shaped apertures; video imagery spills over the walls to a soundtrack that includes Goldfrapp, Nick Cave and - alas - Coldplay.

At the swirling narrative's centre is a family: three sisters, their dead mother and their estranged father. Dad (Bill Paterson), an environmental scientist, had intimations of global catastrophe back in the Sixties; now he's holed up, hermit-like and nihilistic, in Scotland, while the daughters he abandoned pursue divergent lives in London. The eldest, Sarah (Lia Williams) is a Lib Dem minister fighting the green corner in the coalition government; pregnant Freya (Anna Madeley) is smoking, swigging whisky and falling apart as she contemplates bringing a child into a doomed world. Rebellious youngest sister, student Jasmine (Jessica Raine) is doing drugs and dancing in burlesque.

Their troubled relationships - with each other, with husbands or lovers, with their father - mirror the cataclysm of global devastation, as they and the planet hurtle towards oblivion. Is apocalypse inevitable? Has humanity recklessly ensured its own extinction? Questions fizz and soar like fireworks in Bartlett's dialogue - typically spiky and discomfiting - and in Goold's production. There are scenes of bacchanalian clubbing, of designer-clad yummy mummies pushing prams on Hampstead Heath like a small army of chic automata. Less successful are visions of a bright, white-lit 2525 - here, and throughout its later scenes, the play loses its momentum and its way. It needs a ruthless edit; but there's more than enough flair, imagination and theatrical audacity here to make it unmissable.

In Earthquakes in London, we are faced with a battle for supremacy between the planet and mankind. Mike Bartlett's epic saga, premiered by the director Rupert Goold, is about three sisters and the civilised world in meltdown. The siblings' estranged father, a hard-line environmental guru called Robert (Bill Patterson), sees it as retribution: the natural world, sick of our pollution, responding with cataclysmic high temperatures and floods. Only extreme measures – slashing the population – can pull us back from the brink.

In flashbacks, we see the younger Robert as a scientific researcher, lured by honchos from an airline company. In present-day London, his eldest daughter, Lia Williams' Sarah, is the coalition government's radical new Environment minister. Her bolshy kid-sister Jasmine (Jessica Raine) has worked a rainforest theme into her burlesque strip routine. Meanwhile, Anna Madeley's Freya is pregnant and having a suicidal breakdown, drifting from Hampstead Heath to Waterloo Bridge, slipping en route into hallucinatory visions of the past and the future (with surely a nod to Angels in America).

Far from gloomy, Goold's production is exhilarating, with snazzy set design by Miriam Buether. The audience stand or sit on spinning bar stools, as Bartlett's characters cross paths – and go off the rails – on a walkway that snakes across the auditorium. The surrounding walls flow with images of city streets, and Goold overlaps scenes quite brilliantly, capturing the hectic speed of modern life and of imaginative leaps. The acting is excellent too, especially Tom Goodman-Hill as Williams' sidelined husband – desperately unhappy, then wildly pogoing.

You might expect more scientific grist. And the messianic turn Bartlett's storyline takes – accompanied by an animated cartoon – disappoints. Cavils aside, though, Earthquakes is a hot ticket: big, bold, imaginative and politically engaged.