Review: The Heretic - The Jewish Chronicle

Anyone who was expecting Richard Bean to write a play about climate change without challenging the orthodoxies of the Green movement does not know his work very well.

Arriving in the wake of the National's earnest Greenland play, Bean demonstrates the importance of being, well, if not frivolous, at least irreverent. His scientist heroine Diane (Juliet Stevenson) refuses to tow the climate-change line which holds that the sea is rising (it is, she says, but in some cases so is the land), and that climate change is necessarily caused by carbon dioxide emissions. Nor will she keep her mouth shut so that Kevin, her professor boss and ex-lover (James Fleet), can secure private funding for their university faculty.

What interests Bean is the clash between the impartiality of science and the vested interests that have a stake in its findings. This is a rational debate, embodied by Diane's responses to Kevin, and to her anorexic daughter Phoebe, an activist student called Ben, and the militant environmentalists who are threatening to kill her.

On top of this, Bean packs in so many gags - most of them hilarious, some of them merely funny - you wonder where he finds the space to insert stuff like plot.

So prolific is Bean - who came to playwriting relatively late in life - there is the sense of this fine fiftysomething writer laying down a legacy. Other than the one clunky, plot-driven moment in Jeremy Herrin's production - the fight between mother and daughter - The Heretic will be among the best of his works.