🌊 Atlantis by Chanella Macri

Atlantis is a reimagining of Plato’s lost city where its leaders have pushed the world to environmental collapse and are trying to carry on like everything is fine.

Three humans have sunk too and they explore the remains of Atlantis. We see funerals to dying species, elders passing on knowledge of country, and in one uncomfortably familiar scene, an otter (homeless without kelp forests) is deported.

Macri’s text is a nuanced allegory of what’s left after climate catastrophe. As the show makes us repeat: ‘climate justice is Indigenous liberation.’ There’s discussions around the relationships and responsibilities that settlers have to the country they call home: namely to do right for country by listening to elders.

During these scenes I reflected on my own relationship to country. I was born on Gadigal country but left when I was two to spend the next decade on the move. Most settlers carry within them a sense of dissonance but still get to develop some sort of relationship with the country they call home. I never really got to do that, and I felt that disconnect to country strongly during Atlantis.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: the didactic elements of the text really worked for me.

As too did the gorgeous costuming (there’s a crab sweater costume which is just stunning). The shifting set beautifully evoked shipwrecks, whale carcasses, and the relentless waves, but transitions where it was moved seemed cumbersome and slowed the pace of the work.

The sound design was effective at establishing character and place, but it felt incongruous during some of the more lyrical moments of the text.

Nevertheless, Atlantis was a passionate and insightful reflection on climate change and the role that Indigenous and Pasifika knowledge systems will have in healing country.

In the gorgeous final moments of the play one of the sunken humans and a shark watch a whale fall together. Whale falls are funny things: one death can be the source of so much life—and that’s what Atlantis is getting at. After climate catastrophe and collapse and calamity we have to pick up the pieces; to hold each other and to care for country.

After all, they’re the same thing.

Atlantis closes at Malthouse Theatre on November 2nd. You can get tickets here.