The Shell Trial

STORY

In a prologue, The Artist introduces the audience to the current lawsuit against Shell. She invites the audience to think of this evening as a rehearsal for the future where everyone can examine whose responsibility it is to solve the climate crisis.

I

In a metaphorical courtroom, figures representing The Law, The CEO of Shell, and The Government ponder the potential consequences of the Shell Trial and attempt to avoid blame for the warming planet.

II

The piece moves into the real world. We meet characters with less structural power as they question what their individual responsibilities are in the face of climate change. These figures include The Consumer, The Activist, The Fossil Fuel Laborer, The Airline Pilot, The Historian, The Climate Refugee, The Weatherman, The Elementary School Teacher and The Fieldworker.

The atmosphere becomes confrontational as these characters struggle with eco-anxiety and guilt over how their livelihoods are entangled with the oil industry. As each character battles their feelings of helplessness and rage, it is revealed that no one’s future is exempt from the environmental, political, and personal consequences that emerge from the Shell Trial.

Frustrated by inaction, these characters unite to resist the passivity of The Law, The CEO and The Government. However, they are overpowered returning the world to the status quo. Almost…

III

The Artist steps out of her previous role, mourning for all of those lost and opening up a door to the past.

Transcending time and space, children from The Past emerge. Their voices create an eerie and vast landscape, illuminating Shell’s environmental negligence and the Dutch colonialism that enabled Shell Oil’s fortune.

Children from The Past and The Future confront the audience, urging them to act now while they still can.

INSIGHTS

An accumulation of perspectives

Some topics are on such a grand scale, so existential, unfathomable and overwhelming that you know immediately they deserve to be treated in an opera. When there is already an amazing play to build on, the question is what do you lose, and above all what can you gain, by turning it into an opera?

Like the original play De zaak Shell (The Shell Trial), our opera is an accumulation of perspectives in society that together form a system. However, we have expanded the number of voices: we have given the past a say too and turned the story into a global affair. What major forces are at play and how do they interact with one another? Traditionally, opera is an effective medium for reflecting on power, in part because of its roots in both elite and popular culture. It also offers a space for contemplation, a tradition that can be traced back to church music and oratorios. Furthermore, opera is the perfect vehicle for portraying huge archetypal forces. The writers of the original play gave us clear-cut modern-day archetypes that go beyond individuals with simplistic psychology.

The issue of responsibility for the climate crisis is often presented in the form of caricatured contrasts, but the world is more complex than that. In this opera, we want to move beyond entrenched positions and acknowledge that we have a shared problem. In the stage direction, we present the voices and structures that jointly make up the system. The orchestra too is a ‘body’ that makes its own statement on the stage. This staging is faithful to a European, Brechtian tradition of theatre without the fourth wall, while at the same time referencing an oratorio performance or church service.

Colonialism – capitalism – climate crisis

Ellen Reid’s music is both accessible and disorientating in the contemporary style thanks to her eclectic palette of sounds. As the different perspectives accumulate, the musical idiom becomes increasingly raw and modern, in a way that does justice to the confusion, alienation and numbness that this topic can instil in people. We are reminded that the disasters awaiting the Global North are already taking place in the Global South. The libretto is not afraid to make the link between colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism, which still has consequences today and which is at the root of wars, genocide, exploitation and other horrors committed in the name of the Western world. ‘You will feel so safe, as if our countries were not connected by the same seas,’ sings The Climate Refugee. ‘And when your home is swallowed by the Earth, you will say it is not fair.’

We see a great symbolic value in the fact that this opera will be premiering in the cultural centre of the Netherlands, in a building that also houses the city council of Amsterdam, a city inextricably linked with capitalism and exploitation. ‘How many of the ivory towers I enter every day were built with stone from distant shores where I could have been raised?’ sighs The Historian.

An intergenerational conversation

While opera, as one of the most expensive art forms, has a long and often dubious history of sponsoring, patronage and association with the aristocracy and elite, we are now seeing a new trend in various opera houses around the world, as new audiences want to see the major stories of our time turned into operas. For this opera, we explicitly opted for a creative process that was intergenerational – in the team, the cast, the orchestra and the supporting organisation. We are also pleased we were able to bring in performers with experience outside the world of classical music to give us a new angle. Each perspective in our production is represented by the body and/or voice of the performer, whereby their humanity, in all its power and fragility, is our focus at all times.

The ‘we’ culture

In this production, we worked with various consultants, including the psychiatrist Glenn Helberg. Helberg gives talks in which he distinguishes between the materially oriented and the non-materially oriented, the difference between the ‘I’ culture and the ‘we’ culture. The ‘I’ culture is geared to individual profit, acquiring tangible objects and riches. The ‘we’ culture takes a broader view: what is sustainable and acceptable for the group? It focuses on the connection with one another and with natural resources. It concerns values that cannot easily be quantified or captured in concrete terms. Many cultures and peoples are labelled ‘primitive’ in the capitalist, Western worldview, which judges them against conservative ideas of civilisation and Enlightenment. In this dichotomy, cultures that are not oriented towards financial gain at the expense of other people or resources are precisely the ones that are viewed as uncivilised, backward and primitive.

Our research for this opera and our experience working on it have only made it clearer to us how much of a driving force capitalism is in this dominant mindset that enables the destruction of the climate. Essentially, capitalism means reducing all aspects of our world to factors that can be used to make a profit. It objectifies everything: plants, animals, land, water, sunlight, even other people. This exploitative relationship with respect to people, the planet and nature harms the planet and ultimately us too. Whereas the individual’s own interests take priority in the ‘I’ culture, the irony is that in the long term this attitude actually harms those interests. The ‘we’ culture is not about an exploitative worldview purely geared to individual achievements and profit, but about the ecology of the community, which affects the community’s relationship with the planet.

The changing times and the crises we are facing demand a shared approach in which the group provides a safety net, with a collective solution for individual problems. ‘Cherishing slowness’, as The Government sings, is not a realistic option. The climate crisis is not ‘business as usual’. What the human race no longer has in abundance is time.

Excerpts from a text by Manoj Kamps, Romy Roelofsen and Gable Roelofsen