Initial Responce to Earthquakes in London

When I first read the play I realised that is was primarily about global warming and how we are effecting the earth with our actions against global warming. I thought that this theme was mainly conveyed through the characters Robert and Tom because one is a scienist who is trying to mend his mistakes about global warming and the other is an actovist who is trying to make people aware of what is happening to the world. I personally felt that the monologue from Tom (act 4 page 122) particularly stood out to meas it tells off the people about how they are effecting the planet but it also is one of the only points in the play that actually tells people how we can change to improve the planet.

When reading the play I also noticed that the character Jazmine stood out to. Me as she seems to be the only character who doesn't care what is happening or doesn't actually voice her opinions on global warming. I think this is mainly shown in act 1 page 33 where she says that she doesn't want to hear about the environment as she has heard it from her sister all the time. I thought that perhaps her character was written like that to symbolise the minority of who don't care about politics or even the new generation who have no idea how to fix the damaged world that the older generations have destroyed. I feel that this would be an interesting spin as mostly all the characters in the play are apart of the older generation but there is only 3 younger characters who would have to deal with the consiquences of their actions.

I also noticed that most of the smaller parts in the play are stereotypes that could be portrayed by the media. For example the character of the businessman is brings up topics like terrorism on plays and bases it on Arabians wanting to smoke on planes. It represents how some people view terrorism and how they make jokes out of it to feel more comfortable. Another example is the character Liberty. She says "I put Liberty on the form, as my name. I thought it would get their attention." It shows how people change to try to fit into the public ideals and they get manipulated by ideals from the media for wanting to be a certain way.

Another example is marina. She is a polish migrants who works in a hospital. In the play she only ever talks in polish to Freya but when she talks to the other characters she talks in English. I think that Freya imagines her to be speaking polish to her as Freya has watched so much news and media that she stereotypes marina to not being able to speak in English. Also in 2004 there was around 95,000 polish migrants that moved to UK in search of work and in 2010 (same year the earthquakes was written) the number of polish migrants grew to 550,000. Therefore this statistic could have been portrayed all over the media at the time so it was highly likely that Freya would have gained an opinion against the polish migrants.