The End of Winter

A beautiful new production that asks ‘will climate change erase winter leaving it to exist only in fairy tales, paintings, and historical accounts?

Siren Theatre Co and the award-winning team behind Good With Maps are collaborating again on Noëlle Janaczewska’s next masterpiece – The End of Winter.

Will climate change erase winter leaving it to exist only in fairy tales, paintings, and historical accounts? In hot, bushfire-prone Australia our winters are becoming warmer and shorter. The End of Winter is about loss and resilience. It’s about the places one can search for cold weather —places that can be reached via public transport and the imagination.

This is a new work for the stage that speaks to our current climate crisis. Written in the wake of the devastation of the 2019 bush fires it asks: What’s happening to winter?

Noëlle Janaczewska is a multi-award-winning Australian writer whose plays, radio scripts, libretti, fiction, and essays have been performed, broadcast and published throughout Australia and overseas.

From Kate Gaul: “There is something of an elegiac quality to the writing as the speaker shares the loss of her mother. Indeed, grief and loss are themes tightly woven into this story of The End of Winter. But so is regeneration, adaptability, legacy, and hope. We live in a complex time of geo-history.”

The themes and ideas contained within The End of Winter lean into the most significant issue of our time – the changing climate and the loss of seasons.

Telling and sharing stories, from the scientific to the personal, is one the most important tools we have to survive climate change. It’s easy to get into a typical conversation about the weather. It’s harder to talk about how changing weather patterns relate to climate change – especially when climate and weather can often get confused. In Australia, we’ve experienced it all: extreme heat, devastating droughts, raging bushfires, floods and cyclones. But these extreme weather events are getting worse as the world heats up.