Winner of the George Devine Award, Atlantis follows one family’s response to an unfolding environmental crisis, asking what we hold onto, what we sacrifice and what it means to belong to a place that may not survive us.

We caught up with writer Emily White and director Guy Jones to understand more about this gripping new play, co-produced with Theatr Clwyd and opening in the Minerva Theatre on 18 July. Tickets from £15, click here to book tickets.

Why is it important to be telling this story now? 

Guy: The most amazing privilege that we have as storytellers is to choose which of the stories happening now to shine a light on. It was clear to me when I read Atlantis that Emily has found the perfect family through which to ask questions about what is happening to communities – and to the world.

There are characters in this play who feel like they're pushed to the margins of the conversation in lots of different ways, and so they make an active choice to make their voices heard. 

Emily: I always use humour in my writing; that's been my experience of life and the world. When things have been hard or dark in my life, I have always found a way to laugh about it with my friends and family, because that's a way to cope. I think that's just very human.

What are the biggest creative challenges in staging this play?

Guy: Emily's play asks us to wrap our hearts around a home that is at risk of being lost to the family that own and live in it. She also takes us to a beach; she asks us to dramatise the weather and there's a massive storm at one moment. 

So we've had to navigate the idea of taking the audience inside a lived domestic space and at the same time to bring in the natural elements of a specific landscape. Fairbourne is a flat town surrounded by salt marsh, right on the sea and hugged by the Snowdonia mountain range, so we wanted to give a little glimmer of that landscape. Our designer Frankie Bradshaw has done an amazing job of bringing these images to life. 

Why do you think theatre is a great place to tell stories like this? 

Emily: Because it's happening right in front of you, and you're in communion with the performers on the stage. There's a kind of electricity and magic in that, because it's changeable, it's exciting, anything can happen.

Guy: Theatre fills me with enormous hope. At its core, it's a group of people from different walks of life coming together to tell a story. Every night we invite a new community to be part of that story and question what their stake in it is: what they would do in those circumstances. It’s a symbol of huge optimism about what we are capable of as human beings. 

We're really lucky to be performing this in two theatres – the Minerva in Chichester, and the Weston at Theatr Clwyd, with the audience hugging the stage. That feeling of the liveness of theatre, of a community gathered to share in an experience of storytelling will be really special. I can’t wait.