Vancouver play dramatizes B.C.’s deadly 2021 heat dome
Posted June 17, 2025 7:49 pm.
A new play, inspired by B.C.’s deadly 2021 heat dome, takes the stage Wednesday on the fourth anniversary of the start of the tragic event.
“Eyes of the Beast” adapts the testimonies of British Columbians deeply impacted by climate-related catastrophes into a 90-minute play.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO 1130 NEWSRADIO VANCOUVER LIVE!Sean Holman, founding director of the Climate Disaster Project, says “Eyes of the Beast” is a place where journalism and theatre intersect.
“So students at the climate disaster project, which is a teaching newsroom that works with climate-impacted communities, co-created testimonies with British Columbians about their experiences during those extreme weather events, and then those testimonies were woven in together to create scenes for this documentary play that’s going to be premiering in Vancouver,” Holman told 1130 NewsRadio.
“We’re bringing front-line coverage of climate change, of extreme weather events to the stage, and we’re doing that because oftentimes climate change feels like something that’s happening in the distance, something that’s happening to other people or in other places or in other times, when, in actuality, it’s happening close at hand.”
A 2022 B.C. coroner’s report said 619 deaths were attributed to the heat event, and the latest research says the prevalence of low income was 2.4 times higher among the people who died compared with those who survived.
A 2024 study called the 2021 heat dome “one of the deadliest weather events in Canadian history.”
Holman says the play and testimonies are meant to inspire hope and to spur action.
“Climate change is often seen as sort of this gloom-and-doom issue, and to a certain extent, there’s truth in that there are going to be difficult experiences that happen as a result of climate change. We are going to be confronting a much more destabilized world, but we can do something about it.”
“Eyes of the Beast” runs Wednesday, June 18, through Sunday, June 22, at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Tickets are available on the Neworld Theatre website.
—With files from The Canadian Press
