Storm Warning

– John Ruskin, Unto this Last 1862

In 1884 he engineered a platform at the London Institution for a lecture to draw attention to what he termed the ‘Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’. This pronouncement from Ruskin was both analytical and a call to arms of sorts. The London Institution was a forum for largely scientific talks and papers. Ruskin set out to demonstrate what he had observed in cloud formations over recent years and how what we recognise as the Industrial revolution began the pollution of the skies and heralded potential disaster. Within the year he published the lecture to both counter his critics and reach a broader public with his views. 

It is this 1884 lecture which provides a script for Tom Payne , Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Acting in Sheffield’s Hallam University and a performer in his own right. He has alighted on the text as resonant in our own times, a piece of verbatim theatre as it were, as he gives us the Ruskin text word for word but in a thought-provoking multimedia, multilayered production combining contemporary performance, visuals and sound design. Appropriately Ruskin is woven into the cultural fabric of the city where Payne teaches.

From the decade before giving his talk, and on intermittent visits to Sheffield, Ruskin must have stood around the upper Walkley suburb of Sheffield and gazed across to the east and the pall rising from the already huge steel mills and foundries of this particular Coketown. But alongside heavy industry, the city still retained a smaller form of social and industrial organisation based on skilled metal-working – little masters or ‘mesters’, in the dialect of South Yorkshire. 

Ruskin conceived the idea of a community with an educative museum at its heart. He settled a husband and wife whom he had known from his teaching days with the Working Men’s College in the 1850s, in a cottage in this suburb away from the smoke and did the bit he was best at – sending to Sheffield, art objects and collections for his version of a working men’s Wunderkammer. His aim was morally and artistically to stimulate the skilled metal workers of Sheffield and provide a riposte in his idiosyncratic and labyrinthine way to the de-humanisation resulting from heavy industry. 

Payne taking his seminal Storm Cloud text and performing it first in Sheffield connects it to a place where interaction of environment and city life is very much part of the city’s existential history. From branches of beech strewn on molten metal in rolling mills to fig trees along the River Don as workers chucked the stones from fruit after a shift break, to pioneering the Clean Air Act in the 1950s and more recently courting huge local controversy over proposed and partially implemented tree-felling in the city streets, Sheffield nonetheless remains the greenest of big cities in the UK, compared to Manchester, Birmingham or Leeds.

But as ‘ur-Sheffield’ as the production is, it is of course re-imagined by Payne as part of a bigger inquisition into the climate emergency. The text is now a prompt to create a multivalent, multidisciplinary arts-led project and one set to take as yet unpredictable forms, much like an evolving cumulus which is both intellectual and action-orientated. 

The genius of Payne’s performance is that in no way is it historically revivalist. He is not playing at being Ruskin – blue cravat, frock coat etc. or even, by 1884 at 65, a figure prematurely aged and already looking more like how we might imagine a King Lear.   

Payne instead wears a silky cloud-scape patterned jacket which sees projected text and visuals meld him to a shifting diorama of images reinforcing perhaps the impression of the natural world playing out in the manufactured. The delivery is as if it were a contemporary lecture, happening in the here and now but vividly delivered with a natural cadence. He doesn’t baulk in any way at what might feel pompous on the page but is in reality clearly immediate and felt  by Ruskin, even in the moments of abstruse flights in his prose.

The text is unedited but the structure of what Ruskin is setting out to do is given clarity by the recovery of this writing as a performative piece. There is a cumulative flow to the piece rendered as speech with sections of Ruskin’s argument established before opening up further subjects, replete with side swipes at other contemporary “authorities” (climate deniers? in modern parlance). His characteristic  digressions – a regular experience for Ruskin’s audiences – serve to bring us back with even greater force to what is being asserted, like a twisting vine of observations around a sturdy growing branch of  an argument.

Survivor of two mental collapses in the late 1870s and in 1881, Ruskin was coming out of his Brantwood retreat on Lake Coniston to address the London Institution and issue an academic broadside based on the observation of cloud phenomena. Elsewhere he talked of having ‘bottled skies’ since his early days in the same way as his father had bottled sherry. 

And what was Ruskin compelled to assert in his Storm Cloud lecture?  He had based his entire career on looking and seeing and thinking and trying to find expression for things seen. He had applied this to visual art, to architecture,  and to nature before, eventually to society and economics. Now he was turning with urgency to a crisis – something that he has more than casually noticed and noted and now wants the august London Institution to acknowledge as a proven phenomenological observation.

It was his contention it was an observation which was not available to a poet such as Byron or his generation in the earlier part of the century, one that was not even recorded or intuited by such authorities as de Saussure, the founder of the Geneva Geographical Society… but in the late 1870s and 1880s had been logged by Ruskin as empirical evidence.

For Ruskin it is the demonstrable existence of ‘a plague wind’, ‘a storm cloud’ – a set of  meteorological phenomena… potentially irreversible… and certainly nefariously man-made in his times as opposed to God-given. 

This is delivered with urgency and conviction that Payne has discovered in the text itself. Would Ruskin have been reading from a handwritten manuscript or notes or purely in an extempore way subsequently worked up for publication?  Tom Payne uses an inner ear recording playing the text in his head in real time, which in a virtuoso performance has nonetheless the external effect for the audience of living, iterative thought. 

He also takes the prompt that Ruskin illustrated this and other lectures using projections or exhibits (some drawn on a large scale as they were for students of his Oxford Lectures). These projections of cloudscapes done by assistants such as Arthur Severn for Ruskin from his own drawings are used in the performance. They are further developed through the phenomenological dimensions of artist Penny McCarthy’s absorption in the make-up of clouds and incorporated into a changing digital projection put together by Jake Goodall with additional photography from Becky Payne and illustration from Billy Hughes. This visual backdrop is a counterpoint synched to the delivery of the lecturer seated simply at a table downstage throughout. The effect is  further complemented by a shifting score and discreet soundscape from David John Brady.

And as this unflagging and absorbing performance draws to a close, what are we to make of the concluding pages where the lecture turns evangelical? Ruskin concludes the beauty of God’s creation has been desecrated and the moral accusation implied needs to be laid at industrial capitalism’s door as a result of a series of unremitting ‘blasphemies’ over the last 20 years. Think not 1860-1880 for his contemporaries but for us 1980-2000 or 2004-2024.       

Maybe these concluding thoughts from Ruskin could segue as it did in my mind into the various images of massed delegates at endless COPs, or the repeated notion that we don’t have to do anything because the UK’s contribution is currently only 1% to global warming (when in Ruskin’s day it probably was 99%). Or again the absence of climate consensus in many recent electoral debates or political systems in this country, in Russia, China or in India, or in  the place where most of the storm clouds are heading our way, in America, or perhaps, more nebulously, in the massing powers of AI held somewhere now in the 21st century Cloud. Indeed as in the arresting Ruskin passage and visual prompt embedded in Tom Payne’s engaging performance would have it, with its projection beyond the page, beyond the stage, beyond the audience: ‘What is Best to be Done?’