Theatre brings us together to face the beautiful, complicated, painful and at times overwhelming experience of being alive.

So, as a playwright, I am baffled and frustrated, at the oft-repeated idea that the climate crisis is not a good topic for theatre; it’s too big, too far away.

It’s everywhere, now, happening to all of us.

It’s a failure of our craft if we can’t tell compelling stories about this great crisis of our time.

Audiences worry that such plays could be preachy, or depressing. I get that. But it’s the job of playwrights to make sure we tell stories that need telling in a way that’s gripping, moving, and thought provoking.

We need to get better at facing these issues. I was helped to do that by the remarkable young people from California’s Pepperdine University Theatre Department when I started developing our new Edinburgh Fringe play, no one is coming to save us.

They are the generation who have grown up with a rapidly accelerating cycle of extreme and worsening climate events. It’s their present and future. The play was shaped by the experiences they shared.

Josh Wilson told us of the terrifying wildfire that threatened his town and destroyed the flora and fauna across an entire mountain.

Zoe O’Donnell endured the great freeze that paralysed Texas.

Gabby Montejo survived a near-unprecedented typhoon which devastated her community in the Philippines.

Alex Negrila witnessed how sea temperature rises have devastated the once-vast ancient coral beds off the Dominican Republic.

There were many more. Even just hearing and acknowledging these stories felt like a powerful act.

It is not the job of theatre to spell out the answers. It’s the job of theatre to shine a light into places we might not want to look at and spark curiosity about the paths humanity might choose to walk in the future.

One of the students’ big concerns is that too many ordinary people, businesses and politicians are not listening, let alone taking action. The cultural sector also needs to wake up and smell the wildfires.

There’s a lot of navel-gazing and hand-wringing from arts organisations but we need to start doing. We need to boldly and creatively put these stories on our stages, in our galleries, on our screens.

As one student put it: “We need to stop putting the accountability on somebody else or saying it's the next generation’s job. If we keep saying that, at one point, there won’t be a next generation.”

The students have been an inspiration to work with. Thoughtful, concerned, yet hopeful and energetic, even though they have experienced more destructive changes than there have been for millennia.

Theatre is uniquely placed to deal with these knotty problems. We sit together in the dark, feel together, think together, listen together, and perhaps start to imagine how we might live together in the future.

The aim is to create a sense of urgency and an awareness our own potency in demanding change, to challenge society’s mass denial.

We all know the monster is lurking but we’ve locked it in the basement.

It’s time to face the monster and work out, as a society, what we do about it.

Lewis Hetherington is a playwright

Agenda is a column for outside contributors. Contact: agenda@theherald.co.uk