FringeReview UK 2024

The Beautiful Future is Coming

Footprints Festival, Jermyn Street Theatre co-produced with Donotalight

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Experimental, Fringe Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Two of the finest Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprints Festival of six new plays are now running. Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future is Coming is a four-hander directed by Harry Tennison till February 5^th.

Scheduled alongside The EU Killed My Dad which closes the day after, it addresses – simultaneously – the dilemmas of three women tackling or coping with climate change across 250 years.

Using Festival designer Natalie Johnson’s set the brilliance of this triple narrative lies in text changing in a beat (the same prop spanning time-zones) with deft directions and movement enhanced in Neil Golledge’s pinpoint lighting and often thundrous downpour of Anna Short’s sound.

It’s a beautifully crafted work: three time-zones crossed in an instant, with three actors at left right and centre; with one crossing between them inflecting three male roles in a heartbeat. Alice Birch deployed a three-period simultaneity in her 2017 masterpiece Anatomy of a Suicide. Beautiful Future is dramatically something else again, more intimate, more fluid.

1854, in what will become New York’s Central Park, mightn’t seem a place of climate crisis. However scientist Eunice (Sabrina Wu, seen in the first Footprints play, The Good John Procter, soon to transfer to Boston) calculates an increase in Co2 levels: in much the way Ada Lovelace outstripped the Babbage engine in predicting computers.

George Fletcher as supportive husband John comforts Eunice’s fury at the Royal Society’s refusal to entertain her papers. One Professor Henry in New York will, but London is where science is at.

Interleaved with the other time-zones we see Eunice’s increasing frustration and elsewhere guilt (over her children), sense of inadequacy, knowledge of where her real centre of gravity is: Wu simmers Eunice’s inwardness. “Can you feel it? Something is hanging in the balance – ready to fall.”

Fletcher’s John is a model of total (and very un-19^th century) support, till tiny cracks and slippages show.

Wilson Brown’s language, inflecting the solemn New England of say Emily Dickinson’s time along with Wu’s dress, buzzes with 21^st century idioms. The play’s centre though is elsewhere.

2027: Manager Clare (Martha Watson Allpress) and Dan (Fletcher) work in a London office three years from a very recognizable now: wittily detailed and often laugh-out-funny (unlike the serious 1854 section). Just wait for the moment love’s declared. But it’s more than poignant, the narrative with floods off becomes threatening, overwhelming, then with an apotheosis you don’t see coming till towards the end.

It’s the heart of this play. Neither Clare not Dan are scientists or – yet – eco-warriors, but bright, sparkling people falling in love as the streets flood and places outside Cambridge are whelmed in deluge. Wilson Brown’s language relaxes to the elliptical, jokey: lunging where the tentative couple catch each other out in love.

Fletcher’s Dan is wholly different here: upbeat, sunny, faux-goofy: aware he’s getting it on with his boss. His chemistry with Watson Allpress is heart-stopping. Watson Allpress herself exudes sassy warmth, a lurch in temperature when everything changes. In her hands Clare’s final speech exudes what it is to be human, to love, to lose, to decide.

2100 Svalbard: a seed-vault shudders in world-threatening storms. 43 days unending, even up here, is merely a new record. Ana (Pepter Lunkuse), an experimental wheat scientist accidentally pregnant hopes to be picked up before her due date.

Fletcher’s meek Malcolm – resolutely not Ana’s lover but (like Dan with Clare) her employee – silently substitutes decaf for real. So Ana’s palpitations mightn’t be what she thinks. Malcolm’s profoundly aware of his station and Fletcher’s pared down that mix of assertion and anxiety. Life’s shrunk to surviving storms.

Again Wilson Brown’s content to use a contemporary idiom, not imagine those of 75 years ahead. A world to bring a child into before it ends, or a shaft of hope? Lunkuse’s poised, shrewd, her Ana self-possessed with Malcolm but with a gleam of humour. She gives to the final peroration the work’s name and a touch of nobility.

The Good John Proctor was a powerful variation on Arthur Miller; but these latest two plays are the real thing too and deserve further life. Beautiful Future engages throughout though the near future is where it beats quickest. Wilson Brown’s play makes you wonder what life, not just the playwright, might do with her characters. Urgently recommended.

Published February 1, 2024 by Simon Jenner