The Beautiful Future is Coming, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★
Flora Wilson Brown’s epoch-straddling, climate change-themed six-hander had a run at the Bristol Old Vic before transferring to the Traverse Theatre for its Fringe residency. It shows: this is a rich, assured production, deeply bedded in, and as fluid in its performances as it is clear-headed (sometimes harrowingly so) in its themes.
And those themes are pretty weighty ones. In 1850s New York, hobbyist scientist (as she’s patronisingly called) Eunice Foote has made a shocking discovery about carbon dioxide, air and heat, but expresses her fury to her husband John when her gender means the scientific establishment won’t take her seriously. In near-future London, Claire and Dan begin a tentative romance as the city boils around them. In Svalbard’s seed vault at the start of the 22nd century, Malcolm and Ana are trapped by a seemingly endless storm – as Ana’s pregnancy develops inexorably.
Wilson Brown weaves together the stories of her three couples like a nimble musical fugue. Sometimes themes rebound and ricochet from timeline to timeline, sometimes the stories drift apart into their own individual developments, though underneath everything, they’re all bound together by a single overarching idea. Formally, it feels like a masterclass in controlling and apportioning material, but even more impressive is Wilson Brown’s ability to conjure credible, believable characters through whom to explore her ideas, speaking in a nicely naturalistic succession of hesitations, swerves and interruptions.
Nancy Medina’s crisp direction allows enough time and space for the play’s themes to resonate, while convincingly conveying the quicksilver cut and thrust of Wilson Brown’s dialogue. And her actors clearly have the show running through their blood. Phoebe Thomas and Matt Whitchurch are forthright as the 19th-century Americans, peering ahead through time to chilling visions of the distant future. Nina Singh and Jyuddah Jaymes capture the excitement and terror of a young relationship in movingly fractured conversations, both over-confident but needy, and later desiccated by the darkness around them. Rosie Dwyer and James Bradwell capture a similar hesitancy in far-future Svalbard, though it’s one immersed in the pressure cooker of imprisonment by natural forces.
Designer Aldo Vazquez provides a simple but elegant staging that allows the athletic leaps between epochs that the play demands, and Ryan Day’s lighting serves dramatic effect in teasing apart the three intertwining storylines.
It’s a deeply powerful play, and in many ways, a very bleak one too. Embodying the coming cataclysm in the credible stories of believable individuals, however, avoids any sense of preachiness. It’s not a show that lectures you about what you should do, but instead, one that sheds light on the feelings of those unavoidably caught up in the turmoil: frustration, regret, fear, but also hope. And as the fugue’s three voices weave together increasingly intimately at Wilson Brown’s luminous conclusion, it’s that last emotion – small-scale and modest, perhaps, but crucial all the same – that serves as a pinprick of light amid the encroaching darkness.
- Until 24 August
She’s Behind You, Traverse Theatre ★★★★
Johnny McKnight (pictured above, image by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan) is something of a theatre legend in Scotland (and beyond) as a writer and director of daring comedies, and also for his years of playing a pantomime dame. And it’s that latter hallowed Christmas tradition that finds itself in the spotlight in McKnight’s deeply personal solo show, in which he lines up cross-dressing for kids alongside his own self-acceptance, while also exploding quite a few nuggets of outdated received wisdom along the way.
She’s Behind You is a loving tribute to a profoundly popular and populist tradition, and McKnight has interesting things to say about pantomime’s working-class roots, and the expectations that those origins generate in the form. Leaping around Kenny Miller’s elegantly sparkling set (and, naturally, right out into the audience) in full dame regalia (sumptuously designed by Jennie Lööf), McKnight thoroughly embodies the dame’s ageing, cynical, larger-than-life persona – while later taking just those stereotypes to task for the lazy assumptions they rest on. Yet rather than simply a scathing critique of a much-loved form, She’s Behind You instead offers suggestions and solutions for how popular theatre might – and can, in McKnight’s experience – welcome and reflect the world we live in today.
Its messages might be positive and hopeful, and McKnight’s performance blazingly vivid (and extremely funny), but She’s Behind You’s form is a little more problematic. Weaving together historical lecture, personal history and also a roll-call of some of the pantomimes McKnight has created and appeared in down the years, it feels at times like a discussion of something that’s happening elsewhere, a manifesto rather than a demonstration, despite McKnight’s wildly colourful delivery that slips deftly in tone between the show’s various strands. In John Tiffany’s assured, nimble direction, its themes and ideas are ringingly clear, even if its ways of conveying them aren’t always entirely convincing.
- Until 24 August
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