Climate change is probably humankind’s greatest challenge. (And I’m probably being pedantic with that qualifying adverb probably.)
The Beautiful Future is Coming by Flora Wilson Brown addresses this challenge with an admirable and inspiring resolve.
Ongoing climate change will have a catastrophic impact, but that’s only part of its challenge. The other part is that our ethical systems struggle to deal with the immensity of the issue. Most of us moderns (as pragmatists, materialists, humanists) are consequentialist in our ethics. We judge whether something is wrong or right depending on what we guess will be the consequences. This works just fine when our ethical dilemmas are of the order of Can I lie to my partner? or Can I run this red light? In these scenarios, action and consequence seem so obviously connected. They’re on the scale of individuals. Climate change is not. Use your keep cup, minimise your flights, do your recycling – these are all good things to do. But just you doing them is not enough, not in terms of consequences. The problem is larger than any individual. This is not a reason for despair. It’s an invitation to rethink our ethical vision, a call to be bolder, more imaginative, more focussed on working together. It’s no longer enough to simply assuage our own consciences, in the hope that, at night, in the privacy of our beds, we can sleep better.
Drama should be of aid here.
In its imagined worlds, in its presentation of concentrated concrete moments, Drama can warn us to act now, before it’s too late. Wilson Brown structures her play around three scenarios: in mid-nineteenth century America, a female scientist discovers the disproportionate heating of carbonated gases, only to have her work ignored because of her gender; in contemporary London, a couple falling in love are awoken from their private joys by an extreme weather event; and, in 2100, in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, a couple of researchers work desperately on a seed bank, isolated from the rest of humanity by a three month long storm.
Each of these scenarios is realised with humour and poignancy. Each deals with the consequence of our pettiness – on a concrete, individual, specific level.
But Drama also has a problem. If its glory is that it deals in the concrete, the individual, the specific – then that’s exactly what I suggested earlier was the limitation of traditional ethics. Drama is superb in its presentation of dilemmas like Should this character lie to their partner? or (issues of staging aside) Should this character run the red light? It struggles when the issue is of a different scale. Wilson Brown is aware of the problem: one of her characters expresses the sentiment How can we deal with the Future, when the Present takes up all our time?
Wilson Brown tries to mitigate Drama’s tight focus (do I dare say it smallness?) by giving us the three scenarios. They’re thematically related, but I’m not sure we’re not simply being given more of the same – for 100 minutes. Perhaps the contemporary scenario alone would have been sufficient? (But I’ll get back to that.) And the jumping between the time periods, and their occasional overlap, weakens the very thing Drama does so well – the presentation of the concentrated concrete moment.
Under the direction of Kim Hardwick, there are some engaging performances. Tierney Clarke as the nineteenth century scientist is a captivating mix of intelligence, determination and frustration. As the contemporary lovers, Liminka Pather and Reid Perry are both funny and moving.
But would the one scenario really be sufficient? I only pose the question because the purpose of this piece seems so clear, and so laudable, that it’s tempting to suggest a trim. Especially when the stakes are so high.
But that would be to deny the private joys of Drama, the fascination of seeing the craft spun, the artistic choices made. It would also be to ignore that the three-scenario structure underlines a universal human experience: that the fire of the present moment will always be extinguished by the flow of time; that the concrete, the individual, the specific are perpetually being lost to us, forever slipping away.
For the future is coming.
Will it be beautiful?
Not of its own accord.
And this play is a powerful reminder of that.
Paul Gilchrist
The Beautiful Future is Coming by Flora Wilson Brown
presented by Witches of Waterloo Productions,
at The Old Fitz, as the Late Show,
until 22 May
Image by Ryan Nichols
Theatre Red 