A dead-end piece about climate anxiety which alarmingly forgets that effectively addressing the climate crisis requires action, not hope.
Shortly after leaving The Beautiful Future Is Coming at The Traverse Theatre yesterday, my credit card was declined on the 27 Lothian bus. I tapped my phone again and again, but to no avail. I stepped off, apologizing to the driver and the queue behind me. Then, out of nowhere, a woman tapped me on the shoulder. She took my palm and placed a few loose coins into it. “Please,” she said, “just take it.” I rode that bus home in such a stupor of gratitude, I didn’t notice when the woman got off, never to be seen or thanked by me again.
That kindest of human moments on that bus gave me all the hope that The Beautiful Future Is Coming didn’t.
I had hoped that this shiny new Bristol Old Vic production would have done at least some research to build on the burgeoning canon of climate theatre already out there today – like Hadestown, Figures in Extinction, and the internationally commissioned climate plays being read throughout the Edinburgh Fringe at Venue 13. But instead, it contented itself with a perspective on the climate crisis that felt alarmingly steeped in individualism. What I watched at the Traverse Theatre was an outdated piece of flailing climate panic that opted for a monologue-y idea of Hope over an actively practiced interconnectedness that both indigenous wisdom and the natural world teach us, time and time again, is the only sustainable worldview through which to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
The Beautiful Future Is Coming follows three couples (all heterosexual partnerships despite a rich tradition of queer ecology within the fields of environmental fiction and sci-fi) each living through the climate disasters specific to their respective periods in time: 1856, 2027, and 2100.
In the final stage image, the three women sit and finally lock eyes with each other (breaking their temporal separation). Two of them pat pregnant bellies while a third (in a very inconsistent New York accent) joins them in sad-smiling, nodding, and generally communicating to the audience that, despite all odds, the future is going to be okay.
If I were to guess, this was a piece that was trying to be about the uniquely human capacity to hope (i.e. to imagine a future that promises more desirable circumstances than the present ones). If I am right about that, I would ask the creators of this piece a simple question: What do people do when they hope?
They do.
Hope is not an explainable idea that we can comfort ourselves with or swaddle our descendants in. It is (at its most effective) a vivid, emotionally connected dream that removes any friction between our will to action and action itself. And when that action is perceived by others, it tends to inspire the will to action in them as well.
Like that moment I had on the 27 Lothian bus.
When I remember clutching a bus ticket that a total stranger had bought for me, just so that I could get home safe that evening, I know that that was the feeling I wanted to feel at the end of The Beautiful Future is Coming. That is the feeling that anyone who feels any shred of climate anxiety wants and needs right now. If someone had come up to me in that moment and asked me for a favor, I would not have wasted any breath telling them, “It’s going to be okay.” Instead, I would have put my palm in theirs and asked, What do you need? And if I happened to have what they needed, I would have placed it in their hand and said, without any expectation of thanks or recompense, “Please, take it.”
We don’t need to all become vegan. We don’t need to become scientists or politicians or climate experts. We just need some reason to believe that whatever we’ve got to give to each other – be it a bus fare or a good play that isn’t even about the climate crisis – is worth giving.
I believe that a beautiful future is coming, but that’s because I know there are people out there like that woman who paid my bus fare, not because this latest Bristol Old Vic production told me so.
The Beautiful Future is Coming is on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from 31 July to 24 August at the Traverse Theatre. Get tickets here: https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/the-beautiful-future-is-coming-festival-25
What a crazy review haha! High drama on the number 27! I’ve given someone a bus fare in a similar situation, and it wasn’t a sign of hope for the future of humanity – it was because I was sick of them flapping their card around like a moron, holding up the bus when I wanted to get home.