The Beautiful Future Is Coming at Bristol Old Vic – review

With a tree in the theatre foyer, an audio project allowing young people aged six to 26 to talk about their beautiful imagined futures, and the work programmed to sit alongside the city’s Festival of Nature, there is no doubt that Bristol Old Vic is going in on art as activism for Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming. Plucked from a short run last year at the Jermyn Street Theatre, it is given a beautifully realised production by BOV artistic director Nancy Medina.

Across three time periods – 1856, 2027 and 2100 – three couples attempt to make sense of a world where climate change is dictating the future. In the 19th century, scientist Eunice is trying to get her ideas, later to be called the greenhouse effect, taken seriously by a scientific community who patronise her both as a woman and as an amateur. In a world much like our own, colleagues Dan and Claire fall in love, and then the rain starts falling and, in the future, a heavily pregnant Ana and Malcolm live underground, exploring new farming methods as the storm rages into its twelfth week.

Wilson Brown has talked about her reasons for writing the play, coming from the sense that the climate change debate can feel too heavy, leaving people quietly ignoring it as they don’t know how to begin changing the world. She understands, like all dramatists, that the personal is political, that the laughter that the play generates can ultimately move people more than facts and figures laid out in articles. It’s a well-realised play, important because it tackles the most important topic for our age, and if there are structural flaws that stop it from becoming a great play, the production around it gives it a sheen that masks its limitations.

Arguably, the play’s greatest strength and significant weakness is that Wilson Brown has written a wonderful contemporary section, following Michael Salami and Nina Singh’s work colleagues-turned-lovers, whose lives are irrevocably changed when the flooding begins. Fizzing with genuine chemistry, some hilarious stories (the tale Dan tells about having his mouth washed out with soap by his angry mother when he uses the ‘c’ word that he has heard in the playground brings the house down), and a late turn into the horrifically tragic, this is a couple that the audience fall for, when they aren’t on the stage the temperature cools as a result. Perhaps this is because they are the only couple with the agency, the only ones who can make active choices to change things.

In the past, Eunice (Phoebe Thomas) and her discoveries were blocked by her sex – she even asks whether her husband John (played by Matt Whitchurch) will become a spokesman for her discoveries to be taken serious – her passion for her science in contrast with her conflicting feelings about motherhood, that society expects her to make her life’s work; while in the future, James Bradwell and Rosie Dwyer are trapped in a society created not through their own doing. This lack of agency makes sense from a thematic point of view, but from a dramatic one, it topples things.

What hasn’t been flattened is a wonderfully sculpted production from Medina, with screens sliding in and out in Aldo Vàzquez’s design, signifying time leaps, and Ryan Day’s precise lighting bleeding different time aesthetics together. Young, new writers with important messages are often being represented in small spaces above pubs, but Medina’s commitment to placing new writing front and centre of her programming pays off here. Ultimately, The Beautiful Future Is Coming is an entertaining and thoughtful work that more than earns its place on the main stage and gives us hope that there is a place where the voices of those who dream can still be heard.