The Beautiful Future Is Coming @ Traverse Theatre
Flora Wilson Brown's ambitious play chronicles real and imagined narratives of climate change
As Storm Floris paralyses Fringe and city infrastructure on the day of writing this review, any conviction that climate change happens 'to other people' feels like a distant – if not shamefully naive – memory. Nonetheless, it is a refrain that echoes throughout Flora Wilson Brown’s The Beautiful Future Is Coming, which spans 250 years of real and imagined climate history through the stories of three women.
First we meet Eunice, a mid-nineteenth century American scientist, whose research into CO2 is dismissed as 'hobbyism' despite her all-consuming conviction that something is (very) wrong. Then there is Claire, a middle manager at a PR agency in 2027, who falls in love during a summer where temperatures soar and streets begin to flood. Finally, we meet Ana, stranded at a research station in Svalbard in the year 2100, desperately trying to find a flood-resistant crop seed as she enters her final weeks of pregnancy.
The sense that the climate crisis is too big to fit into the framework of our daily lives – too vertiginous to truly comprehend – lies at the heart of this ambitious 90-minute production. Collective inertia from across all sectors of society consistently bridges the play’s generational divides. It sits as a constant counterpoint to the (breakneck) speed of climate breakdown: as lung-clogging smoke and rising flood waters draw in, and thunder ripples throughout Elena Peña’s soundscape.
Much of the strength of Beautiful Future... lies in its ability to balance the visible with the implicit. Aldo Vázquez’s bright costumes and warm lighting only seem to further emphasise the shadows of the play’s absent children: children who are longed for but may never come; children waiting to be born into a world where human survival is not guaranteed; children who will judge parents for what was (and was not) done.
Whilst the play’s episodic narrative structure at times comes at the expense of character development, this is ultimately offset by Nancy Medina’s superb direction. Characters poignantly loop around each others’ paths between scenes, holding eye contact or mirroring gestures and phrases. The threads that bind us inextricably to those who have come before are given necessary physical space to unfold.
Whilst the future depicted remains uncertain, audiences will be left in no doubt that the stuff of Eunice’s nightmares is already here. The real question, Wilson Brown seems to suggest, is what are we prepared to do about it? Whilst Beautiful Future... offers no straightforward answer, no comforting promise of rescue from storms of our own making, it is a reminder that we still have a duty to seek out hope. To remember that, in spite of everything, we may still find something beautiful.
The Beautiful Future Is Coming, Traverse Theatre (Traverse 1), until 24 Aug, various times, £17.50-25 (further concessions available)