The Beautiful Future Is Coming
Bristol Old Vic
★★★★

CLIMATE anxiety is a growing global concern, yet Flora Wilson Brown’s 90-minute play does not lambast us with shocking facts and figures but chooses a far more subtle, yet no less effective approach.

The emergent man-made disaster is the backdrop to three relationships set over 250 years.

All the men in these relationships are thoughtful, caring and usually the source or butt of humour but it is the women who provide the strength and endurance with thoughts of their children providing a spring of hope against an uncertain future.  

Phoebe Thomas gives an impassioned performance as an amateur US scientist whose unsettling experiments with CO2 in 1856 New York are overlooked because of her sex and official standing. Matt Whitchurch is equally believable as her husband who does his best to provide emotional support tainted with comically patronising 19th century values.

Rosie Dwyer’s self-confident and self-possessed role as Michael Salami’s nominal boss and girlfriend engagingly counterbalances Salami’s joyful exuberance. His full passioned involvement in life being both his strength and weakness with extreme weather events providing the galvanising, contemporary backdrop.

The last of the women is a future scientist played by Dwyer, heavily pregnant and locked in an underground bunker with a hyper-sensitive colleague while an 86-day storm ravages the land above. Wound up to breaking point, her experiments with weather resistant strains of wheat offering grains of hope for her unborn child.

Gradually all three relationships with their fears and hopes are interwoven into a carefully designed collage played out against the impact of a dramatically changing world.

Nancy Medina directs the first-rate cast making the most of the complex script and drawing out the couples’ contrasting passions for life while also embracing frequent elements of humour.

Aldo Vazquez’s colour-splashed set design is amorphously adaptable along with Ryan Day’s atmospheric lighting equally effective in transforming the stage from the stability and affluence of the US couple’s home to the bleak sparseness of a futuristic lab.

This is a thought provoking and intelligent play performed with great sensitivity in a production that is bound to leave its mark.

Runs until June 7, box office: (0117) 9877-877, tickets@bristololdvic.org.uk.