‘I’ve seen the future and it works,” Lincoln Steffens, an American journalist, famously exclaimed after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919. This hour-long solo play written by Tue Biering for the Danish experimental company Fix&Foxy and here performed in English by Temi Wilkey appears to take a similarly positive line. I found it hard to tell, however, whether its optimism was authentically sincere or bitterly ironic.
It starts with a character simply known as The Woman walking on to a bare stage and announcing “I’ve come from the future to tell you that it’s going to be OK.” A good deal of time – too much, in fact – is spent reminding us that she is a performer and that we are members of an audience. Periodically, she exits and re-enters but the burden of her song remains the same: that we are wired to expect catastrophe. She even imagines a member of the audience shouting at her that “I would rather die today than in 10 years”. In an extraordinary final sequence, The Woman strips off, covers her naked body in soft clay and slime and lists some of the innovations that have helped to make human life more bearable.
There is an interesting debate to be had about whether we are so doom-laden that we ignore past progress. But this play never gets to grips with it and when The Woman envisages a future without “climate crisis, financial crisis, humanitarian crisis, refugee crisis” and much more, I could only assume that the intent was to induce doubt about her utopian message. Wilkey, who has an engaging presence, deserves some kind of medal for her final act of exposure and left me hoping the Gate has a good shower system. But the play itself seems uneasily poised between peddling a transgressive hope and deploying a Swiftian scepticism. It is also so busy being meta-theatrical that it ducks the most important issue: what we can do in the present to ensure that we actually have a future.
At Gate theatre, London, until 7 December.
