Creators: Adam Lenson, Stu Barter, Rachel Bellman, Annabelle Lee Revak, Darren Clark and Shaye Poulton Richards
Director: Adam Lenson
Humanity always thinks it is at the end of the world, but it never is. Civilisations rise and fall, resources deplete as continents shift, diseases come and go, and yet people always survive, perhaps not with the same levels of luxury, comfort or wealth, but they survive. That is the rather cheerless message of Adam Lenson’s new musical Precipice, premiering at the New Diorama Theatre and created from a writers’ room comprising Lenson, Stu Barter, Rachel Bellman, Annabelle Lee Revak, Darren Clark and Shaye Poulton Richards. Hoping to break down the traditional approaches to creating musical theatre, some of the songs are strong, but the narrative becomes a muddle of sentimental sci-fi.
Trapped in a building known only as ‘the tower’, a group of people in 2425 are about to enact an important annual ceremony, honouring the foundation of their community and the day their ancestors found sanctuary with a series of rituals and readings. But a 100 years before that, Emily and Ash move into a beautiful apartment overlooking the River Thames and set in motion a chain of events that puts the survival of humanity in jeopardy.
There are too few dystopian musicals set in the future, so the concept of Precipice is a welcome one, and designer Libby Todd brings together all of the tropes of the genre in the grubby set design with makeshift strings of lights and costumes that speak to an 1980s retrofuturist style. And the central dilemma in this section is an interesting one, a group who have largely inherited its situation from previous generations, leaning into the myths and legends they have created around their collective identity without ever really challenging who and why they exist.
But the large writing team has resulted in an unwieldy script that skims the surface of too many unresolved issues. Naturally, there is a strong climate change theme, a sense of blame for the people like Emily and Ash in 2025 living in personal comfort, driven by consumerism and over-indulgence, with little thought about the resources or needs of their successors on the planet. And while the story casts back to both of these characters doing their bit – she is a moral civil servant and whistleblower, he is a microbiologist trying to prevent mass pestilence – this focus on individual culpability never addresses the role of governments or multinational technology companies, who could really be making a difference.
From this, characterisation stalls, never fleshing out any of the 2425 team enough to invest in their solos about lost love, family issues or people being sent out of the building to restore ‘balance.’ Similarly, poor Emily and Ash, whose relationship cracks through the show, are never fully formed, speaking in unlikely dialogue as their river view becomes a front row seat for climate catastrophe – although Precipice doesn’t join the dots on how a small contamination leads to a calamitous population event in a short space of time – and ultimately these characters feel redundant.
Precipice has much more to give in its futuristic timeline, perhaps starting with the major building crisis that sets the characters in a flurry about energy, offering a timestamp to drive drama and then unfolding into individual character narratives. How and why they got there is, at least theatrically, less interesting than what they are going to do about it and how sacrifices are made. It’s not the end of the world; this is just an early draft, and if the show wants to survive, like the residents of the tower, it also needs to jettison some of its weaker elements and find a new balance.
Runs until 13 December 2025
