The Beautiful Future is Coming –Jermyn Street Theatre, London

Writer: Flora Wilson Brown

Director: Harry Tennison

The Beautiful Future is Coming is another outstanding production by DONOTALIGHT’S team of writer Flora Wilson Brown and director Harry Tennison. Wilson Brown is unafraid to tackle powerful issues: her 2022 I Know I Know I Know was a tightly woven drama about secrets, lies and abuse. The Beautiful Future is Coming, equally tightly woven, is a fresh and often very funny look at the impacts of climate change.

What else can be said about climate change in 2024? Well, Wilson Brown surprises with clever ideas in a witty, gripping drama of convincingly realistic relationships. The dramatization is bold and effective, not a second is lost as the action shifts constantly between three couples, each from a different era. All three of the women are powerful, while the versatile George Fletcher plays the subordinate male to each.

Scientist Eunice in mid-nineteenth-century New York is frustrated by her failure to get her vital research read by the closed all-male world of science. Husband John is supportive but never gets what’s at stake. Shouldn’t she be satisfied when a science journal includes her in an article about amateur lady scientists?

In parallel, Fletcher transforms into the likeable Dan in the contemporary world. The first scene is hilarious, as Dan nervously approaches his office to negotiate the morning after. Was the night with Claire just a fling? He’s far too twenty-first-century to risk assumptions. And to complicate matters, Claire is his boss. Their razor-sharp dialogue catches the modulations as their screwball relationship develops into something

A split second later, Fletcher is Malcolm, the research assistant of an impressive boss, Ana. It’s now way in the future. Alone on a small research station in storm-battered Svalbard, Malcolm is helping Ana’s attempts to propagate wheat that will grow in East Anglia, now the land has been taken over by the sea. We don’t yet know Ana’s back story, but her visible pregnancy intensifies her need to be rescued from Svalbard.

The issue of climate change is sketched in vividly but with a light hand. Wilson Brown skillfully embeds the implications of an increasingly devastated world into the actuality of each couple. Dan’s mother lives somewhere outside Cambridge. He receives frantic calls as flood waters fail to recede. In the future, Malcolm only has to mention his family once lived in Cambridge for Ana to react with instant pity. Clearly, the Cambridge catastrophe has gone down in history.

All four actors are outstanding: Sabrina Wu as Eunice and Pepter Lunkuse as Ana delineate their characters with warmth and conviction. But it is Martha Watson Allpress with the much more sympathetic role of Claire, who shines with her comic timing.  Tennison’s taut, pacy direction means that we remain riveted throughout. Inevitably, there are imperfections. In such an admirably economical piece of story-telling, some aspects are left unexplained. What exactly is Eunice’s scientific discovery, for instance? Why are Malcolm’s ambitions so low? But despite this, The Beautiful Future is Coming is a never-less-than gripping piece of theatre and deserves a wider audience.

Runs until 5 February 2024