The Future Looks Bright – Etcetera Theatre, London

Writers: Şebnem İşigüzel and adapted by Büke Erkoç and Ersin Yaşar

Director: Büke Erkoç

The Future Looks Bright proclaims the title of Büke Erkoç’s and Ersin Yaşar’s single-hander adaptation of a short story by fellow Turkish writer Şebnem İşigüzel. Only it doesn’t really. It looks decidedly grim. The unnamed protagonist starts the piece standing in the wind on top of a tall building, preparing to jump, calculating the mathematics behind her precise moment of death. “If there’s a buzzing in your ears this is due to tension” she tells us, “… but after the sound of hitting the ground you’ll hear nothing else”. A statement of the obvious one supposes from a depressive character whose only enduring relationships seem to be with the idea of death and the memory of her mother, not necessarily in that order.

Dramatically speaking instantaneous suicide is something of a dead end, but thankfully the character (Büke Erkoç performs as well as co-adapts) takes time for a life review before fully committing. We hear of her childhood: dad is distant and perhaps cruel; mum is a melancholic who likes to sleep on her back on the sofa with the TV on.

Mum’s backstory reveals (in the form of a diary) that her erstwhile true love, a fugitive journalist on the run from a fascist regime, was shot dead in front of her eyes. Unable to ever fully process his death Mum hurries her own along by refusing vital medication for a liver condition. Can The Future Looks Bright’s central character escape the long shadow of her mother’s self-inflicted demise or is her own self-destructive destiny set in stone?

At 15 the protagonist’s elder brother introduces her to his “beautiful-eyed friend”. At 19 she is at university dating said friend, whose recreation time is spent spraying “fuck fascism” on campus walls. “The more they fucked fascism the more I fell in love with them” she says of her brother and beau as she mulls over her Marx. Fascism tends to fuck people back, in this case in a rather too neatly symmetrical hail of police bullets that does for the doe-eyed boyfriend.

Grief-stricken, engulfed in depression, obsessing over death, the character takes a train to London in search of a spiritual connection with mum. For reasons best known to the writer the character joins a group therapy session with five men who also want to die.

Erkoç’s performance and direction are certainly committed. But she can be awfully difficult to hear even in the intimate space of the Etcetera Theatre, which creates something of a challenge in engaging with her character. One supposes the piece is aiming to say something about finding meaning in death. Ultimately the protagonist and her motivations emerge enigmatic, ephemeral, and unformed.

Runs until 25 July 2024