Writer and Director – Dominic Hedges
An eerie soundtrack. Drone footage of a car driving through floods. A glimpse of a girl’s face underwater. A woman in a dressing gown sits slumped and silent while a teenage girl plays a guitar and coaxes her to engage. Next scene: the woman is a researcher behind a Perspex screen, dressed in a white coat, seemingly conducting an audition. The unsettling narrative jump cuts in Will You Love Me Tomorrow? have the strange subconscious power of dream imagery. Venus Raven’s lighting design plays a powerful role throughout.
This innovative production, combining talented young performers with professional adult actors, attempts to stage the psychological trauma of the climate crisis. The younger characters tell the adults facts about floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels, crop failure, water wars. In navigating the terrifying contemporary moment, Will You Love Me Tomorrow? does not always succeed as a play, but it is a philosophically ambitious piece of work with flickers of brilliance. It deals unflinchingly with the most crucial topic art can address – the survival of civilisation.
We’re deep into a perplexing tale of the children singing, acting, painting, as part of some kind of experiment, when The Researcher, sensitively played by Grace Over, says: “This type of immersive therapy can have side effects”. It feels like a shift towards clarity, but there are more twists to come. The Assistant (Samantha Nixon) is an even more enigmatic figure than the other characters. “Is she God?” asks The Researcher at one point. We are left guessing who exactly is in therapy and why, and what – if anything – is real.
The show’s title is taken from the pop song, Will You (Still) Love Me Tomorrow? originally recorded in the 1960s. The Singer (Elanor Bilbrough) is convinced she has written it to prophesy the end of the world. The fact that The Researcher refers to it being written “a hundred years ago” is one of several hints that the play is set a few decades in the future. Bilbrough’s poignantly unaffected renditions of this and other songs form the emotional heart of the play. Her sister, movingly played by Sadie O’Sullivan, mixes anger, pathos and tender connection.
The other young people, Rufus Harwood as The Actor and Anton Wild as The Artist, give lively, engaging performances, providing moments of welcome comedy as well as ultimate seriousness. Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow…” speech is given new meanings.
The show’s original songs, written by Sally Horowitz of musical duo The Weaver Line, are part of a varied and disturbing soundscape. Thumbs Down is a theatre group that is not afraid to interrogate its own themes and methodologies. Writer, director and researcher Dominic Hedges analyses, in a programme note, the process of creating the show: “scenes were rewritten, ideas were challenged and the piece gradually reshaped itself around the people in the room.”
The resulting show is an experimental work about an experimental therapy. The performers’ commitment is impressive. This was never likely to be a conventional piece of theatre; instead, it is intriguing drama on an important theme.
Runs until 19 April 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Ambitious experiment
