Climate stories are typically defined by despair. The future we are told of is such a tragic, barren dystopia, it’s hard to look at head-on. But a flood of theatre-makers are writing their way past fear into something more useful, inspiring action through love, music, puppetry and folklore. “The ones who profit most from the idea that we’re doomed are the oil companies and the people massively polluting our planet,” reasons playwright Flora Wilson Brown. “If we allow ourselves to think there’s nothing we can do, we won’t do anything. There’s still time to act.”
Wilson Brown rejects this nightmarish narrative in her play, The Beautiful Future Is Coming, at Bristol Old Vic. Exploring the impact of the climate crisis through the eyes of three couples, the play jumps between 1856, 2027 and 2100. In the scenes set in the past, life is returned to Eunice Foote, the real scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect years before the man who took credit for it; in the future, we visit the Svalbard seed vault, where humanity has stashed the ambition of life on another planet. “It’s about making the impact emotional,” Wilson Brown says, “rather than statistical.”
