This Beatiful Future or How I Forgave the Yard Twenty Times Over

Before this show I *hated* the yard. Really hated. Not just disliked, actively detested. 

They'd tricked me out of my money too many times over the past six months with their superficially sharp aesthetic and everything had then been crass, flash, faddy, and stupid. Not to mention boring. 

I emerged of the insipid Pilgrims feeling like I'd just had a run-in with a precocious-and-smug-with-it six-year old. Removal Men (directed, as TBF was, by Jay Miller [I'm only being rude to make the bias apparent, promise]) was one of the most genuinely offensive, mishandled, incomprehensible pieces of drivel I'd ever had the misfortune to spend money on (can you tell I didn't like it?) And Big Guns, a hopeful last leap-- a great writer! a great director! a great write-up by Andrew Haydon no less!-- was, to my eyes, a big pile of formless, imprecise pants masquerading as a play by employing a good sound designer.

So, I was so unsold on going to This Beautiful Future. I was so ready to hate it. I had my battle face on. I was practically preparing a speech asking for my money back (I'd rehearsed the same speech during Removal Men then smilingly shuffled past the ushers on the way out). 

But, and this is almost painful to say after such a zealous and committed belief that The Yard is where culture goes to die, This Beautiful Future is miraculous.

*Spoilers. Millions of them. Go see the effin show first. I promise these words will not compensate at all.*

Miraculous in the sense that it just flies in front of you, in the face of all you think you want out of a show, and displaces it, turns it on its head, makes you really wonder how directors still get away with thoughtless direction that just does the play, when this direction so much is the play.

It tells the story of the final night in a relationship between two teenagers in occupied France in 1944: Otto, a deferential Nazi boy soldier, supremely played here by Bradley Hall; and Elodie, played here by Hannah Millward with the sort of spiky self-assurance that only deferential teenage boys, Nazi or otherwise, can inspire.

The action onstage plays out compellingly if prosaically, foreground to a historical background of which we are never anything but hyper-aware [how did Rita Kalnejais’s script manage that!?]. They dance around each other in sequences of pseudo-intimate, proto-sexual, non-conversations, and it really is the closest I have seen to a sort-of evocation of sort-of teenage life onstage: full of the morbid confidences, the untouchable anxieties that make up your warped sense of the world. 

But this goes only halfway to explaining the show: on the sides of this story, framing the stage, standing in little karaoke booths, are two older actors. Facing away from us, watching their screens, they sing, mainly unheard, from within their little booths. But when they are heard, often operating as a sort of legible commentary on the "play" going on in front of us, they sing along to synthy-poppy-silly versions of Boum or Someone Like You. 

We read them, simplistically as older versions of the actors onstage, but as the play reaches its ending, as it deconstructs and they leave their little rooms and engage with the action, we are left projecting onto them something to which they have no hold. 

They become-- the operation is so complex-- the present selves of the performers but also, simultaneously, the locus of past regret. They are both older and younger than the characters onstage [HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE!!?? MAGIC'S HOW.] and emerge as not just contingent to the plot, but the exact space where meaning existed all along. 

*Of course* a play about two people at the cusp of life, living under extreme violence, should play out through karaoke, that most simultaneously insubstantial, joyous and yet profoundly private and unreproducible medium. *Of course* karaoke Adele, sung by the audience, should be the place for deeply extreme, deeply private, deeply-purely-contemporary feelings felt communally and through all time. 

One feels, or at least I did, that This Beautiful Future is some sort of gauntlet thrown down. This is how you do new writing. This is how you direct a play (I saw Obsession a few days before and Jesus does Ivo need to pop by). The design by Cécile Trémolière, the sound, the lighting, the way contemporary politics are pinned down quietly and without fanfare-- for Christ's sake all of it is just so much sharper, keener, brighter, livelier than anything I've seen this year. 

So, I accept The Yard's apology. They have my undying support. I'm buying a Yard tee. I've got Jay Miller's face on a mug. 



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