The Beautiful Future is Coming

Anna Sokolova
7 minutes ago
3 min read

Old Fitz Theatre 18 - 22 May 2026, Sydney

Presented by Witches of Waterloo Productions

The review

The sold-out season is extremely short, and this is a pity for work like this. It is a complex production, and it would win more from longer stage life, when only time would make demanding, fast switching scenes grow more into each other.

Six actors are lifting off the play, which is complex in its agility, intertwining three timelines, keeping a connecting narrative throughout. Although it looks simplistic, the performers are doing an excellent job of balancing multilevel conversations and seeding thoughts that linger after the show is over.

There are three couples taking turns on the stage, on a large, round mirror floor (a setup for the main season production of “Sonder”), with a small, round white table and a couple of chairs. Eunice and John are in New York in the 1850s; Clare and Dan are in London in 2027 - basically now, and Ana and Malcolm are in Svalbard in 2010, on a remote meteo research station, blocked out of the world by a never-ending storm. Each pair is dressed as they would in their times, with Ana and Malcolm wearing white lab overalls, which do not hide Ana’s baby bump. There are three bookshelves around the reflecting surface, one for each time too. Thick leather books, cups and office things, and plastic and metal containers and bottles.

It is a tender but strong and resilient feminist story about ecological catastrophe developing itself for decades. The story is made without loud slogans; it is compiled from everyday life events and the large-scale ones.

Eunice is a woman ahead of her time, curious and inventive in experimental work, investigating a warming effect she has just discovered. Passionate about her work, she is lucky to have a husband who understands and supports her even when she is clearly choosing work over a prescribed destiny of being just a wife. Lightened up by soft yellow candle light (which reflects time well too, with daylight apartments or sterile white labs), with rebellious curls of red hair over her forehead, Tierney Clarke’ Eunice refusing to accept the perceptions about women understanding science, she picks up the fight again and again.

Clare and Dan work together - their fast dialogues made from unfinished sentences are fun to listen to and untangle. The cute romantic story rudely interrupts with catastrophe bringing to light a harsh realisation: if one hears “only twelve people ceased in the disaster” it sounds a relief, until one of those twelve is your mother.

Malcolm is in a non-envious position as a young colleague of Ana, whose pregnancy just terrifies him. Daniel Francis-Swaby is excellent in presenting the mix of care, anxiety, over caring, also keep going with the job, being locked in the station months longer than planned. A scene where he confesses to secretly giving Ana coffee without caffeine for months because it is better for a baby is the funniest and heart warming in the entire show. Lily Rawson’s Ana is a woman left solo at the very front of the dreadful future, yet agreeing to bring new life to it, is a character summoning it all.

There are moral choices, frights, uncertainty and big determination. It is, if not mostly, about women, the ones who are bearing unique charges for the continuity of life, clearly seeing what the ending-with-high-odds world and coarse-thinking, head-in-sand-hiding self-destructing societies are leaving them with.