The end of the world show

Published on Sunday 8 April 2007 00:19

SUSPECT Culture's Futurology - A Global Revue features a contortionist, a clown, a stand-up comedian and a tango dancer. There are song and dance numbers, ventriloquism and an emcee double-act. If that sounds as little like a Suspect Culture show as you could imagine, just look at where it's being performed. After opening at Glasgow's SECC, it tours to hangar-like halls and conference centres, with not a fashionable arts centre in sight.

How could it be that a company known for formal experimentation and clever ideas has signed up to perform non-stop erotic cabaret (or something like it) at the country's most corporate venues? Can this be the same Suspect Culture that once tackled such heady themes as identity in the global market (Airport), the futility of trying to recapture a perfect moment (Timeless) and the psychological need for escape (The Escapologist)? What are they playing at?

The answer is nothing short of apocalyptic. Suspect Culture is preparing for the end of the world. Like the Emperor Nero plucking away on his lyre while Rome was in flames, and like the Berlin club acts who camped it up in the face of the horrors of the Third Reich, Suspect Culture is rolling out the cabaret while the planet girds itself for environmental catastrophe.

The reason for combining cabaret and conference centres is simple. In times of stress, modern man turns either to pointless pleasures or PowerPoint presentations.

"What do you do in the face of impending doom?" he says. "You hold a conference. That's what society has deemed is the appropriate way of dealing with these things. With the more emotional, human part of the brain, the response is go out, get drunk, have sex - that's a very common response to impending doom. So there are two worlds that co-exist within the play, the conference and a cabaret, and they represent two approaches to a future: the rational and the animalistic."

Drawing on the talents of all the associate artists from around the world with whom the Glasgow company has collaborated over the past 10 years, Futurology - A Global Revue imagines a Kyoto-style conference of economists and politicians who gather to discuss the future of the planet. While they spend fruitless hours trying to agree the wording of a single sentence, a woman called Patrice vainly campaigns for action to save her island home from sinking beneath the rising sea waters. Her challenge is to master the niceties of conference etiquette - not to mention negotiating her way around the delegates' sexual shenanigans - before it's too late.

"It's a simple story, following one character from a small archipelago of islands in the South Pacific," says director Graham Eatough. "We see her navigating her way through this slightly alien world with its own rules and mysterious practices. She offers a very human connection to what can often be abstract ideas."

BUT ALTHOUGH the show asks the key question of the day - "Is everything going to be all right?" - it doesn't offer a straightforward green polemic in reply. Its concern is less with imminent planetary meltdown than with the impossibility of predicting the future. It's about information overload, contradictory scientific advice and how we can make sense of tomorrow's world today. Should we be fearful that oil is running out, the deserts are growing and that the economies of India and China are about to eclipse our own? Or should we be looking forward to a high-tech 21st century where your fridge orders the food and quantum mechanics allows you to be in two places at once?

"There are so many visions of the future, that whatever your political beliefs, it's quite overwhelming," says Eatough. "Just the sheer diversity of views of the future, never mind that some of them are quite apocalyptic, makes it an interesting time to examine people's relationship with the future. We're interested in what it means to be confronted with that amount of confusing, contradictory, extreme visions of a future. We wanted to explore the human, emotional territory - what we call the 'when you open the papers moment'. What do you do with the information and what does it make you feel like?"

Devised by the company under the certain dramaturgical guidance of David Greig and Dan Rebellato, the show is a multinational satirical comedy that puts its finger on the most pressing political issue of the day. Such is the live nature of the debate that the territory has changed even over the four years the show has been in discussion.

Eatough's perspective on the green debate is refreshingly non-conformist. On one hand, he recognises the responsibility on all of us to cut down on waste; making it company policy, for example, to take trains instead of planes when possible.

On the other hand, he refuses to adopt a sack-cloth-and-ashes approach and makes no apology for the environmental impact his company does have.

He's well aware of the irony of flying in an international team of actors to perform a show about the environmental impact of flying, but doesn't feel inclined to defend himself.

"It's that currency that the show's about," he says. "It's how I might feel a bit defensive about you saying that or how I might think it's a nave point of view. The show's not about the actual effects of carbon emissions, it's about how people adopt positions and how complicated that is."

Eatough believes the way forward is balance, not self-denial. "There's a dangerous logical conclusion to the idea of a return to an idealised past when we had a less harmful environmental impact," he says. "I worry about how viable a solution that is: to say in a puritanical way that the only way to address these problems is to radically reduce things that can sometimes be very creative, positive and fulfilling. That seems regressive and negative. That isn't to say we can just let things continue to run out of control, just that a more effective personal solution is to do with a balance. If you're going to do one thing, then try to do less of the other."

A co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and the Brighton Festival, Futurology - A Global Revue is one of the company's biggest shows to date.

"It feels like a big show to rehearse," says Eatough. "There's a live band, we're spending a lot of time practising dance routines and there's a lot of people involved. It's a nice moment for the company because it acknowledges a development in personnel over the last 10 years."

As for his own role as a futurologist, Eatough is cautious about fortune-telling. "Whatever we project 20 years from now, it will always be slightly wrong," he says. "You only have to think back to when we were teenagers. If someone had come from 2007 and we'd been allowed to ask them a question, it might have been: 'Did nuclear war happen? Were we all wiped out?'

"The answer would obviously be 'No', but you'd also want to say it was the wrong question. There wasn't a nuclear war, but there are still lots of dangers in that area and, anyway, this other thing has superseded it as the projected apocalypse. It's important to ask questions of the future, but it's also important to remember that they'll be the wrong questions."

Futurology - A Global Revue, SECC, Glasgow, Tuesday to Saturday, 8pm; Corn Exchange, Edinburgh, April 17-21, 8pm; AECC, Aberdeen, April 25-28, 8pm; tickets 0870 040 4000. www.suspectculture.com, www.nationaltheatrescotland.com