Ghosts of The Near Future Festval Theatre Studio 1st December 2023 Review
Ghosts of the Near Future was at the Studio @ Festival Theatre tonight for one performance only, and the last date on the show’s current 2023 tour. The venue was, except for a very few empty seats, a sell-out and I wonder how much of this was due to this show’s very successful run (which I missed) at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2022.
The publicity for this show by international performance duo emma + pj describe it as “a genre-bending, multi-form storytelling show about extinction and disappearance”, but everything is in the eyes of the beholder here and Ghosts of The Near Future is far more than that, it is a very sensitive, thought-provoking and unique work of theatre.
What do you get when a magician wanting to perform the greatest disappearance act ever on stage meets en-route to Nevada a physicist looking not only for exotic atomic particles but elusive legends of the sun dried, parched and dust landscape? The answer, a beautifully narrated story where words and how they play with and against one another create a landscape of an abandoned classic American automobile now become part of the landscape, a bar where only gasoline is for sale to drink, and powerfully emotional memories of a childhood cat and an apple tree and the mourning of their passing and loss asks questions of whether each have any awareness of their human’s attachment to them.
Ghosts of The Near Future is a skilful use of blending film, screen projections (which return in other forms later in this story) and original music (check it out at Soundcloud) into the spoken narrative. A few well known songs (not on the soundtrack) add to this surreal world of desert, casinos and cowboys hats. Elton John’s Rocketman music and lyrics are used to great effect with images of total annihilation.
How near is the future to us though? Why are we so apprehensive, even afraid of it? These questions and more are asked here as our very existence and how we deal with time and a universe that is so strange at the very large and the very small levels that we really all have trouble understanding even the basics of it and our place in it. Like Schrödinger's cat and sub atomic particles that only seem to exist when we do not look at them, is everything around us an illusion, a disappearing act, that includes us too.
One of my favourite lines in this interweaving narrative that seems so often to travel in a circular motion of big questions with no answers is the reference to us all as salt in a bag of water, but refusing to accept that is all that we are, that our consciousness tells us that we are so much more.
Ghosts of the Near Future is an original work that paints its chaotic world with words, sound and images, much the same way as we all try to process the world around us every second of our lives. We all need more works like this by creatives like emma + pj if live theatre is to continue to surprise us all.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
The publicity for this show by international performance duo emma + pj describe it as “a genre-bending, multi-form storytelling show about extinction and disappearance”, but everything is in the eyes of the beholder here and Ghosts of The Near Future is far more than that, it is a very sensitive, thought-provoking and unique work of theatre.
What do you get when a magician wanting to perform the greatest disappearance act ever on stage meets en-route to Nevada a physicist looking not only for exotic atomic particles but elusive legends of the sun dried, parched and dust landscape? The answer, a beautifully narrated story where words and how they play with and against one another create a landscape of an abandoned classic American automobile now become part of the landscape, a bar where only gasoline is for sale to drink, and powerfully emotional memories of a childhood cat and an apple tree and the mourning of their passing and loss asks questions of whether each have any awareness of their human’s attachment to them.
Ghosts of The Near Future is a skilful use of blending film, screen projections (which return in other forms later in this story) and original music (check it out at Soundcloud) into the spoken narrative. A few well known songs (not on the soundtrack) add to this surreal world of desert, casinos and cowboys hats. Elton John’s Rocketman music and lyrics are used to great effect with images of total annihilation.
How near is the future to us though? Why are we so apprehensive, even afraid of it? These questions and more are asked here as our very existence and how we deal with time and a universe that is so strange at the very large and the very small levels that we really all have trouble understanding even the basics of it and our place in it. Like Schrödinger's cat and sub atomic particles that only seem to exist when we do not look at them, is everything around us an illusion, a disappearing act, that includes us too.
One of my favourite lines in this interweaving narrative that seems so often to travel in a circular motion of big questions with no answers is the reference to us all as salt in a bag of water, but refusing to accept that is all that we are, that our consciousness tells us that we are so much more.
Ghosts of the Near Future is an original work that paints its chaotic world with words, sound and images, much the same way as we all try to process the world around us every second of our lives. We all need more works like this by creatives like emma + pj if live theatre is to continue to surprise us all.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com