15 – 18 March

In his little book, Dilemmas, Gilbert Ryle scotches the notion that if something happens then it was always going to happen and by the same token has been fixed from the start. It’s a notion Sam Ward explores in this unusual piece of storytelling. Using a real incident – complete with actual air control recordings – in which a man hijacks an empty airliner he poses the question, ‘when did that story begin?’ The answer, he suggests, involves a near infinite regression. Likewise, the future for the audience is told in multiple stories of what will happen in an hour, two hours, two weeks, months, years, millennia, until the earth finally gets gobbled up by the sun that has given it life and nurtured it over billions of years.

Like any ‘telling’ as opposed to ‘showing’, the story will depend on the personality and skill of the teller. Sam Ward who writes and performs the piece is a comforting, if paternalistic presence. The result is a kind of collaboration that happily avoids the usual clenching of buttocks when the audience is invited to take part.

By dint of some clever audience participation – nothing happens, the story will not progress, until a member of the audience asks for it to happen – we are drawn in. ‘Do you want to know what happens or not?’ he seems to ask. The audience blinked first and a brave voice (perhaps wondering what the ticket price had bought them) sets us on our way. This happens at various times, making sure we are all paying attention. At various points audience members are brought onto the stage and are fed lines to repeat back. As he sweeps around the stage, like a sixth form teacher trying to get the attention of his class, making sure they’re with him on the journey, absurd and outlandish predictions of the future lives of the audience are scattered apparently randomly, but with engaging conviction: a baby is born in a lighthouse, friends meet after a prolonged separation and love is declared, a CEO plays golf as a man dies from self-immolation. Finally the countdown to oblivion rapidly bounds over millions and billions of years and finds him emphatically prodding the air for emphasis as we or our descendants race towards the inevitable.

The show is an accomplished piece storytelling, with no plot other than the journey towards the cosmological certainty of a heated full stop, but with the vague hope that, “Paradise is ours to make”.

★★★☆☆ Graham Wyles, 16th March, 2023