It’s eight years since Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal blazed across the Royal Court stage. The memory of that play’s incendiary power illuminates harshly the holes in her long-awaited return to theatre. Futures is a self-conscious, self-indulgent mess. The director, Paul Higgins, and his superb cast of four give it a production of heroic conviction — but it ‘s more than it deserves.
Paul, an insomniac, watches his wife sleep. He speaks of her with restrained hatred, hinting at infidelity, domestic violence, even implying that she might not be slumbering, but dead. In between he relates a tale of his work in the City, of a friend called Raff who has since died, and of his increased sense of the impermanence of human existence since September 11.
Then his wife awakes suddenly, announcing that she has dreamt that her father has been the victim of a terrorist attack. The action shifts to a mental hospital where, under the watchful eye of a mute, white-coated doctor, Father, shaven-headed, covered in dust and groaning as if giving birth to himself, tries to piece together his past in painful shards of memory and language.
The writing is reminiscent of Sarah Kane’s later work, as well as Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly, but it is littered with semi-formed ideas. There’s much laborious punning on the “gilt” and “futures” of Paul’s trading career, and Father, groping for meaning, often lapses into rhyme: “eyes lies surprise”, “words are right fight night light”, and suchlike. With his childish petulance and cruel denial of his daughter, he is a King Lear figure; and amid the Tarot-like imagery of toppling towers and panic, there are allusions to fate and probability.
The dearth of dialogue and of fully conceived characters makes the play frustrating. We are left to make a whole from the fragments Prichard presents: are Raff and Father one and the same? Did either of them die in New York on 9/11? Did Raff/Father sexually abuse his daughter and beat her mother, establishing a cycle that Paul and his wife are now repeating? It’s an unrewarding guessing game.
Advertisement
Higgins imbues the production with all the passion, focus and clarity that the piece sorely lacks. But it feels as though Prichard is floundering.
Box office: 020-7978 7040