The future is the past is how we speak now

What follows is a rough adaptation of what was already a pretty rough text that I put together as a guest speaker for the event Futures After the Pandemic: Transmedial Stages and Posthuman Dramaturgies, organised by Joseph Dunne-Howrie and Bianca Mastrominico, which took place at Rose Bruford College on Friday 9 May, 2025. It was one of those juicy, challenging days that opened up questions within questions, not least in discussing creative interactions with AI (everyone, read guest speaker Hannah Silva’s book My Child, The Algorithm) and briefly broaching the environmental impacts of working across “posthuman” landscapes (although Caridad Svich, another guest speaker, felt this wasn’t considered nearly enough).  

I talked about theatre club because I always talk about theatre club, and because western society is no more post-human than it is post-feminism: or rather, western society remains defined by a patriarchal capitalist agenda that would eliminate care and genuine justice altogether if it could, and partly tries to do this by ripping the teeth from humanism, feminism, any struggle to meet people’s actual needs. What I'm always talking about when I talk about theatre club is space for listening and connecting: the fundamentals of human existence. 

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I don’t have specialism as a dramaturg: I tend to work in a “yes, and” way: you have this idea – yes! And what happens if we think about x or y or z in relation to that? This flexibility was quite useful in 2020 when two shows I was working on with Paula Varjack, both intended for the stage, had to adapt to the changing circumstances of covid. 

When I came into the making process of the first show, #thebabyquestion, in late 2018, Paula had already been working on it for a substantial time with Catriona James and Luca Rutherford. I came in to help with structuring the material they’d generated, and at an early showing at Camden People’s Theatre in London I hosted a post-show feedback session. That conversation revealed that the material really touched a nerve. Paula, Cat and Luca were exploring the pressure that is still put on cis women to have children, and the impacts of that pressure on how women are perceived within society. That pressure – the politics of pronatalism, a term I hadn’t yet encountered when we were making the show – leads directly to the UK Supreme Court ruling that, in legal terms, “woman” refers to “biological sex”: a ruling that serves no one more than the patriarchy that would keep women in their place, the place defined by men. 

Paula works a lot with pop culture so conceived of the show as a kind of “Top of the Pops”, but instead of running through a singles chart, we ran through the years from 1978, when the pill was first made available to single women on the NHS, to the present day, using songs by people like Madonna, Charlie XCX, Katy Perry and more to discuss concepts like the biological clock, different birth control methods, and how differently #thebabyquestion lands for men. 

When covid resulted in cancelled performances, Paula was already working with a film-maker called Chuck Blue Lowry, and that’s how the decision was made to record a one-off performance of #thebabyquestion. Sadly we were not doing this on an NTatHome budget, which restricted how we were able to film, but also how we were able to screen: not having a budget for Performing Right Society for Music fees, we weren’t able to pay for the music – and there was A LOT of music. But also, we didn’t want to just put this out in the world and leave it at that. We knew from the experience at CPT that we wanted space for dialogue. 

Dialogue has been really important in my practice since 2011 – in fact, it’s how I became a dramaturg, and how I came to run Theatre Club, a very basic project in which I host space for people to talk about performances without the artists present. We have to ask each other the questions we’d otherwise ask the artists, which can be annoying when you just want a straightforward answer to a straightforward question like “why does the play have that title?” but is otherwise fascinating, because people watch through the lenses of their accrued experience and then bring all that difference together and gather it around a play. Take that into a conversation and you can have very nuanced discussions about political issues that might otherwise inspire a lot of shouting, not least on social media. 

So although #thebabyquestion became a film, it was very much a “theatrical film”, intended to be screened in theatres as the first section in a two-part event, followed after the interval by a discussion. At one of those discussions, host Beth Watson of Bechdel Theatre organised the conversation through the following questions: 

The Baby Question – what did this title bring to mind for you? Were there any unexpected or surprising “baby questions” that came up in the piece? How do you feel about “baby questions”? 

Pop culture – have you seen representations of childfree women before this film that particularly stick in your minds? How was this piece different – or similar to – other representations or stories centring childfree women? 

What does solidarity look like between people who are childfree by choice, and those for whom this isn’t a choice? How do we support each other? 

 As you’ll notice, none of those questions has an easy yes/no answer, and they build towards reflection on solidarity and support. And those things feel really important given the atomisation and polarisation of society not only post- but pre-covid. 

Paula, Chuck and I were thinking a lot about atomisation and polarisation in the other project we were making together during this period, iMelania. This also wasn’t intended as a film but as an ambitious mid-scale performance incorporating tech: that is, layering stage action with projected image, with the images moving between pre-recorded and live film. We had just about managed to have a scratch performance at the Barbican in London when covid happened, but it was still relatively early days in the project, so Paula and Chuck carried on working on it via whatsapp, exchanging thoughts and articles and social media posts.

In case you didn’t work it out from the title, iMelania was inspired by and is a response to the truly bizarre existence of Melania Trump, in particular Melania’s position as a kind of “acceptable” foreigner, and admirable woman, within a narrative of demonising immigrants and diminishing women. So it opened up questions around who gets to be the “good” immigrant, the accepted immigrant, the immigrant who lives in a new country without friction, and who gets to do all these things AND be female. 

When Paula and Chuck decided to pivot iMelania into a digital project, a recorded collage of all the materials they’d gathered in whatsapp over the past 18 months, my role as a dramaturg was quite a basic structural one: how to shape this mass of material so that there’s some kind of coherent line through it. Contrary to my usual “yes, and” approach, this required quite a lot of “no, because” from me: with so much material, clear decisions were needed as to what should be discarded. We also had a few key questions to work through together. Firstly, would our “stage” be a laptop or a phone? The mobile was true to the material, the intimate scale of Paula and Chuck’s dialogue, but the events we were covering – not just Melania’s ascendancy but the murder of George Floyd and the storming of Capitol Hill – also demanded a bigger scale.

All of us had seen and were hugely inspired by Kirsty Housley’s work on Rich Kids: a History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, which moves between live performance and instagram live, which is how we made the decision to have the show on both screens simultaneously. But that decision led to another question: how would we manage the transitions, and ensure that people actually were attentive to the work, and not the bazillion other things that might be popping off on their screens? This particularly preoccupied Paula because she’d noticed herself becoming someone who watches TV while still glued to her mobile. Although we did come up with an answer, it wasn’t 100% perfect: it involved making a four-minute video telling people how to access the work, and another introduction for the start of the show impressing on people that they would be watching on mobile and laptop simultaneously, and needed to start the show on both at exactly the right times, AND emphasising the instruction that they needed to turn off notifications – which the gen z-ers in the house did not appreciate at all. 

The third question related to an early intention for the show to involve local participation. How would we ensure that iMelania still felt present and participatory if we were all watching it on separate screens? Watching together via zoom was a possibility – but already in 2021 people had zoom fatigue, big-time. So Paula researched other options and discovered Gather. Which is very weird. Basically it's a highly pixelated digital island, where you and your friends make avatars and then meet up to talk together. There were some dramaturgically pleasing aspects to this: the island had very hard borders, and was clearly exclusive – all very Trump. But more important was that, at the end of the show, you could meet up with the friends at the tropical bar and chat about your experience of it and what it had brought up for you. After all, for 45 minutes we had asked people to watch 18 months of really difficult politics at high-speed: the least we could do was offer them some space for decompression as well. 

Something that I've learned through more than a decade of hosting these kinds of conversations is that theatre organisations are astonishingly uninterested in supporting them to happen. I struggle to know what that’s about. Are they afraid of people being critical about the work that’s programmed? Are they scared of getting people in a room actively, to discuss, instead of passively, to watch/listen? Is it that they’re genuinely only interested in getting ticket and bar revenue? 

I have a brilliant relationship with Cambridge Junction, who programme theatre club regularly, AND pay me for it – unlike any theatre in London, where I actually live. I believe they do this because they know that they’re often challenging their audiences, they understand that a good conversation after a show can turn a difficult evening around, and they recognise that when you’re producing work that invites people to feel rather than expects them to understand, audiences really appreciate a space to scratch their heads in, where they’re not going to be judged or expected to use the right language or say something smart. 

So this is my provocation for Futures after the Pandemic, and it’s really very simple. When we have so much in society pushing people apart, isn’t there more that theatres and theatre-makers can do to invite people to come together, beyond inviting them to sit silently listening, then sending them home alone again at the end?