‘What will the world be like in a thousand years?’-New Beginning at the Queen’s Theatre.

Climate Activist Ruth Kettle-Frisby today writes in the Havering Daily:

New Beginning provides us with a rare and restorative interlude from the clattering chaos of the modern self-conscious experience. We are invited to pan outwards and away; inwards and underneath to the ‘heartbeat of the underground’, and to ‘deep time’. It is a harmonious synthesis of apparent paradoxes, weaving the conservation principle of energy – with the continuous process of being, becoming; death and decay – seamlessly with mystic spirituality; it introduces creative new perspectives that nevertheless hark back to ancient cycles within our own nature.

‘What will the world be like in a thousand years?’ ‘What will jobs look like?’ ‘Will people make better choices in the future?’ These big and intriguing questions were gently posed to us personally by a young person who showed us to our seats and sat with us, planting seeds of wonder in our minds to set the conceptual scene. This gave us the space to think; to remove us from the minutia of well-trodden cognitive pathways of ordinary thought patterns, allowing us to contemplate new possibilities. “I’ll leave you with your thoughts”, she said, as our attention refocused on the softly litbarren landscape conveyed on the stage: just a few bare trees and a simple terracotta dish at the start.

Interestingly, in a theatre full of people, no individual disappears; on the contrary, each of us emerges as focal points as we are bathed in eternal truths so rarely contemplated in modern life that they feel like novelty; ultimately inviting us to surrender ‘to the cycle of birth and rebirth…knowing that every ending is a prelude to a beginning’.

Climate Change is an all-encompassing topic that is becoming characterised in the modern world from shifting perspectives, governed by competing ideologies.  Many of us accept robustscientific evidence that climate change and air pollution are intrinsically linked, and that together they represent an existential threat to our natural environment, however the conversation can feel dominated by provocative headlines, and seem conducive only to entrenched social divisions.

New Beginning, however, endeavours to shape an episodicnarrative about carbon and clean air that’s rooted in forestrylife cycles on which human nature depends. Essential truths are revealed to us as quietly hopeful, comforting, and energising; that is, we discover our very identities to be rooted in a complex network of regenerative eternity; that we are worthy of a profound sense of belonging, and that our actions make a difference.

I think it was the multisensory physicality, meticulously designed by David Shearing and Variable Matter, of this immersive experience that resonated with me the most. Natural props were used to striking effect: from a magnificently rooted tree stump, descending deus ex machina onto the stage – to the woody contours of the star anise pods in our hands, its evocative scent filling the room. To sit quietly – amidst the constant flux of light, sounds, organically choreographed movement and undulating animated projections of trees buzzing with mycelia – was an extraordinary experience.

For me, New Beginning represents a secular alternative to religious creation stories, and a call to extend our love and energy outwards: to each other and to all aspects of the natural environment of which each of us – against all the odds – are integral parts.

Characteristic of Shearing’s work, New Beginning is a gentle feast for the senses that’s been sensitively and sustainably created so that everyone can benefit from and enjoy it. This innovative production goes a significant way in contributingto evolving definitions of what we mean by ‘theatre’, reinterpreting conventional story-telling methods, as well as expectations of the boundaries between the stage and the audience; the result is something altogether more personal, resonant and inclusive. 

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