Futureproofing theatre

When I heard the sad news of Lou Reed's death last week, I reached for one of his songs. All Tomorrow's Parties, sung by Nico, had already been on my mind. It's a thin slice of hope delivered as a dirge – "And what costume shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow's parties?" A Cinderella story heading for a bleak finish ("For Thursday's child is Sunday's clown, for whom none will go mourning"), All Tomorrow's Parties was inspired by the hangers-on in the Warhol Factory, but it's really an endless cycle of dreams and disappointments, the whole future seen in an instant.

The title of Forced Entertainment's show, Tomorrow's Parties (above), which reaches Dublin in a couple of weeks, may seem more poignant now than when it debuted in 2011. But its idea is similarly caught between the optimistic and the fatalistic.

A man and a woman step onto a wooden pallet in front of fairground lights and start making predictions. “In the future, people will all live together in one enormous crowded city and it will cover the whole earth,” she begins. “Or,” the man counters, “in the future people will develop super powers based on cartoon characters.”

And on it goes, a litany of predictive text, about as reliable as your old mobile phone. We will holiday in space, develop telepathic powers, miniaturise ourselves. “Or,” the man suggests, “in the future things will be pretty much the same as they are now.”

That’s a wise and witty description of “futurecasting”. Whether it happens in art or society, whether it imagines utopia or dystopia, futurology is really always a statement about the present.

1984, for all its enduring images of totalitarian control, is more explicitly about the postwar fears of 1949. Blade Runner, set in 2017, is actually obsessed with the concerns of 1982 (when it was made) and the style of 1942: a "neo-noir" where people and products are indistinguishable. That idea actually owes a huge debt to a 1920 play, RUR, by Karel Capek, which gave us the term "robots".

But while pundits are constantly making dreary forecasts about the future of theatre (perpetually uncertain), theatre is remarkably slow to make forecasts about the future. Plays set in the future tend to be coy about the date: the post-apocalyptic wastelands of Beckett's Endgame and Happy Days; the day-after-tomorrow alt.realities of Caryl Churchill's A Number and Far Away; the dire projections about social and human failures in Gary Owen's The Drowned World and Paul Kennedy's Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life.

You can guess why. Playwrights respect the limits of a theatre’s special-effects budget and prefer not to impose shelf-lives on their work. That’s why the future on stage is either a magnification of today, where dire warnings can be shouted louder, or a scuffed-up version of the past, where the costume department can save money on rubberised collars. In the future, there will be more dystopian dramas and no plays where a crisis is solved with a hover board.

Is that just to be expected in a medium where classical future forecasters, such as Greek oracles or Shakespearean soothsayers, are always ignored or misunderstood? Or is it that every flying car and doomsday fireball suggests that we’re hopeless at predicting the future anyway?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace and in occasional parties. But, whatever’s next, it keeps us guessing.