FLORA Wilson Brown’s play The Beautiful Future is Coming was first seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre in 2024, and now comes to Bristol Old Vic in a new production by Nancy Medina, the theatre’s artistic director.

In the programme Nancy says “ We’re thrilled to share this beautiful human story in our city, which has such deep connections to climate activism” and that thought is carried through in an interactive foyer installation – a native field maple that is the focus for an audio project for young Bristol residents’ thoughts about climate change and what might be done.

The playwright explains that the work was “a place to put all my climate grief – my worries and fears for the future.” Set in an unspecified “immediate” future and a distant future, it looks back to the opportunities missed at the time of American scientist Eunice Foote, the woman who formulated the theory of the effect of carbon dioxide gas on atmospheric temperature, but was only recognised as a curiosity – a woman who, paradoxically to the men who ruled the world, had a reasoning brain.

This unsettling and thought-provoking play catches a couple from each of the three periods at a critical moment, and from time to time cleverly interweaves their stories to highlight the similarities unchanged by the passing of time and advances in knowledge.

Eunice, powerfully convincing in the hands of Phoebe Thomas, is comfortable in the house and arms of devoted husband John (Matt Whitchurch), but he is unable to take her undoubted intellectual brilliance seriously.

Claire and Dan (Nina Singh and Michael Salami) are tentatively beginning to build on a work romance, already inured to the heat and flooding that is resulting from climate change. When a personal tragedy leads to a dramatic protest, sloppily dubbed by an increasingly right-wing press as terrorism, Claire hopefully heads for the hills and what she hopes will be a better life.

Years on, and the pregnant Ana (Rosie Dwyer) and Malcolm (James Bradwell) are trapped by interminable rains in a research station, beyond the reach of rescuers. They are trying to grow a flood-resistant wheat.

It’s hard to leave the theatre after the 90-minute play confident in the “beauty” of the future it foresees, but there is hope. If we follow Eunice’s lead, we fight and fight and fight again to be heard and understood.

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Photographs by Ellie Kurtz