Staging crisis and complicity, hope, catastrophe and the apocalypse in performance

Post-show discussion at Precipice, December 2025

Emma Clark (Head of Programming, New Diorama Theatre)
Adam Lenson (Artistic Director, Timelapse Theatre)
Dr Jonathan Gross (Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media & Creative Industries, KCL)
Sarah Housley (Author: Designing Hope: Visions to Shape Our Future)
Alan Fielden (Poet, theatre maker, artist, and lecturer, Container)

EMMA:
Great, hi everybody, thank you so much for being here tonight, thank you so much for staying up and joining us for the discussion. We're kind of an intimate group, so do feel free to come forward a little bit, we're not going to be mic’d, just going to speak out to the space, and this is very much an informal environment so please do feel free to come and go, go to the bathroom if you [need to leave to catch a] train, don't worry about it, it's totally fine.

My name is Emma, I'm Head of Programme here at the theatre at New Diorama, and we are here for a post-show discussion with a quite lofty title: ‘Staging crisis and complicity, hope, catastrophe and the apocalypse in performance’, very much inspired by the work you've just seen tonight from Timelapse Theatre. I'm very privileged to be joined by; Adam Lenson over here who's Artistic Director of Timelapse and the Director of the piece that you just watched, Precipice; Alan Fielden, at the end there, who's a poet, theatre maker and artist and he was the lead artist behind Container, which is a piece that we were really lucky to have earlier in our year this year (which was also a very different kind of polyvocal choral piece also about catastrophe taking a very different form of fear-making); as well as Sarah Housley to my left who is a design futurist and innovation researcher as well as the author of Designing Hope, Visions to Shape Our Future, recently published which I know was a point of inspiration and reading in the research behind this piece; and finally Dr Jonathan Gross, Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at KCL who is also currently writing a book on how art and culture enable hope in times of crisis.

So join me in thanking all of them for joining us today. So the way this is going to work, I'm preparing a couple of questions just to kick us off, kind of for the whole group, and then we can open it out both to each other as well as discussions and questions from the audience.

So to kick us off I think I think it's kind of evident to probably all of us that we're living in this this real era of poly-crisis, of multiple compounding catastrophes, and I know for a lot of theatre artists within our sort of generation and people making work in our spaces here - I feel like that I'm probably going to misattribute it. Fisher, other writers, Mark Fisher, that quote around it being ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. The sense that it's really hard to create a space of imagination about a future that's beyond the way we're living now. And we're joined by several people who I think are kind of tackling that really head-on in really different ways, and I'm really curious - for each of you, in all of your different kind of modes of work, what the seeds were for wanting to tackle this sense of kind of crisis and catastrophe, and how you arrived at like the particular mode you wanted to express that through? Whether that was through piece of theatre making and the form that you chose, or writing, teaching, whatever kind of mode that took for you.

Why don't we start with Adam, given that we just saw an experience you created?

ADAM:
Thank you, I'm really glad to be with you all to talk about this. I think, so we started developing this piece through a kind of group writing and devising process, so six writers sat in the studio outside, and the original provocation was the Doomsday Clock, which is a kind of piece of art and kind of almost marketing made by a group of scientists and artists and politicians and philosophers to sort of say how close we might be to a man-made catastrophe, human-made catastrophe, I should say. And that was just a provocation, because it just sort of contains every crisis imaginable, like global fascism, like AI, climate, biomedical, all of those things - and it just was a sort of helpful bucket for, like, both the idea of like the clock that we feel like we're living under.

And we just did a bunch of fragments and scraps but the thing that really held us was that we kept talking about the way various crises in the past were presented to us when we went to visit museums or something, and we all had this like memory of, kind of this sort of shared memory of, like, when you go to a museum about Tudor times and they talk about the Great Fire of London, or the spread of the bubonic plague. And we just thought, what would our time look like from a similar distance forward? How would our lives and the decisions that we're making sort of be judged if they were being curated and talked about from that distance of time? And we just, we kept having this thing where we said, ‘from the futur,e our pandemic that we just had would technically be called, like, the Elizabethan pandemic’. And that just kind of gave us a bit of, like, a weird feeling, that ‘will someone talk about us the way we talk about them?’. 

So that led to this time gap, and we thought we didn't want to make a show about the end of the world because that felt too depressing. We wanted to make a show about humans sort of clinging on, but we realized that maybe we might be in the midst of things happening that would change the sort of way that people live. There was this thing I read, I mean you know that there's some some back and forth about like long-termist moral philosophy, but one of the things I read, I think in the one of those books by one of those long-termists, was that we're ‘living in the hinge of history’ - that, like, never has there been more opportunity to, sort of, change direction or, like, touch the things beneath us: and what's that responsibility like? And that's sort of, out of those things the piece sort of emerged. 

Emma:
And how did it lead to a musical?

Adam:
Well, for me, music is like, I always think, you know, not to talk too much about form, but for me, music is everything. Like it's, I always say it's breakups and breakups and first dates and birthdays and funerals. Like, it's those extreme points in our lives. It's a time machine. It's like a checkpoint to, like, all of those various things that happen in our lives. And for me, music is… music is the thing that kind of tracks our humanity through time and space. And it's stackable. It's layerable. Like, we hear a song and we remember the hundred different moments where that song accompanied the moments of our lives.

So for me, music, the theatre, has always been a kind of time machine and a kind of way of experiencing, like, emotion and philosophy and humanity through those things. So it seemed obvious to me that if we were going to make a show about, like, time and memory and community, that music would, would be there. And I just sort of say, one other thing is, I don't think I've said it much publicly, but we were making the show in - most of the ending of the show was in spring of this year - and it was around the time of Passover. And I'm Jewish and Passover is like a retelling thousands of years later of a human survival story, of like a lineage that survived. And a lot of it's about saying thanks to those who came before us, they suffered, they made mistakes, but we're here because of them. And that was kind of it.

Emma:
Alan, do you want to go next?

Alan:
Um, sure. Okay. Yeah. Uh, so the question being to do with picking this subject matter or wanting to engage with the subject matter and to a degree the form as well and-

Emma:
And through what mode you’re working.

Alan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a different way in terms of finding the form first and then seeing what kind of felt appropriate to it. For a little bit of context, Container, the show we did in April, [was] five people behind music stands and microphones, speaking, singing, playing instruments, a sort of layering text and this kind of collage of sound over each other that creates a second experiential experience.  Beginning with that form, and then seeing what it lent itself to, and there were certain obsessions that started to kind of root out, but what felt possible with that form was the ability to talk about interconnected systems, and things that felt quite complicated. And that feels like something that does feel somewhat contemporary, to do with engaging with, in terms of the interconnectedness of climate change with migrant displacement, with scarcity of food, with microbial resistance and all these things are wedded - and actually you can't really necessarily deal with one without speaking to the rest, which is quite a hard thing as a kind of dramatic challenge. That was something that was quite exciting from a sort of artistic point of view.

I felt like how much can we, I didn't mean to say this, but how much can we ‘contain’ within this form? Yeah, you know there's a [...] form that does something here, that lends itself to something, but how much can we pack into this and how much can we, kind of, access, seemed to be part of our method. 

Sarah:
I like the idea of polychoral response to a polycrisis, something quite beautiful about that. So this is [my] book, I always bring it, it's got a beautiful cover I had nothing to do with, so I'm going to show off about it. It's called Designing Hope. 

So I think about the future for a living, and my answer is much more straightforward, because I am not an artist. So I wrote the book about the futures that we are making or imagining at the moment, because I just saw people constantly saying that we're not thinking about the future anymore, we're not excited about the future anymore. We feel like we don't have a future anymore. And I know from working in the field I do, which is futures research, which is a bizarre field that no one would think exists. But we do have futures that we're making, cohesive visions of the future, but they necessarily look very different or continuations or tweaks of past futures that we developed. And so I just thought I'll write a book that shows them to people and explains them to people and gets them to have opinions on them. And if they're not good enough, or if you see issues or if you want a different future, then there are exercises and there are tips and explanations of kind of saying, ‘well, here's how to do it, here's how to think about the future, here's why it's a good idea to, anyone can do it, everyone can do it. And now go off and design some futures.’

Because I think we need more. And I think all of these interlinked emotions that are present in your piece are very relevant, because the future has become more emotionally complicated to think about. But that doesn't mean that we can just stop doing it. 

Jonathan:
Yeah, thanks, Sarah. Yeah, so I've been writing about hope since about 2018, but in terms of writing about the crisis, it was like the first Saturday of lockdown in 2020. So I can date it quite specifically, that's when I started writing about crisis. So, in the position of being lucky enough to work from home, I was working very intensely Monday to Friday. And then the first Saturday of lockdown, ‘what am I going to do with this day?’ So I sort of cleaned my flat for a few hours and put on a CD and ‘pressed play’ to quote the last line of the show [Precipice]. 

And that [CD] was Angels in America, which is a play that I think most people will know, many people will know, which (you can see where I'm going with this if you do know), that play is a six hour play about living through a virus, living through a public health emergency. And at that point at the start of the pandemic, it was like, that was the art that I wanted. The Angels in America story from a previous public health crisis, of how a group of people worked out how to survive it, how to care for each other.

And so starting to write about that in a sense, it was a very personal experience. Like, why was it that that I needed? Why was it that I wanted? And how did it help me? And so I wrote an article which ultimately was called ‘Holding Together Loss and Hope, Reflections on the Need for Art in Times of Crisis’. And I unpack Angels in America and my response to it. And also another, so Angels in America by Tony Kushner, a more recent piece by Tony Kushner with the composer Jeanine Tesori, Caroline or Change. Maybe some of you have seen that as well. They're both pieces which, in my experience of them, they don't shy away from suffering or from loss. They really hold it in combination with the possibility of hope. And so I began writing about crisis in that way and thinking about what can art, specifically, do with those kinds of experiences, in times of crisis. And I think we're gonna talk more about hope in a minute. 

So I can sort of describe some of the other angles that I've taken, but that was the kind of starting point. And then the book project that you mentioned is an expansion of that and a more systematic answering of that question. What can art do for us in times of crisis, in holding together loss and hope? 

Emma:
Do you have a sense yet of what that format is going to be from the book, structurally, is it in case studies? 

Jonathan:
Yeah, it's case studies and it speaks to the polycrisis that we've been referring to because I sort of unpack some of these different dimensions of the polycrisis and then think about what different cultural forms might be helpful in speaking to the different dimensions of the polycrisis. So for example the part of the book where I look at examples from theatre and particularly thinking about community and crises of community.

Some writers have referred to covid as a ‘meta crisis’ - in other words a crisis that made visible all of those other crises, like Adam was saying about the the doomsday clock, and one of those crises is a crisis of community. So I look at theatre in relation to that, but also crisis of the states, crisis of trust in public institutions - and there I'm looking at television, and so for example ‘Mr Bates versus the Post Office’ as another example, I'm sure many of you will be familiar with. And thinking about what made it possible for that piece of TV and public service broadcasting, which we might think has had its day in the age of our proliferating digital media, what made it possible for that TV program to cut through, to have a public debate which resulted in legislation in parliament which ultimately had an effect in the world? There was something about the form that made it useful for addressing a crisis in public trust in an institution. So that's the form sort of linking particular dimensions of the polycrisis, to particular cultural forms that might have particular capacities to speak to them. 

Emma:
It’s a really nice segue to hope, for my second question. I've been really interested, one of the kind of driving, I think, like, thematic questions and provocations that the Precipice process specifically has kind of posed both within your team, but also I guess even sets of how this work is reverberating through the building and the theatre is around this thought of hope, but I guess we all have a series of choices to make, whether that's in our critical writing, our storytelling, our artistry. About, I guess, whether we're just reflecting back this sense of kind of crisis and dystopia, versus trying to position ourselves towards somewhere more future-oriented and potentially hopeful.

And I'm sort of curious about how those conversations have shown up, either explicitly in your own kind of thinking and work in artistic processes especially. Like, is that a concept that came up in your discussions? Is that something that you spend much time thinking about? And if so, what does that manifest as? Like, what does that look like to you envisioning? Really difficult.

Adam:
Um, just to say, like, we were making this show, six of us were writing this show and we were, we had a kind of rule, which was no homework. (Laughs). What that means is no being on your own, like no being on your own at home, like we write in the room together and whether that was planning together and then going off to our separate corners where we could all see each other while we were like, you know, body doubling, they call it - like, so that you're like working concurrently together apart, but also a lot of fair amount of just sitting and playing songs at the same time as each other and scribbling lyrics and then trying them out with someone on the piano. And so even though we were doing something that was about confronting challenging topics, we were sort of doing it together. And that kind of lent a kind of persistent optimism to all of it, because it was like, it's just easier to kind of, it's easier to think about difficult things when you don't have to do it on your own.

And actually some of it can be kind of reflected and processed and fed back to you and placed in the room in front of you in a different way. I mean, Jonathan came into rehearsals, well, not even rehearsals, you came into the writing process, like I think it was week one, we were in the studio and you said something, hope I'm not mis-saying it. You said, ‘hope and optimism aren't the same.’ Or that's the version of it that I took, we think of them as synonyms, they're not. Hope is the ability to see a future. Again, am I getting that right? 

Jonathan:
You go for it. (laughs)

Adam:
Yeah, okay, yeah. The version of it that kind of lived in my brain after that scene was just that like, hope is the ability to see a future, rather than kind of like not acknowledging anything beyond the present. And being stuck in the present is what I sense this crisis feels like. It's the inability to kind of imagine tomorrow because you're so locked in. And so actually, yes, the future might come with difficulties, everyone's futures might come with difficulties, but actually better together, better to, like, make some plans and to understand the sort of person you want to be in face of those, the sort of world you want to build, the sort of communities that you want to create.

And yeah, I see the show is quite, I see the show that you've just seen as quite an optimistic one. It surely is confronting, some of the topics within it, and being forced to look at ourselves and through 400 years in the future and go, yeah, we are just sort of, I am ordering Deliveroo as the world burns, like I am. But in the end, I think there was something about survival and clinging on and knowing that humans will continue to kind of be here, I think. And that actually the one thing that remains the same is we all get in rooms and we'll tell each other stories. It's been the same for thousands of years. And I think it will be the same for thousands of years. And I think trying to return to that. And the end of the show when it's like, we get to go again, we get to press play and go again, and maybe the people 400 years in the future, their story will get told.  And the stories after that, kind of endlessly kind of telling each other that that feels kind of important to me. And again, I was in rehearsals and I try and pick up books in rehearsals to read that are not a, sort of like, divert me from what I'm doing, but maybe help. And that's when I picked up the book. 

Sarah:
I don’t know how you thought this would be a diversion (laughs). 

Adam:
It's like when all you're thinking about is your own thoughts it’s nice to read someone else's, and sometimes it should [...] But it was where I first met the word ‘protopia’. And again to paraphrase your work, my read of it was that, did you know ‘utopia’ means ‘no place’? So, it's perfection, but it's impossible. We know what ‘dystopia’ means, and in your book [Sarah] the concept of ‘protopia’ is the first time I've seen it - ‘protopia’ just means a little better each day. A little better, and that feels manageable and, like, the question of what is manageable in the face of the impossible is also I think something that I was hoping was in the piece that we were making. What is it useful to do?

What is useful? And you can't do everything In the face of crisis, but you can imagine tomorrow and you can do a little and maybe you can make someone in the room you're in smile, or maybe you can make someone else's day slightly better, and that will feel relevant.

Sarah:
Did you feel the responsibility over the emotional tone, particularly for the audience? 

Adam:
I think people expect musicals to settle them and cheer them up, and that's never been my experience of what I want theatre to do. I want theatre to provoke, and I want it to rewire my brain, and I kind of want it to make me cry and feel much more interested in that than anything else, because that's how catharsis comes in, that's how regrowth over that. So no, maybe I should have thought a little more about how the audience would process this, but I can't think like that. (laughs)

Alan:
Yeah, I feel like I should jump in and say that I'm pretty hopeless (laughs) and that my work, I think, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came out of it and thought this was quite a hopeless piece of work, but I think that there's something, you're talking about community, you're talking about sharing stories, you're talking about the act of actually going through something together, the communality of theatrical creative endeavors. There was something about a container that was, for me, the most hopeful thing for me, very personal, is the act of actually just recording or acknowledging something hard, that that can feel really lonely, that if there are things in your life that you are concerned or sad about, it's nice to be in a room of strangers where everyone's talking about that thing, that can feel quite... I don't really know if I know what hope is, so I'm hoping to learn, especially from people who are writing about it, but I think that there's something nourishing about... I'm kind of pro-despair. I'm gonna say that. I think that's really important, and I think it's an emotion that's not really given much acceptance compared to other emotions. 

I think there's an interesting thing that you raise here about expectations, expectations within music, musicals, expectations within theatre, expectations within this form compared to fine art, compared to music, where for some reason theatre is supposed to give us more answers, give us more messages, give us more solutions, which is something I somewhat push back against and I think sometimes, as long as it's not done in a kind of... what's the word when something is just sort of malicious or something, I think despair can actually be very healing and, when you're talking about catharsis, yeah. 

Sarah:
Well I can, because I wrote a book with hope in the title, not only because it wasn't necessarily my plan, but people kind of sometimes expect me to solve all their problems, and so just expect me to kind of defend hope, which I don't necessarily love to do, because I do think all of the other emotions are also valid or worthwhile and we shouldn't push them out for the sake of hope. But I have a collection of quotes about hope that lay out what it is.

One of them is the Seamus Heaney one which compares hope and optimism. So he says “hope is not optimism which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there's good worth working for”. That's the really solid one for me, I think there's always good worth working for. Coming from a design background, designers have the urge to solve problems, find problems and solve them, and we also, you would not bother to design something if you thought it was going to make the world worse. So inherently I think design is an act of hope, and see I do have a bit of a bias towards hope I guess, although people I've worked with said I'm quite cynical, so  maybe on this panel I'm the most hopeful (laughs).

But I am very interested in despair, I think it's a really interesting emotion, and I read a lot about it and I read a lot about collapse and collapseology, because that is some of the most interesting thinking happening in environmental circles at the moment is actually thinking about collapse, which obviously you can write in detail. But hope is, I think it's always just very human, we're just very adaptable, we do go through crisis and we do survive, and we do kind of naively think that we're going to survive, because we always have before, like you [Precipice] said in your absolutely amazing banger of a song. So I think it's there, and I think it's quite difficult to get rid of these things. 

Jonathan:
Yeah, in some ways I'm pro-hope, and in some ways I think hope is sort of politically neutral, so I'll try and explain what I mean by that. Yeah, I think we need hope to get out of bed in the morning and to pursue any of life's projects, and if we frame this in relation to what Adam mentioned about the distinction between hope and optimism: Terry Eagleton, the literary critic, cultural critic, has written a really great book on the distinction between hope and optimism, and he explains that optimism is a form of fatalism. It's known how things are going to turn out, and Eagleton and many other writers indicate that hope is always a condition of uncertainty, and that's part of what makes it ambivalent at times as well. It can be difficult to hope, as well as enjoyable, and so in the research literature there are different suggestions made for what the opposite of hope is. The opposite of hope might be despair, it might also be optimism, because optimism might sort of rob you of the energy to act, so the opposites of hope might be despair, pessimism, optimism, cynicism. There's a paper that suggests this range of opposites, but it's really interesting to hear Alan then sort of say that you're interested in despair, because in the middle of that book Terry Eagleton quotes from King Lear, a line in King Lear, I forget which character says it, but they say “if you can say this is the worst, it's not the worst”, so in other words, if you're making art in your case about terrible experiences, there's value to that, and I would argue there's a kind of a hope in it, because you felt it was worth expressing it and communicating it, and that in itself seems to me an act of hope. There's uncertainty as to its value perhaps, what difference it will make, but there's hope in it, and one of the writers on hope that I come back to a lot is Rebecca Solnit, who has been quite well known for her work on this in a sort of political context and around activism, where she sort of picks up that idea of uncertainty and says you know “hope is the belief that our actions matter precisely when we don't know when they're going to make a difference”. 

So yeah I think hope is fundamentally important to humans, but part of my work has also been about the politics of hope, in the sense that what we hope for is highly contested, and in a sense it's the stuff of politics, so I've been interested in how hopeful narratives play out in public discourse and how people compete over what we should collectively hope for as well. I really look forward to reading Sarah's book and I'm sure you're kind of conscious of those kind of struggles over what the future should look like as well, so as I say hope I take as sort of fundamentally valuable and necessary, but also sort of politically neutral, it's there to be shaped and pulled in different directions.

Emma:
The last question that I wanted to ask is something that's already been raised, I think, across a couple of your answers, around the sense of interconnectedness - both in terms of the crisis we're facing, but also, I guess, the threads of community and how we exist in community, how we might operate the community towards a future. For those who are newer to New Diorama, it's quite unique in its mission as a theatre in that what we do is we support solely companies and ensembles, so we're constantly thinking about issues of a collective and the possibilities of working in collective ways to create a theatre in this instance, but also to just exist in the world.

And I think someone picked up on this question for Adam about at what point, I guess, are you thinking about audience and thinking about this point, and which choices you've made about framing a piece of writing because of storytelling, a piece of performance, and how it's then going to encounter this relationship, but how much, I guess, consciously you're holding much responsibility for that, or intention with that - or whether that's kind of side, and if it can just happen and whatever comes out of that will happen. 

I'm curious specifically about whether within all of your work there are kind of specific publications, feelings you were trying to generate or more transmit, or calls to action, I guess, that in your book there's kind of more explicit like practical sense of the set of exercises and calls to action which we could actually be engaging with. And I'm someone who doesn't believe that theatre needs to offer any form of call to action, but I'm just curious what you mean to say, to how you were thinking about when this work enters into your community.

Adam:
Um, because the group, because the show was made by a company, and it was really, you know, sometimes people will ask, you know, “Oh, but you wrote that song, right?” Or “you wrote that speech”. I'm like, it's impossible sometimes to describe, but no, someone had an idea and that led to a chord progression. Maybe, maybe, and then maybe that led to, like, a synth ostinato, and maybe that led to like a lyric on top of - maybe someone, once they had the A section of that lyric, could write a bit of scene that they thought might follow it. Like it, it was emergent. And there were days when we were all in a Google doc together and we had a rule, which was do whatever you want, delete anything, rewrite anything. You know, what you might not know about Google docs is you can go back to any second in time and restore them. So we always knew that if we need to go back in time to an hour ago or two, as I get to grab back that thing, we could, but we didn't.

But we just sort of, but like watching it kind of move, it was like an active brains connected together, which is to say this show does not happen if any circumstance is different and the show exists entirely in the middle of us all. Now I'm the person that put the provocation in the room. I put it in the room for a reason, because I'm really interested in, I'm really interested in why we're here and what we're here to do and, and coping with the fact that we aren't here forever and mortality and crisis and all of those things. So maybe I, like, loaded the dice, but not a single thing happened- we all would making the show for each other. I guess in the back of my mind, I thought, well, if the six of us all from diverse backgrounds and diverse practices and different worldviews all found something in it, that maybe that would radiate outwards. 

And that has been interesting because people have really loved this and people have found it really challenging or hated it. I'll just say, and that's been interesting because as you say, I, I questioned, I wondered, maybe we should have thought more about, you know, lots of conversation was about like, does it need to be linear? And can we, like, say something and then explain it later? Or, you know, we wanted it to feel slightly disjointed and out of order because crisis is all of those things and, and the such state of, so a lot of it was designed with the thought that people would come to it and have to do a little bit of work. And like I said, some people have loved that, some people have not loved that, but I suppose what I love about NDT and what I've loved about this process is we made it together and there's no other way that this could have ever been made. And there was, there is value in that, I think. And there's beauty in that. And there's something, it was here and it happened. 

And the piece is about things being here and happening and maybe disappearing, but in some, one of my, one of - Lia who runs the company with me - one of our favorite lines in the show is, like, right at the end when Emily, who is like melting down and probably on the verge of having to enter this catastrophe totally unprepared. She says, “what do you do if you know that you won't be remembered?” And there's no reason she should be. She's a random person in the midst of a world of billions of people, but the irony of the show is she's the one who's remembered by accident, by design. There are people in a room 400 years later reading her book and thinking about her. And I don't know that, that gives me hope that it, yeah, I don't know if I answered your question. I said something. 

Alan:
Um, so there's something- maybe is there something in there, a question about the artist, sort of, originally was there a question about obligation as well, or something about how how this relationship with hope? Maybe I'll kind of frame this as a question to you as well, but it's not a natural inclination of mine as a maker of work to think ‘let's get some people in the room and turn the lights off and give them a really horrible time’ (laughs) like, which some people might have thought of Container, um, it's just something that in places is it's funny and has levit,y and other places engages with things that are really terrifying about the world that we live in. And that was something that I had to really wrestle with, because that's just not in my nature, that's not something that I have an inclination towards. 

I wonder, there there are times in precipice where we're being confronted with scary concepts, so I wonder how you, how you feel about, how the group feels about that, what your relationship is-

Adam:
I think there was no desire to upset or antagonize an audience, but I think what we all realized is we shared our feelings with one another and the things that we were scared about, the things that made us anxious, and it felt sharing those things is an unqualified good, knowing that you're not alone in those fears or in those anxieties, in that guilt - I think maybe even that guilt of being an artist, without any kind of demonstrable knowledge that there's efficacy in making art, in terms of its push on the existence of anything useful. 

Emma:
Until Jonathan tells us otherwise. Yeah. (laughs)

Adam:
I studied to be, the reason I'm interested in science and theatre is because I studied to be a doctor and that was a demonstrable thing that I could have helped people, and instead I'm making theatre. So my relationship with what it is to kind of be efficacious or helpful is complicated, but I'm sort of, I'm always trying to connect with other people and in my pain or my despair or my sadness or my joy, and that in itself normally leads to some good things happening day by day. 

Sarah:
So in thinking about what you asked about the collective, I suppose it's a slightly different context for me than it is for you, but I will say that one of the big themes that runs through a lot of these futures, not that they're all distinct futures, they interrelate, as all the futures will. One of the big kind of macro themes is moving towards being a collective again for a society that has become very individualist, becoming much more community oriented.

And as well, I think within the themes of collapse, that is a big point of discussion at the moment that you don't really get through collapse by yourself. You have to work with other people. And if that's what we're confronted with, that's what we're going to have to do and it's going to be difficult. And you [Adam] talked about rooms of people telling stories to each other - I think the future is always going to be people sitting down and talking to each other and trying to get along. And working their way through something as well. So that would be my contribution to the collective idea, I suppose. 

Jonathan:
Yeah, thanks. Um, two parts of the question, one around sort of the community within the work or the communities to which we speak in, and then also the kind of the feelings or the call to action that we're making to them.

I mean, maybe the first thing to say is that alongside hope, my other key word has been care. And actually the first piece that I wrote about hope came out of a piece of research with my colleague, Nick Wilson we were working with A New Direction, the organization that supports children and young people in the arts. 

Emma:
I just worked with them

Jonathan:
Hey, great, they're fantastic. They support children and young people in London with their cultural opportunities. And we were studying the cultural opportunities of children and young people in Harrow in Northwest London and thinking about what their cultural opportunities look like, what enables cultural opportunity, what do we even mean by cultural opportunity. And one of the organizations we worked with was supporting children and young people in such a way that they could imagine their futures in different ways to feel that they had agency with regards to their future.

So that became a piece of writing on my part, where I thought through the relationship between acts of care, paying attention to someone's needs and taking responsibility for meeting those needs with skill, and hope, and what the role of culture is in that mix. So without sort of going through how that's then developed, just to say, I think care and hope are closely related, because actually it's acts of care, being able to trust in your environment, but whatever scale that allows you to feel that your actions matter. So maybe we saw sort of dynamics of that in the show, the sort of attempts to care for one another, the difficulties of caring for each other and community, the kind of contestation of what that should look like. But at stake in that is perhaps the possibility of hope.

So that's sort of part of my answer to the question that within the work that I do, I'm interested in that relationship precisely, between hope and care. And then in a sense, what I'm hoping to provoke or ask people to feel, in a sense, with any work of art or piece of writing, maybe at some level, we're asking people to pay attention to something that we think is important. So I think care is important. I think hope is important. So at one level, that's why I'm doing it. Look at this, it matters. But in addition to that, clearly I want to be saying specific things about those particular topics. So for example, in one of the communities that I'm involved with is the community of students that I teach within the university. And my colleagues and I have introduced the idea of care, ethics of care into our teaching. So we have a master's degree in arts and cultural management, and we ask the students to think about care, ethics of care, and one of their assignments this semester is to, in a group, choose an organization that they think manages culture with care and unpack what that means, and also reflect on how they care for each other in the process of doing that research.

And there is now a growing body of literature, body of research on care in relation to the creative industries, as it's sometimes referred to, as well as, I'm sure you're aware, in terms of the politics of care, more broadly, one of my colleagues, Jamie Haken, is part of the Care Collective. We've written a care manifesto. So anyway, without going on and on, part of the community that I'm looking to sort of bring this work to is students, and obviously there are particular challenges to being a young person within our current sort of economy and broader society. So that's one of the communities that I'm interested in. And in the spirit of acting locally, thinking globally, that's my most immediate locality. 

Emma:
I have time for one or two questions from the audience, if anyone does have anything they'd like to ask. Yeah, shout it out in the back there and we'll come here. 

Audience Member:
One question, sort of a provocation or agreement, on what you’ve been saying I think, especially Jonathan, is that during the pandemic virus, being quite connected to musicals and theatre about HIV and AIDS, and that really opened up to me as a queer person that part of history. I don’t know how I came across those texts but I did. And something big that I came across was ‘no future theory’ where people during that time, there was no support, no healthcare, no policy, the future became less important, basically. The future has never been as important to queer people, I guess, due to not reproducing.  And I really identified with that for a really long time. And then I guess, coming out of the pandemic, I realised it’s not working for me anymore the idea that there is “no future” and that everything is bad. So how do you imagine a future, how do you bring that into the present? The thing I love about theatre is that it’s based in the present moment and brings attention to what is happening right now. So I guess I was taken by that idea of how we acknowledge that present, but also find a way towards the future.

Emma:
In the front, here

Audience Member:
I was thinking hope, where does it come from psychologically? And my thought is that it comes from absence. That if you are satisfied and have a full belly, and have company and are financially secure then there’s no need to feel hopeful, you’re living it, you’re doing it, you’re having it… And actually this absence of a future can be incredibly fecund as a type of breakthrough, either as the orientation and imagination to believe in us, actually, and people, our connectivity, ourselves and to imagine. And I hadn't really thought, until this evening, that hope comes out of absence.

Adam:
Can I speak to that briefly? So when I was a kid or a young person, I always used to find myself really drawn to sad works of art and sad music. And I remember my mum would say, ‘oh, you will be happier if you surround yourselves with happy things, happy art, happy songs’. And I remember it was a sort of big point of contention all the way through my adolescence and teenage years, which is that there's no questions in happiness. It was the way I always used to phrase it, which is, happiness is a state. Sadness is a process. These were the things I used to say to my mum. I always say, fun, teenager. (laughs)

But I really feel like I suddenly got a blast from my past because it really slots in. So I think what you're saying, which is maybe, that I've always thought that there's something to aspire to. None of us are complete. None of us know the edges of our experience. And we're all trying to just learn more information about why we're here, what any of that means. And for me, that comes within what I at that point was calling sad forms of art, which are actually art about crisis, art about uncertainty and art about loss. 

So, yeah, just to say, I've always found more catharsis and information, I suppose, in art that is fundamentally not just about happiness, because I think happiness is a kind of pat on the back and a kind of existence. When you say hope is about absence, I feel like that really slots into something, which is we're all looking for answers. I don't speak for everyone. I'm looking for answers about why I'm here or why we are here, why the people I love are here or why we suffer and any of these things. I'm not religious, but because that feels like it's already answered in some way. So for me, theatre has always been my kind of faith. It's like my way of philosophy, my way of looking for the things that I find absent, in the hope that I might find them somewhere, even if I'm not fully literate or conscious of what those answers end up being.

Emma:
And on that note, thank you all so much for joining this conversation. Thank you all for being here and for joining us.

Precipice is on for one more week as the end of our 2025 year of programming. So please spread the word, send people our way to join us and to see out this beautiful show. And if you enjoyed the show, the space, the conversation, please join us again in 2026, come back to the theatre, come use the space, come join our community.

Thank you all - give them a big round of applause.