We Were Promised Honey! review – glimpses into uncertain futures

There is a joke in Waiting for Godot that comes after a rare moment of action. “That passed the time,” says Vladimir. “It would have passed in any case,” retorts Estragon.

Writer/performer Sam Ward gives the audience the same alternatives in We Were Promised Honey. Whether we let the show run its course or not, at the end of the allotted time we will be an hour closer to our fate. Preferring to pass the time in Ward’s company, we choose to listen to what he has to say about our future. He tells us it is going to end badly, but we decide it can’t hurt to hear about it.

In an era threatened by global heating, economic contraction and war, it can be hard to contemplate the future, but the destiny Ward has in mind for us is on an even more existential level. Five billion years from now, he reminds us, the sun will be nearing its end. Even if we manage not to make the planet uninhabitable ourselves, it will become so regardless. How, then, should we make the most of things in the meantime?

In this stripped-back production by YESYESNONO, he proposes possible futures for selected members of the audience, slickly incorporating their traits – ability to drive, favourite drink – into the story. Gradually pushing us deeper in time, he imagines mega-corporations ruling a scorched planet, a sci-fi landscape of impossibly high office blocks and subterranean shopping malls selling mini fridge-freezers.

Over centuries, chance encounters at theatres on the Edinburgh fringe morph into intimate friendships which, in turn, lead to aeons of estrangement. We are, he suggests, like Richard Russell, the baggage handler who, in 2018, went joyriding in a twin-turboprop Bombardier Q400 without knowing how to fly. Asked how he intended to return, he said he hadn’t planned on landing it. In the meantime, he enjoyed the ride, his fate no less inevitable than anyone else’s.

For a show with such life-and-death themes, its tone is whimsical. Ward creates a sense of joyful collective enterprise, his lyrical script gently prodding us to take ownership of the choices we make and, perhaps, accept some responsibility for our future.

• At Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
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