Alan Harris, ubiquitous as a writer of quirky, engaging dramas across the breadth of South Welsh theatre production, and Martin Constantine, ubiquitous as a director of youth and college opera in Cardiff, have created a trans-media production which investigates our vision of a shared future with a significant other. It is always funny and shapes up into a neat dramatic argument as its novel structure begins to settle into a pattern in your mind.

Two people working as document correctors perceive an impeccably-planned future together, with a romantic vision of how they, as an aged couple, might achieve an unprecedented bliss, based on pre-ordained experience. Each future day is plotted and numbered, and filed away awaiting realisation. As a thought-experiment, it is executed with sufficient wit to deflect our rational processes and allow us to believe, for once, that shit doesn’t happen.

The mode of communication is deliciously unrealistic. Jenny, played by opera graduate Jennifer Adams normally sings, and Matthew Bulgo, playing, presumably, Matt, normally acts, but occasionally accompanies himself on the ukelele. There is a measure of video projection, (servicable, but hardly integral), energetic dance, (exciting, articulate and inviting more integration into the piece) and recorded sound, (modest, permitting clear articulation of the lyrics, but not quite characterising the piece as a whole). Word setting is mysteriously better for the operatic moments than in the ukelele songs.

The piece would fail without the clear diction Miss Adams displays, and they both handle the pace and the comedy with confidence. Their use of pullovers as a metaphor for something they’d otherwise get arrested for, is perfect. While they start by planning also the annoyances and disappointments in their future life, they begin to develop more risky proposals, including the preposterously tragic demise of their dog. Their model needs revision and a remedy is mooted.

I relish each new Alan Harris play. With the excellent ‘Cardboard Dad’, he had a chance to refine the stylish conceits of the play into a seamless whole. With ‘The Future for Beginners’, I begin to wonder whether his brilliant surreal urges might fare better without being surrounded by the scaffolding of plausibility.

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