Tomorrow’s Child
It should be a day of celebration for Polly Ann and Peter Horn, the birth of their first child, mediated by all the advanced medical techniques of the distant year 1988, yet against the odds there is a complication, their son – for that is how Doctor Wolcott chooses to regard him – appearing as a small blue tentacled pyramid due to a dimensional fluctuation within the birthing mech.
Based on the 1948 short story by Ray Bradbury originally published as The Shape of Things and later collected in I Sing the Body Electric! as Tomorrow’s Child, it has been adapted by Matthew Waddell, Eric Rose and David van Belle as a sensory experience, the audience led blindfolded in groups beyond the black curtain and seated in a chamber filled with the joyful cries of playing children which give way to the sound of a circling helicopter as it approaches the hospital.
The three-dimensional soundscape shifting from the aural ambience of the future through soaring overlapping voices recalling Sidney Sager’s polyphonic arrangements for Children of the Stones and the more eccentric of Gyorgi Ligeti’s challenging pieces used in 2001: A Space Odyssey with occasional forays into lounge jazz as Peter enjoys a cocktail, the recorded cast are a touch flat in the delivery of their lines, presenting Bradbury’s prose as though this were a B-movie of the period rather than modernising the characters with depth and shade.
The overall effect both consuming and relaxing, the participants surrendering control to the guiding hands of the assistants, the shifting sound flooding the space to the exclusion of all other sensory input, Tomorrow’s Child is a fascinating piece of automated theatre, an experience rather than a performance which will not evolve or adapt through its run, but one which is daring, innovative and technically superb in its execution and beautiful in its final reveal as sight is dazzlingly restored.
Tomorrow’s Child runs at Assembly Checkpoint until Monday 28th August
