Review: GHOSTS OF THE NEAR FUTURE, Barbican Centre

Ghosts of the Near Future is a show about the end of the world, about death, about Las Vegas, about pet cats, and about disappearing. It’s a show about magic acts, and it is one in itself. 

Performance duo emma + pj turn the Barbican’s Pit Theatre into a post-nuclear Nevada desert, a faded postcard of America. There are lone diner tables and chairs, with bottles of condiments, as well as a huge neon cactus and rusting metal barrels - the stage is scattered with iconography of the American dream. On this stage, the pair tell the story of a magician travelling to Las Vegas, before the show expands into an abstract exploration of both global apocalypse, and the everyday tragedies we experience as little apocalypses of their own. 

This is a vast, expansive show - it’s difficult to describe what it’s about because it’s never just one thing. Instead, it’s led by a feeling, an aesthetic, an experience. This nuclear wasteland creates a blank canvas for storytelling, with different memories and images coming together to form a kind of jigsaw. The concept, born from the title alone, is strong enough to make the show feel cohesive.

Visually, Ghosts of the Near Future is stunning. Georgie Hook’s scenography and Alex Fernandes’ lighting design come together to immerse us into the world of the show, in a swathe of orange glowing lights and paths of sand. On top of this, Patch Middleton's sound design rumbles across the theatre, creatively breathing life into a nuclear apocalypse and sending tremors through the floor. 

One of the cleverest aspects of the production is the use of projections and "live micro-cinema". Performers Emma Clark and PJ Stanley integrate live camera work onstage, using small-scale everyday objects to recreate landscapes and disasters. A particularly memorable sequence features tiny human figures swirling in water, conjuring up images of nuclear destruction. The camera work and projection never feels gimmicky or irrelevant to the rest of the show; instead, it invites us further into this uncanny realm. 

Clark and Stanley have a talent for writing speech that uses simple, conversational language to convey big, complicated ideas. Casual anecdotes about childhood pets evolve into questions about life and death, with seemingly random images coming together in unexpected ways to build emotional weight. There’s choreography and singing too, not just thrown into the mix but embedded into the Las Vegas element of the story. Ghosts of the Near Future walks the line between theatre and live performance art in a way that’s really exciting to see. There are perhaps a few sequences that can feel like loose threads, but nowhere near enough for it to have an adverse effect on the show overall. 

This is a show that’s been on quite a journey. The idea first came about during the pandemic, inspired by feelings of isolation and a world that feels like it’s ending again every day. Two years and a successful Edinburgh Fringe run later, we are beyond the Covid era, but ideas of apocalypse still feel bitingly current. Ghosts of the Near Future feels like it slots into a wide range of other recent cultural works, from Phoebe Bridgers’ "I Know the End" to Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The Pit, deep in the belly of the Barbican Centre, feels like a very apt venue for its latest showing.

It would feel remiss to talk about Ghosts of the Near Future without mentioning the physical play script.  I first came across the script at Fringe in 2022, and despite not managing to catch the show, it's been stuck in the back of my mind ever since. This should by all means be a difficult show to translate into written form, but the book goes above and beyond to get the experience across, with creative typesetting, images and illustrations, show photographs, and hand-written postcards. It’s almost a piece of art or theatre in itself, and really interesting to consider when thinking about how we turn less straightforward pieces of theatre into publishable texts.

The Barbican website describes Ghosts of the Near Future as an "apocalyptic fever dream", which sums up the experience of this show to a tee. Both spectacular and poignant, dread-inducing and strangely calming, it’s the kind of piece that has you smiling in awe throughout, even when the subject matter is dark and gloomy. It’s a piece that speaks to the present, but it’s also just a deeply impressive feat of theatre-making.

Ghosts of the Near Future runs at the Barbican Centre (The Pit) until 28 October, before continuing on its UK tour. 

Image Credit: Jemima Yong, Mihaela Bodlovic

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