Living for today

Tomorrow is not Promised at the Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse on Thursday, March 21

TIAN Glasgow’s enigmatic hourlong play Tomorrow is not Promised for Manchester-based New Slang Productions, a black theatre company, takes place after a devastating earthquake in an unnamed location.

A young woman (Mariah Baillie) with a rootless accent that might be American, Scottish or Irish, is wandering around with her only possessions; a mobile phone with a diminishing amount of battery and her front door. She is a survivor and uses the door to create nighttime shelters. She meets another young woman, Suzanne (Chisara Agor), who lives in a house where only three walls are still standing. Suzanne appears to be an otherworldly person who could be a figment of the other woman’s imagination. There’s something ethereal about her. She hums a ghostly tune. She plays a banjo and flute suggesting a place like Prospero’s island in The Tempest, full of music and magical creatures.

Their conversations are poetic, nonrealistic. They punctuate their lines with “she said”. They physically move to different sides of the front door like heads and tails on a coin. The play’s title suggests a Biblical phrase about living for today as the future is unknowable and unreliable. The women discuss their luck in being alive and having nothing to lose when all is lost. There’s a pretence between them about being charity workers in a post-disaster scenario providing communities with non-specific benefits. The nameless woman wants to phone her sister, the conversation probably imaginary, her sister possibly lost in the quake. Grief comes in many forms and the interior motives of the woman’s actions offer multiple interpretations for the audience.

The dialogue about flying, often found in stories and songs of African slaves to the Americas suggests a passing on to the next world and an escaping the horrors of the present, post-earthquake realities.

It’s an unsettling play because of its deliberate lack of definition, its poetic realism and theatre of the absurd elements, and the uncertain relationship between the two women wearing their masks of contentment in a bleak, inhospitable landscape. Both performers have a charm and stage presence that radiates strongly to the audience.

The play’s title suggests a Biblical phrase about living for today as the future is unknowable and unreliable