An earnest young playwright announces his experimental new work with a pretentious flourish, exhorting the lakeside shadows, or mists (depending on your translation), to let his audience see what’s to come in 200,000 years. There’s an immediate heckle: “In 200,000 years there won’t be anything.” He presses on: “Then let it show us that nothingness.”
They are almost throwaway lines in Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull, as they were in an entertaining recent production by the Corn Exchange. But, among several productions that decided to peer into the future and return bleak forecasts, at least this pessimism came with a lighter touch.
Otherwise, in theatre, on screen and seemingly in culture at large you could be forgiven for thinking that humanity had just been issued a battery of tests and that before we were given the prognosis we were gently asked to sit down.
Before The Seagull, which will always finish, tragically, with the same character's inability to conceive of the future, you could have caught Guerilla, a lament on a third World War, which it described in detailed surtitles and ominously imminent dates, accompanied by wordless scenes of obliviously distracted groups.
El Conde de Torrefiel’s stark picture could easily tip into the absurd, with insistent descriptions of new nuclear alliances, a fizzled-out Arab spring and European nations falling like dominoes towards the far right. But behind these dystopian reveries is something more recognisable, if no more comforting: a doomer mentality, philosophical pessimism that may gather in appeal during downbeat times.
Another show, Wishful Beginnings, from Norway's Verk Produksjoner, also set about imagining how the world was going to end, along scenarios roughly plausible and fantastical, on a stage that had been entirely walled up with plywood. Let them show us this nothingness.
They say escapism becomes the dominant mode of entertainment during times of stress. Comedies and cartoons eased the sting of the Great Depression, for instance. But live with upheaval long enough and soon darker ruminations find their dull expression: noir fiction and film noir in the postwar years, the existential despair of theatre of the absurd, the malaise of the 1970s, the fin-de-siecle cynicism of the 1990s, a steady catalogue of believing the worst. This year even the titles of our more celebrated records sound imprisoning: Blackstar, Hopelessness, You Want It Darker.
It's fascinating to see how grim a picture of humanity comes via Westworld, the latest iteration in HBO's must-see television, which tellingly switches the focus of the 1973 movie from the beleaguered humans in a theme park to the enslaved androids just beginning to realise the cruellest tendencies of their human "guests". These are the fantasies of "rich assholes" to "rape and pillage", which otherwise seems like the sort of behaviour you associate with Viking marauders or, more recently, Republican candidates for the US presidency.
This, the weary operators of Westworld sigh, is how humanity behaves when the leashes of law and decency are removed, in a playground for rampaging ids. For the robots consciousness is a curse. If you must exist at all it's better not to know.
Dystopian sci-fi tends to extrapolate from the present and magnify its concerns into startling projections of what is to come. It's easy, watching Westworld, to remember the bread-and-circus distractions of the Roman Empire, where civilisation satisfied its bloodlust in the Coliseum or to understand that the fantasy violence of contemporary video games hasn't swelled the population with sadistic killers.
It's harder to come away from Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, the new documentary on the pathological effects of the internet from the serial pessimist Werner Herzog, with anything like a rosy view.
The leashes of law and decency are certainly loosened through anonymity, he shows you, and you don’t have to agree with a bereaved family, taunted by emails with ghoulish images of their dead child, that the internet is “the antichrist” to recognise that it facilitates the worst in our nature.
But a readiness to believe the worst – in people, in nature, in the future – is also a very exploitable glitch in our own programming. The ideologies of hatred that have fuelled the kind of right-wing politics Guerilla is so worried about pander to such fears, just as the more xenophobic rabble-rousing behind Brexit or the stoked grievances that made Trumpism briefly credible encourages apocalyptic mindsets teeming with threats and conspiracies.
There’s a sort of reverse escapism at work in these dire distractions, in which, at best, art might be used to work off antagonisms, to expel murky fantasies in permitted spaces that, if left unchecked, would otherwise become corrosive.
On the other hand, as Oscar Wilde knew, if you always expect the worst, you will never be disappointed. "Lane, you're a perfect pessimist," Algernon tells his butler, after another gloomy forecast. "I do my best to give satisfaction, sir."
