REVIEW: Future Conditional, Old Vic ✭✭✭✭

Future Conditional

4 September 2015

Old Vic

4 Stars

Reviewed by James Garden

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The school year in England has begun, and with that, the first production of Matthew Warchus’s debut season as Artistic Director of the Old Vic—Future Conditional, by Tamsin Oglesby.

With a cast of well over 20, the play, at first, seems to be a sensational overload—one doesn’t quite know who exactly to follow as the play’s protagonist, and at first it seems slightly odd that a play about youth education in England lacks students, save one, played by the wonderful Nikki Patel, but as its triple stranded narrative unwinds, that lack of central character not only becomes irrelevant, but ultimately, the point. This is an emotional story—one of the school admissions process, across the class spectrum. Oglesby clearly has experienced this world first hand and touches on the broad spectrum of parental nerve-wracking moments—the postcode lottery, institutional tribalism and the English Oxbridge obsession, and the public vs. private issues that many parents in this country face.

Rob Brydon, playing the school teacher to the invisible children (and therefore actually, the audience in the round, to quite a good effect), is strong, but ultimately playing exactly what you would expect Rob Brydon to be. His is not a transformative form of acting, but it is certainly effective in this piece.

The schoolyard mother strand brings this reviewer back to his days of American private school, and the disdain his mother had for the crazy high pitched obsessions of the class mothers over bake sales and high school entrance exams. They are even reminiscent of the best moments of Desperate Housewives, albeit with slightly more realistic and well-rounded characterizations than the ABC comedy-drama.

The third strand of this production is a government think tank, which, is where this piece slightly becomes a bit too didactic and heavy handed—the three Oxbridge types, one of whom clearly got in because her father is a part of big oil, ultimately think there’s nothing wrong with the system, and the non- Oxbridge educated ones think something is fundamentally broken. When the characters finally realize this divide they begin to fight, quite literally, like children. It’s invigorating to watch, as it is superbly acted, but ultimately, obvious and broad.

The unfortunate missed beat in this production is the lack of irony found when Patel’s character successfully matriculates at Oxford. Of course a fictionalized Malala Yousafzai, identical in all but name and lack of Nobel Peace Prize, is going to get into Oxford—she’s a prime candidate for the tokenism that stretches across the upper echelons of education worldwide. So the fact that this poor girl getting to the top seems to be praised by the piece unfortunately lacks real triumph, even though the piece acts like this is a revelatory moment.

There is a joy to this piece that is impossible to truly describe in words—it has the boisterous nature of Spring Awakening (the musical) but without sung through moments, although the two school uniformed guitarists who make up the pit (or rather balcony) band certainly make you wonder when Melchior is going to come on stage with his wireless hand mic. But where Spring Awakening digs into the cold, Future Conditional runs to the warmth of the cliched hearth.

This piece is a must-see, for sure, but it congratulates the English system for being fair to its least privileged a little too easily—because that’s just not the reality. It's still a pretty xenophobic and classist place for the majority of foreigners and poor people in this country. Perhaps the upper echelons of British education could be educated by the American need-blind private system popular at the Phillips Exeters and Andovers, and Harvards and Yales of America, although that’s a conversation for another time. But this show, like the English people itself, doesn’t look far enough outside of itself for its answers to be truly satisfying.

FUTURE CONDITIONAL RUNS AT THE OLD VIC UNTIL 3RD OCTOBER 2015