Photo by Rachel Burnham

By Luisa De la Concha Montes

My Plan for Tomorrow follows Piers (Alfie-Lanham Brown), a frustrated character who wanted to be a writer, but didn’t get into Oxford, so now he splits his time between delivering job-hunting masterclasses, attending comic-con conventions and telling people how great his (unfinished) novel is. When he runs into an old acquaintance from university, Tomas (Chris Capon), Piers becomes obsessed, as Tomas represents everything Piers wishes he could have been: a successful comic illustrator with a big following. 

The scenes are cleverly devised, as they naturally embed the audience into the story. In the first scene, we are students in Piers’ masterclass, in the second scene, we are attending a comic-con convention, and in the third one we are supervisors in a therapy session.

This structure turns the audience into judges and detectives, making us peel back the layers of Piers’ personality with each development, trying to understand who he really is and why he is so annoying. It’s analytical in the same way as gossiping is: we think we are assessing other people’s faults but truly, we are just revealing our own moral standards. Similarly, through our examination of Piers, we unveil our own biases and thought patterns of what success means, and how searching for it can take some people in some obscure directions.

The format, which continuously involves the audience, creates a deep exploration of jealousy, envy, class conflict, and toxic masculinity. Yet, by the end of the play, Piers remains a mystery, and instead we’ve discovered what success means to us and how that may (or may not) clash with society’s own construct of success. Through its execution, which involves an excellent cast that truly managed to bring the audience into the story, and a fast-paced, energetic script, My Plan For Tomorrow involves each audience member intimately, making us question what success means to us.

One of the most recently overused words in theatre is ‘immersive’. Often implying a direct involvement between the cast and the public, it fails to address that all theatre is immersive by default (or at least, it should be). Good theatre provides us with an opportunity to leave the self behind and jump into a different way of being. Often, due to the limitations of fringe theatre, we are left grasping at the edges of what it could have been if there was more time, money and resources. And yet, once in a while we come across something that manages to leave you stunned. Such is the case with My Plan For Tomorrow.

My Plan For Tomorrow ran through 30 July to 3 August.

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