Picked this out as the show I most wanted to see at this year's MIAF when the program came out, cause it looked like it might be a real (artistic) experience - advertised as a contemporary opera, organised around Darwin and Origin of Species, music by the Knife, touting comparisons to "Einstein on the Beach" (seeing a good live performance of which remains one of my mostly fondly cherished cultural hopes).
For all that, it looked like inertia was going to get the better of me until I found myself at a loose end on the last night of its (brief) run - last Saturday - and bought a ticket a few hours beforehand ... and I'm glad I went, although my feelings about the show were mixed. I think a lot of that mixedness flows from the relationship between the strength of the show's high concept and the relatively literal, programmatic feel of the execution - that is, the idea of an 'opera' built around the notion of evolution, and both musically and sets-wise structured to reflect humankind's own evolution, both in the strict and in broader senses, where the form is, to a large extent, the content, rather than being structured around any kind of conventional narrative, is striking and impressive, but the actual show/performance doesn't get very far beyond that idea, instead playing it out in fairly predictable, pedestrian ways (if those are fair ways of describing a work that is, in a way, inherently interesting and unusual).
One way of looking at this is to suggest that the component parts often seemed pedestrian because, for all of the graspability of that basic idea, the piece's commitment to rigorously embodying that idea (and working through its implications for contemporary 'opera') requires a degree of repetition, build-up, etc - that certainly goes for the way that the Knife's score 'evolves' over the show's 90 or so minutes from relatively minimal, soundscape stuff to out and out triumphant electro-popness. But I'm not sure that this would excuse the unexciting nature of the actual songs, the uninteresting choreography (case in point: a lot of the dancers' movement could, for example, without too much of a stretch evoke the delicate fluctuations and waverings of the simple forms of life as viewed under a microscope with which we're all familiar - but that in itself doesn't make them interesting) and the lack of a really coherent stage language (lots of imagery, including repeating motifs and stage elements, which themselves develop or, again, 'evolve' in various ways - but, to me, nothing really underpinning it), unless it really demands an entirely different way of looking at the work (in which case it's incumbent on the work itself to do more to open up such a way).
Overall, "Tomorrow, in a year" was well worth it - the fundamental interestingness (audacity is putting it too high, but it's something like that) of what it was, coupled with the elements of genuine spectacle to it and the artistic intelligence that it embodies, as well as the thought that it provoked, saw to that. But it didn't feel totally satisfying or immersive - something just wasn't quite there.
