So Young is a play about five people, one of whom is dead. Central to the play is Helen, who died of Covid but around whose absence the remaining characters continue to orbit. We are witness to a single evening when couple Davie (Andy Clark) and Liane (Lucianne McEvoy) are invited by Milo (Robert Jack), Helen’s widower, to meet Milo’s new girlfriend Greta (Yana Harris). At twenty years old, Greta dramatically fails the ‘half + 7 rule’ for forty-something Milo, and his friends are unsurprisingly unimpressed. What follows is an evening of escalating strife as tempers rise as fast as glasses of wine get downed, and each friend wrestles with grief, death, aging and loss in their own way.
The 2025 production of So Young performed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow is superbly acted, with Liane frequently stealing the show with biting diatribes on the folly of men. All actors bring copious energy and pathos to the play, managing to navigate the fine balance between comedy and tragedy. And this is necessary, because from the first minute So Young is fighting a rearguard action against the cliched nature of its subject matter. “Older man fucks younger women instead of dealing with his emotions” is after all a tale as old as time, or at least as old as English Literature professors, as Liane points out. Can So Young offer us something new?
Every now and then a text is published that explosively captures its zeitgeist. For early 21st century Britain (and the West beyond), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative is such a text. The title of its first chapter (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”) has become and remains a truism on the Left. The first part of the book’s title has become the descriptive term for the pervasive sense that there is, indeed, no alternative. That we are forever stuck in an Eternal Present of a crumbling public realm, increasing precarity and environmental disintegration, all the while being told by our capitalist overlords that this really is the best of all possible worlds.
Capitalist Realism came out in 2009, resonating with the politics that emerged from the Great Financial Crash: Occupy, student protests in the UK and elsewhere, the abortive resistance to austerity, the failed revolutions of the Arab Spring. If anything, events since then reinforce the observation that resistance is indeed futile. Reading Capitalist Realism for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how much it is of its time yet remains relevant today.
There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.
The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.
The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.