Interview with Tian Glasgow on Tomorrow Is Not Promised

What is Tomorrow Is Not Promised about?

Tomorrow Is Not Promised is about a woman who goes through grief. It’s depicted like an earthquake happens and all she's left with is her front door, and the show is about how the other women in her life support her.

I wanted to create this show because I was having a lot of thoughts about how people are affected by grief, how they talk about it between friends, and how disjointed you can feel when you're going through grief. 

What sort of inspirations and experiences did you draw on in writing the show?

In creating the show as a cisgendered man, I feel like I really paid a lot of particular attention to the fact that I really wanted to represent how I've seen a lot of the women in my life support each other, from my mum to my sisters. So often, especially from my mum to my aunties, it's more about “Have you eaten?”, you know, all of those engaged ways of showing love through those acts. Rather than having really…I don’t know – I won’t even say “the right words”. More, I guess, formulated words like a therapist would have. A person who has the language to be able to talk about difficult things with family.

Can you discuss the significance of the title?

The title Tomorrow Is Not Promised can be seen from various different ways. From it being quite a nihilistic view, quite a depressive kind of view that you can’t plan anything and anything could happen to cause an earthquake. And it could also be looked at as a live-for-now kind of way. What you have now, you hold dear, in a “make the most of today” kind of way.

Interestingly, the title came to me when I was working on a project in Ghana. I was in Accra and there was a poster – a huge billboard poster, which I still have a photo of – of an insurance company using the term “Tomorrow's not promised” to sell insurance. Which I found really dark.

Could you share a bit about the process of writing and creating the show?

In making the show and writing the show, taking, wow, maybe eight years? I remember purposefully writing it differently to how I’ve written plays before. The scenes weren’t written in a chronological way like I normally would. They were written in ways where it was depending on how I felt about things. And that's why I feel like over those years it got sort of shelved for a while. And then the pandemic happened. I think I only wrote one scene during the pandemic because most of it was already written.

 It wasn't in response to the pandemic, but it really connected with how people felt about people they've lost or other types of grief. People have lost work or [wanted to] move country, and the pandemic happened, and they lost the potential of that new life.

[Throughout the process], the overall aspects of it being such a universal thing, such as grief, stayed the same, you know, it connects with people in so many various ways.

How does magical realism and Afro-Futurism feature in the work?

Thinking about terms like “magical realism”, or even when I did loads of research into the term “Afro-Futurism” as it came up, I think for me it was [about] being able to tell stories and create stories that are set in a future that we feel that we belong in.

I created a space within the show where racism doesn't impact these two women. They are able to think about and talk about what's going on in their lives. Because they're in a space that is kind of within her own head or within the memories and things like that, they step through different moments in their life without ever having to, you know, be impacted by all of these sorts of societal things. They just get to be people, which was one of the experiments of creating a show like this.