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Following an Arts Council commission of a new play by Tim Plester, Fifth Column are proud to present a sneak preview of this exciting new project!
 Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of the year 2000 began to take on a powerful and symbolic resonance in the hearts and minds of humankind.
It evolved into the great myth of the industrial era, and helped crystallise a series of beliefs, hopes and anxieties founded upon all manner of dazzling scientific promises and technological dreams-come-true. By the year 2000, sickness, poverty and pollution were to have been made things of the past. Climates were to have become controlled, tasty cordon bleau meals were to have become available in easy-to-swallow pre-packaged pill form, and everyone was to have been granted chemical control over the effects of ageing and the safe option of successful cryogenic preservation.
And so, here we are then. Slap-bang in the middle of that promised future, and naturally enough things have turned out rather differently. World peace continues to elude us, optimism is increasingly viewed with something of an air of mistrust, and these days at least, it seems people have less and less time for grandiose or heroic visions of to-morrow. Or do they? The Third Millennium has come in for a lot of scepticism in recent years, but there was a time, not so very long ago, when it seemed like such an exciting place to be spending one's time.
With the benefit of hindsight, and inspired by the forward-thinking fiction of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Fritz Lang and Georges Mélies, Welcome To New Amsterdam revisits that bright new future envisioned by the imagineers of the 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's, and concocts a classic narrative of love, power, honour and betrayal. Staged in black and white and written in 4 acts (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter), Welcome To New Amsterdam is a tale of a future New York, set in a past yet to come. This is the world which might have been. The New Golden Age. The Second Renaissance. A high-tech Eden boasting amazing gadgets on all sides and 3-D videophone booths on every street corner. A world of hover-cars, robo-servants, and hourly Pan-Am flights to the moon. A world of mobsters, femme fatales and laser derringers. A world of vertiginous mile-high skyscrapers, cloned pet dodos, art deco and the music of Irving Berlin. It's story (as far as I know at this stage), is the story of a once mighty family empire teetering on the brink of collapse. Ahead, I can see an intoxicating mix of kidnappings, ransom demands, illicit affairs of the heart, police-corruption and attempted suicide.
The story of Welcome To New Amsterdam is also the story of the city; the construction of myth out of concrete and asphalt, bricks and mortar, steel and chrome. According to legend, the Gods guided Romulus and Remus to lay Rome's foundations around an altar. Poseidon supposedly built the walls of Troy and Delos, whilst Apollo allegedly built those of Thebes and Megara. It is also said that the holy city of Jerusalem was erected on the central rock of the earth. Meanwhile, in the year 1626, the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island from the local Native American tribes for the paltry sum of 60 guilders worth of glass beads and fishhooks. These early European settlers bestowed the name of New Amsterdam upon their new home and then set about burning down the original inhabitants' tepees while they slept. The rest, as they often say, is history.
History, however, has a habit of being rewritten. History, however, has a way of being fabricated. History, it seems, has a way of making one stop every now and again to ponder those simple little things like the subtle interplay between the possible and the probable and the multifarious vistas that lay in-between. So welcome indeed sweet citizens to the city of New Amsterdam. I hope you enjoy your stay.
Tim Plester
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