Casper Dillen’s Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

Casper Dillen, Christy Taylor and Small Sample Size Theatre’s latest takes its name from a 1930s essay by John Maynard Keynes…

(left to right) Inge Cauwenbergh, Mahxium Ogyen Chung, Dann Xiao, Casper Dillen and Christy Taylor in ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. © Lila Rui Lan.

Casper Dillen, Christy Taylor and Small Sample Size Theatre
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
★★★★✰
Roehampton, Holy Trinity Church
13 June 2025
casperdillen.com
welcometowandsworth.com - venue, Holy Trinity Church
Part of the Wandsworth Arts Fringe festival

Casper Dillen’s work makes me smile. I’m sitting in a Roehampton church pew; we’ve just been serenaded by bell ringers, moved on to full-on ecclesiastical organ music, and I’m watching the vicar (the Rev Joshua Ray) slowly lowering a large teddy bear down from the rafters. An inflatable dinosaur emerges, reading a book, while a plummy Radio 4 documentary voice discusses the work of Noam Chomsky on 1950s child linguistics.

Then we are in the 1980s with ‘Words Don’t Come Easy To Me’ blaring out while an amateur (very amateur) baseball player roams around the small performance space/platform. The platform is two steps up, making it harder for Dillen’s hopping mermaid (oh yes) to get around and particularly difficult for your average inflatable T-Rex. But nothing really daunts the company of nine as they go about their strange work involving various sports and odd dares. Perching a broom on two heads and shuffling around comes to mind, as does boxing a dinosaur with a book. And you have to admire any T-Rex with a smart gymnastics ribbon routine.

And so it goes on with a totally boxed-in woman, blind to the world, shuffling around, a badly sung national anthem (addressed to the high altar), skipping up and down the aisles (how relatively normal), dental hygiene inspections, a lone gunman roaming with a ray gun, mermaid handstands and a drone wandering through. And much, much more, all smoothly supported by Christy Taylor’s free-roaming musical collage.

It’s 40 minutes of surreal pandemonium and has nothing to do with Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren — which was actually a 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes. The free programme booklet is just as eccentric, full of the performers’ notes on the piece, often weirdly indecipherable mixes of diagrams and text. It also includes a lengthy piece by Dillen on what Economic Possibilities is not about, or may be about. If you wanted to attribute high ideals to it, then I suppose you might say it’s a celebration of humankind’s profound and competitive ability to test themselves in various physical games. Or it may be that in years to come, ChatGPT looks at a video of the show and comes up with some explanation or through-line, but I wouldn’t put money on it. For me, it’s all just surreal and off-the-wall bewildering fun… and I love it.

Economic Possibilities is part of the Wandsworth Arts Fringe festival, which runs through to 22 June 2025 and includes new wave theatre, dance, music, cabaret and comedy. I’m sure there are great shows in there, but somehow I doubt that any other night will be quite so deliriously loony. Or, indeed, weave a vicar into the action!