Next Stop Utopia
By Nick Pelling
Have you ever thought that you were living a shallow and rather selfish life? Worse still, that this was all just a reflection of your horribly flawed personality? Imagine being told this by your partner just as they shut the door on you for the very last time. That is pretty much what happened to author and broadcaster, Dr David Bramwell. His response was extreme: he decided to rip up his reality by its roots and chuck it out. He threw out his TV and radio, gave up on social media and committed to a plan to go in search of people who might know how to live a meaningful life.
Most people would probably just mope about for a bit and then maybe take up yogic drumming, but Bramwell went much further and much deeper. To brutally and unfairly summarise his response: he took a kind of mid-life gap year in order to travel the world and immerse himself in various alternative communities that were, in some sense, in search of Utopia.
What he found out – and he is wonderfully frank – is the basis for a book and now the talk-cum-stand-up that comes to the Kino in early March. It is funny, sad, uplifting, irritating, weird, scary and maybe life-changing in unequal measures. And unmissable.
Without, I hope, giving too much away, we are taken on magical mystery tour from the anarchist collectives of Christiania in Copenhagen to an eco-city in the Arizona desert, stopping off at other zen stations on the way. This may make it all sound a bit like Utopia-tourism and obviously one might object that finding deep meaning in an experience cannot be done on a ‘drop in’ basis. But, Bramwell genuinely seems to throw himself into each assorted paradisal trip; in an intense way. Oddly, one of the running themes amid all the ashram stopovers seems to be the central importance of hot tubs.
For a spiritual pilgrim, Bramwell is sharply acidic about anything that smacks of a re-heat of hippiedom or the sort of greenwash voodoo that can be served up in consumerist-alternative circles. But his talk takes us way beyond weekend jugglers. For example, in Northwest Italy he finds the community of Damanhur and the Temples of Humankind. This is genuinely mind-flipping stuff. For some reason, the devotees of Damanhur built a secret underground temple and, as Bramwell states, a “fully functioning time machine”. Only Dr Bramwell can really explain this. And he does a pretty good job.
In fact, Bramwell is a fascinating host: he seems both a naïve acolyte and detached sophisticate all at the same time. It makes for a great talk, and maybe more. Inevitably there is no neat nirvanic ending but the conclusion is quite surprising. But what I can reveal (spiritual spoiler alert!) is that Utopia, in its deepest sense, involves a football table.
This is definitely not the kind of bus that comes in threes, and anybody with a spiritual pulse would be well advised, as somebody once said, to come together at the Kino.
• David Bramwell and ‘The No. 9 Bus to Utopia’ is on 2 March at the Kino in Norman Road. Contact www.kino-teatr.co.uk
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