The Space Arts Centre announces three productions

The Space Arts Centre, in Isle of Dogs, east London announces three productions...

The Suicide, by Nikolai Erdman, adapted and translated by Eileen Thalenberg and Alan Richardson. 12 to 30 March 2013. Directed by Adam Hemming, produced by Space Productions. Semyon Semyonovich is unemployed, fed-up and hungry for liverwurst. Following an argument with his wife, Masha, Semyon decides to take his own life. Word that he is contemplating suicide has spread like wildfire and now everyone wants him to kill himself on their behalf. Can Semyon go through with it? Will he do it for love, society, the arts?

The 8th Wave, by James Ernest, produced by Disturbance. 2 to 13 April 2013. Brian’s little world revolves around his shop, a business built up from nothing. Lonely and unmarried, somewhat at odds with the world, his self-righteous world-view cadged from the Daily Mail, he believes in things as they should be, not as they are. When teenage scally Mathew breaks into his shop, the fire of Brian’s resentments flares up. He holds the boy captive and unleashes on him the fury of his bitterness at the world. Mathew fears the worst. But Brian and Mathew have much in common: both are desperately lonely, observers rather than guests at life’s feast. And they share a desire: for something better than their lot, a longing for meaning, for an end to the pain, for transcendent happiness. And Brian is determined that things will not continue as they are – he will send them both to a better place, one way or other.

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, adapted and directed by Eleanor Appleton, produced by Red Dress Productions. For Mary Lennox, a young Victorian girl raised under the hot sun of Colonial India, the Yorkshire moors and heavy skies that surround Misselthwait Manor are alien to her. Coping with her parent’s death and isolated in this new environment, she hears terrible screams by night. Left to her own devices she goes in search of adventure within this giant imposing house and its vast grounds. On discovering a key to a lost and abandoned garden she discovers a new physical world and the key to open her heart to friendship and magic.

- by Darren Dalglish