CityLife

Mind The Gap returns to region

TWO-DAY RUN: Mind The Gap

AFTER it had been seen at 2007’s 24:7 Theatre Festival Luke Walker’s Mind The Gap was nominated as Best New Play at that year’s M.E.N. Theatre Awards.

Now it’s back for several local performances, beginning this weekend at The Lowry’s Studio theatre.

It’s set on the last tube train home at midnight. Dawn and Dismas, stuck in a tunnel after the lights go out, don’t know if they are alone or trapped in the company of strangers.

How can you trust someone when you can’t see their face? Can you really forgive and forget when the lights come up again?

Desperate to communicate

“I knew,” says Luke, “that if I wanted to write a play about two characters who were desperate to communicate on a metaphorical level and discover something about themselves, I would have to locate it where there could be absolutely no communication with the outside world, where you would be totally alone, where all mobile phones lose reception."

Luke, who was inspired to begin writing for the stage after seeing Simon Stephens’ On The Shore Of The Wide World at the Royal Exchange and then, on the way out, spotting a flyer for the Bruntwood Playwriting competition, says: “Mind The Gap is a play about lots of things.

“Most importantly it is about communication and how people interact. But it is also about loneliness, life, death, truth and lies. It sounds a bit heavy but I hope it isn’t. I wouldn’t class it as a comedy exactly but I hope it has its funny moments. 

“It has a Beckett-ian feel to it,” he admits. “That word ‘gap’ intrigues me.”

What is the gap? “Don’t all the interesting things happen in the gap? Life isn’t black and white, life is the grey, fuzzy bits we either love or loathe.

“Life is the gap between birth and death. It is dark, then the lights turn on for a while and then it is dark again.

"It is Beckett’s enduring image of giving birth astride a grave. All gaps are terrifyingly unpredictable but isn’t that what life is every day?”

Mind The Gap is at The Lowry Studio on Sunday, February 8 and Monday, February 9. £5 - £7.50. Call 0870 787 5780. Then The Met, Bury, on Wednesday and the Coliseum Studio, Oldham, on Friday 13.