Double Bill: After Life + Six Characters Looking for an Author

ACT 1: After Life by Jack Thorne and and Hirokazu Kore-era

ACT 2: Six Characters Looking for an Author by Luigi Pirandello and Translated by David Harrower

After Life by Jack Thorne and and Hirokazu Kore-era

If you could spend eternity with just one precious memory, what would it be?

A group of strangers grapple with this impossible question as they find themselves in a bureaucratic waiting room between life and death. Encouraged by enigmatic officials, they must sift through their past lives to choose their forever.

Adapted from Hirokazu Kore-eda's award-winning film, After Life is a surreal and powerfully human look at the way we view our lives, and a haunting meditation on what it is to live – and to die.

Written by Jack Thorne from a concept by Bunny Christie, Jeremy Herrin and Thorne, After Life was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in June 2021.

Six Characters Looking for an Author by Luigi Pirandello and Translated by David Harrower

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is an extraordinary and influential play, a sharp-edged labyrinth of humour, pity and profundity. This text, entitled Six Characters Looking for an Author, is a new version by David Harrower.

Six people arrive in a theatre during rehearsals for a play. They are the characters of a play that has not yet been written. Trapped inside a traumatic event from which they long to escape, they desperately need a writer to complete their story and release them. Intrigued by their situation, the director and his company of actors listen as the characters begin to describe and argue over the key events of their lives.

Pirandello’s play deals at one level with the nature of theatre, the mystery of imaginative creativity and the clashes between life and art, and at another with the suffering of humanity, the bitterness of family breakdown and the pathology of guilt.

Venue. Rose Bruford College Wigan Mill at the Pier, Trencherfield Mill, Heritage Way, Wigan WN3 4EF

Set and Costume Designer – Chloe Wyn

Lighting Designer – Will Evans

Sound Designer – Dan Thomson

DSM – Bethan Evans

ASM – Anna Reid

Head of Productions - Mell Bird

Master Carpenter - Dave Smith