Following on from the acclaimed success of Pre-drinks/Afterparty at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Deadpan Theatre is now presenting new play Gate, a poignant and witty story of love and loss that asks what really happens to us after we die, what we leave behind and what we will become. Gate is written by Artemis Fitzalan Howard, co-founder, with Eliot Salt, of Deadpan Theatre.
It is an average Thursday morning at ‘The Gate’ in Wapping, East London, and, like every first-born child in her family for generations, Eve is guarding it carefully. It’s going to be a busy day – there are four new appointments booked in. The trouble is none of the clients knew they were coming… because nobody knows the gate exists until they reach it, and to reach the gate you have to be dead.
In Gate, Fitzalan Howard challenges the theories of the great ‘thinkers’: when evolutionists tell us that we’re just trying to spread our genes, economists tell us that all we do is maximize our self-interest, and psychologists tell us that we just want to get laid, is it true that we only act on narrow material desires or do our wider spiritual beliefs still count for something?
Gate will be directed by Sadie Spencer and designed by Alex Berry. It is produced at the Cockpit Theatre by Artemis Fitzalan Howard for Deadpan Theatre.
The production will have a limited run at the Cockpit Theatre in London from 13 to 24 September.
