Double Bill: Nancy’s Orange and The Butterfly Collector

Supported by Theatre by the Lake and Arts Council England, Peter Macqueen and Grace Kirby have created a unique double-bill – each actor writing a one-person play, each directing the other, and both working with acclaimed sound designer Mark Melville.

Nancy’s Orange is inspired by Grace’s part-time job delivering NHS prescriptions to patients, often elderly and isolated, in remote countryside along Hadrian’s Wall. Brief encounters reveal lives richly lived through stories of love and loss, sadness and joy, infused with poetry and humour.

I thought it would be a nice little job, just me and Classic FM, no-one’s breathing down my neck and I can leave the work at work… but we find that she can’t. Instead, she questions how we care for and perceive our elderly neighbours, inviting us to do the same.

In The Butterfly Collector Peter Macqueen draws on memories of happy childhood holidays collecting butterflies, and sets them against drastic attempts to rescue that collection (and those memories) fifty years later, when Storm Desmond inflicted severe flooding on more than 7,000 homes in Cumbria, including his own.

The play is set in the not-too-distant future, when there are too many storms to name and too few butterflies to count. Meet a man perched on a tower of furniture – a chair on a box on a table – having a picnic. Are the waters rising or receding?