Love at the End of Time

In a city washed clean by catastrophe, four survivors circle each other in a strange new world of bewilderment, desire, and suspicion.

Love at the End of Time is a darkly absurd, mythic fantasy. Intimate, unsettling, and shot through with flashes of humour.

Written by award-winning poet and playwright Roderick Ford, whose work often draws on gothic and outsider perspectives, this play rewrites the boundaries between human and other, memory and enchantment, grief and renewal.

What might love mean when the old world has ended?

Directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks, with set & costume design by Alyson Cummins, lighting design by Stephen Dodd and sound design by Carl Kennedy, the production places raw human connection at the centre of a world on the edge of the uncanny.

Accessible Performances Available:

ISL Interpreted Performance: Friday 7 Nov, 7.45pm

Love at the End of Time and the Representation of Autism in Theatre

The challenge for me as an autistic writer is how to show to neurotypical (NT or “normal”) audiences the treasures perhaps hidden behind the convulsive silence of classical autism, or the fragility of life on the membrane between reclusiveness and the yearning for connection that is intrinsic to Aspergers syndrome.  How to show the frequent autistic sense of some unknowable component within the self, the feeling of alienation from the rest of humanity, and to create thrilling and accessible plays that will excite both NT and autistic people, in a form that echoes the autistic imaginative universe.

Much drama reflects the NT’s concern with social/historical reality, from which people with autism are often excluded.  Marginalised solitaries, they live to a great extent in their own self-constructed imaginary universes.  These closed worlds are perhaps safe havens, or simulacra of the NT’s world built up by the autistic mind in an attempt to replicate and make sense of it.

Autistic individuals are frequently more at ease with narratives that don’t attempt to mirror the “real world”.   Many seem to prefer imaginative forms (fantastic, surreal, sci-fi, absurdist etc) where they are on an equal footing with NTs in terms of unfamiliarity of content.

As a writer with autism, I cannot write authentically about the NT social world and its concerns, but nor do I want to feel restricted to writing about people with autism.  Therefore, fantastic literary forms offer an ideal middle way for me to give voice to autistic narratives that arise out of an autistic sensibility, and in a manner that NTs can connect with, allowing me the freedom to write the stories that give voice to my own interests and obsessions.  The aestheticising of autism’s symptoms by transferring them into NT characters and worlds, provide a useful framework for my work — in a similar way that Frida Kahlo used her disability as an aesthetic in her own work.

In Love at the End of Time, it is fascinating to see how under Aoife Spillane-Hinks’ brilliant direction, the emergence of a catastrophic future world shines a light on the experience of exclusion in our own time, echoing the often distressing uncertainty of everyday autistic life subsumed under another neurological order.

As complete annihilation approaches, we will see how those who remain cope with fracturing identities, the loss of a consensual reality, and its replacement with one of mystery and enchantment.

Roderick Ford