Lights! Planets! People!

Six months ago renowned space scientist Maggie Hill launched a career-defining mission to find habitable planets beyond our solar system. It did not go well. Then her girlfriend stopped speaking to her. Maggie’s going to have to address both of these catastrophes.

Lights! Planets! People! written by TV and radio scriptwriter Molly Naylor and performed by Karen Hill, is an intimate and exhilarating story about how we try to control the things that define us, our desire to connect with each other as well as issues around the environment.

Maggie has been trying, unsuccessfully, to contact her girlfriend and is attending her first ever therapy session, in which she is at pains to stress that her bipolar disorder is not relevant to the conversation. Now she is giving a lecture about her career to inspire young women to work in science. As the show shifts between the lecture, the therapy session and a series of botched attempts to connect with her ex, Maggie’s private and professional lives start to overlap and we begin to build a picture of her greatest achievements and biggest regrets.

Maggie, is a character we have seen little of on the stage (or screen for that matter), a gay, bipolar 60 year old with a unique, funny, sad and wise take on the world. It would be fair to say that this is a voice and a viewpoint we do not hear often enough.