Water of Life
Author
Chris Ballance
Chris Ballance has had sixteen plays produced - a mixture of plays for children, devised pieces, adaptations and work for a general audience. His play Water of Life won an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First, and Viva la Diva was runner-up in the South London Playwriting Competition as well as being shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award. Four of his plays have received second productions.
Synopsis
The story of Scotland's most prolific mass murderers, set in Edinburgh in 1829. Seeing the anatomist's demand for fresh corpses, and the difficulties experienced by grave-diggers, Burke and Hare miss out the middleman by murdering their own supply of corpses. This early example of entrepreneurial capitalism at its most efficient led them to murder at least 15 people. The more they murdered, the more whisky they could afford, and the more they needed to anaesthetise the pain of the crimes they were committing. They used whisky to knock out their victims to murder them - and then themselves to knock out their own guilt. For Burke, it was a journey through the hell of addiction - to alcohol and murder - to redemption at the hangman's noose.
The story has been told before - but this is the first attempt to tell the story from the murderers' point of view. The play has had three productions, and won an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award. View extract.
Cast
5 male, 4 female
Duration
80 mins
Contact
24 South Main Street
Wigtown
DG8 9EH
UK