Joseph Croan, 57, a famous child psychiatrist, has risen from childhood in Muirhouse, Edinburgh, to professorship at the Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan. He’s married to Cindy, 39, a Native American academic. Visiting Edinburgh, Joseph can’t get out of his hi-tech flat in the old Royal Infirmary, as Cindy, back in New York, enters premature labour with their first child. As Joseph tries to escape, Sam, a 13 year-old Muirhouse boy he’d assessed 25 years before, in the very same room, appears.
In Copenhagen, 1908, Edvard Munch (1863-1944), one of the greatest artists who has ever lived, is close to death; the result of ten years of increasing alcohol dependency. He is admitted into the psychiatric clinic of Professor Jacobsen; the treatment consisting of being locked in a darkened room for eight days and nights, under the care of a novice nurse, Sigrid Aasta Andersen.
A three-act exploration of atoms, time, empire and our fallen world.
I will be developing this in a workshop in 2023.