Leeds Arts Centre is known for careful, unhurried work — roughly four full productions a year, each one months in the planning, development and rehearsal, after more than 75 years in operation. So its latest venture, a partnership with Planetarium Go UK, marks a genuine departure from form, and the company says it’s a project it has never been more proud of.
What began in mid-July as a single proposed performance grew rapidly into a full programme over the following weeks, with rehearsals continuing throughout August, staged under the title Meaning in the Void. The idea came from Planetarium Go UK, who invited the company to bring homegrown theatre into their temporary dome venue in Millennium Square.
That single show became six distinct pieces, spread across 20 performances over four nights. The team behind it included four writers, four directors, upwards of twenty actors, and two producers who by all accounts ended the process exhausted. The resulting programme mixes poetry, prose, short plays and an adaptation drawn from Orwell’s 1984, built around the idea of making work by local artists genuinely affordable — tickets are just £2 each.
Leeds Arts Centre says staging work under a planetarium dome changes things entirely, adding that the project has left the company asking, in its own words, “what does it mean to be human in a universe this vast?”
Across the four nights, audiences will see old friends reunite beneath the stars, follow a Space Man drifting helplessly into deep space, watch mythology collide with contemporary poetry, descend into a mind at war with itself, meet two androids confronting a dark secret at the edge of existence, and step into the bleak world of 1984 — each piece framed by the same shifting sky.
Leeds Arts Centre credits a wide network of collaborators for making the project possible: poets Nobody Important, Matt Haines, Rosie MacDonald and The High Poetess, rehearsal space from the Fox and Newt, Crowd of Favours and Slung Low, and support from its regular home at Carriageworks in getting word out about the show.
Meaning in the Void runs at the planetarium in Millennium Square across four dates in September — the 8th, 10th, 12th and 13th — with tickets priced at £2 per show and discounts available for booking a full night’s programme.
