A performance between eight girls and an embalmer.

When the Time Comes is a performance in an old church by eight girls, who construct a series of tableaux to summon the theatricality of life and death. Somewhere between the sacred and the mundane, the girls throw their bodies at moments in time they have or have not yet experienced to ask the adult audience how we talk to children about dying. Chairs fall, hair swings, matches flare. All of this as an impossible attempt to share the incommunicable nature of loss, beauty, loneliness, change and growing up.

Director and scenography - Craig McCorquodale

Youth Arts Workers - Leila Bright and Jenna Corker

Project Facilitator - Jo Sharp

Flowers - Flowers Vermilion

Performers - Amelia, Ava, Caitlin, Jainaba, Lena, Lilianna, Nadia and Nadia with Carrie Thomas

Production Manager - Matt Elliott

Stage Managers - Scott Ringan and Magnus Rack

Design Assistant - Barbara Byahurwa

From Lyra - Jo Timmins, Natalia Barua, Anna Plasberg-Hill, Iain Reekie, James Preston and Caitlin Mulgrew

With thanks to Molly Jack; Rachael Cloughon, Anna Mayhew and Louise McLachlan at Craigmillar Now; Crosbie Matthew Funeral Directors in Kirkcaldy; Eoin McKenzie; Katie Stuart; National Theatre of Scotland Thinking Space residency; 21Common; Nikki Tomlinson; Giorgos Tsiris at St Columba’s Hospice; Rachael-Ann Clark and Fiona Clark

The work is presented alongside the installation Daily Myths by internationally acclaimed Syrian artist Nihad Al Turk

Images by Andrew Perry

This work is available for touring and development.