AND I LOOKED AT THE SKY

PRESENTED BY 20 SOUTH STREET IN ASSOCIATION WITH GREY SWAN

Written by Tim Stubbs Hughes

Directed by Julia Stubbs

On Betty’s 86th birthday, one candle revives an old pact: when creativity fades, can love choose its own ending?

On Betty’s 86th birthday, a single candle on a carrot cake just isn’t good enough. While John has been outside digging up the last of the carrots and making her cake, Betty was in her room recalling a decades-old promise. 

Now, faced with that solitary candle, she wonders who she has been and why her hands feel so heavy. John has spent more than a week trying to write her birthday card, unable to find the words for whatever life they have left.

Betty is an artist, John a writer. Decades ago, they made a pact that if their creative spark faded, they would choose their own ending. Now they must decide whether that moment has arrived.

Set over ten months, and I looked at the sky follows a long-married couple as an abstract promise becomes an immediate and irreversible decision. As they revisit the life they have shared, memory, tenderness, habit and disagreement begin to complicate what once seemed clear. Through moments of wit, stillness and intimate domestic detail, the play explores the relationship between creativity and identity, and what happens when the work that gave a life meaning begins to fall silent.

A simmering, delicate new play about love, autonomy, ageing, and the choices we make together, and I looked at the sky asks whether two people who have shared a life can ever be certain they also want to share its ending.

With Mary Tillett and John Rayment

Lighting Design by Jonathan Samuels and Sound Design by James Connor