A new play based on real events more than 50 years ago when dozens of people witnessed bright lights in the sky and a UFO reportedly landed in a field is to have its première in Stoke-on-Trent.
Claybody Theatre will stage Deborah McAndrew’s Bright Lights Over Bentilee, which tells how witnesses saw a glowing, saucer-shaped craft touch down in a field beside the Bentilee housing estate—at the time the largest council estate in Europe.
McAndrew said, “three things attracted me to this story: a UFO, the 1960s as a time period and Bentilee. This corner of the city is much maligned and often misunderstood. I didn’t know it well before I started to research this play but it’s an extraordinary place—more like a village than an estate—and the people I’ve met there have been really inspiring.”
Bright Lights Over Bentilee will be performed in The Dipping House, Claybody’s new permanent venue which used to house the Spode pottery.
Director Conrad Nelson, added, “science fiction is a genre I love and at Claybody Theatre we like to create an immersive world for our audience to experience. It’s exciting to be adapting our atmospheric venue, The Dipping House, to suggest something that could literally be out of this world.”
Bright Lights over Bentilee will run from Friday 27 September until Saturday 12 October.