The Space Between

3 Act Stage play

Story Line.

When mail order bride Su Leis husband Dennis McNally suffered a fatal heart attack during a bout of impromptu afternoon love making, she knew exactly what to do. She phoned an ambulance, made the bed, took a shower and slipped into the brand-new dress that had been hidden in the wardrobe for just such an occasion.

It’s not that Su Lei was heartless. No, not at all. Or that she didn’t love Dennis. Though, actually, perhaps it is. Because the truth of the matter is, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that did love Dennis. Dennis was not an easy man to love. In fact, the few that had been bold enough to try, had struggled to progress as far as the liking stage, and all, with perhaps the exception of his mother, and possibly Su Lei, had eventually decided to turn back.

A builder by trade and millionaire by design, Dennis was self-made and self-opinionated. He was a man who knew exactly what he thought about everything. So, unfortunately, so did everyone else. Insistent that his brutal honesty was more valuable than tact, Denis’s natural inclination to alienate others was equalled only by his gifts for vulgarity and avarice. Having made his fortune as the director of a suspiciously successful construction company by the age of 55, he decided to retire. But not before he had managed to acquire a large piece of land on the edge of a small, unspoilt village and set his workforce to the task of constructing the largest, most ostentatious, light blocking, view obscuring property that his architects could bring themselves to design.

Once the Majestic pile was completed, he took a once in a lifetime trip to Japan and purchased himself, via a marriage agency, a wife. The beautiful, 22-year-old Su Lei. Having only signed up one week before, Su Lei joined the Marriage agency full of hope for a better life. Intelligent, hard working and kind, Su Lei was a trainee English Teacher and had developed her language skills and her sense of humour by watching British T.V shows and, in the process, had become a huge anglophile. Having fallen in love with the idea of falling in love with an Englishman, Su Lei joined the agency in the misguided belief that all British men were like Jeremy Irons. However, once ensconced in Denis’s mock Tudor mansion, she discovered that the majority of them more closely resembled Jeremy Clarkson.

Despite living in what (from the outside at least) resembled a fairy tale castle, the daily routine of domestic tasks and spousal obligations that the young Su Lei was confronted with, was enough to make even Cinderella lose all hope. But, practical and pragmatic as ever, Su Lei accepted that the dream life that she had fantasised about was never going to materialise with Denis and resigned herself to the realities of her solitary and subservient domestic life. But on the day of Denis’s heart attack, that life changed.

Undeterred by the fact that Denis had done little to curry favour with his neighbours, or with anyone else for that matter, Su Lei decided that on the day of his funeral, she would open the doors of her home to her immediate community. Although the invitation that she extended was in order that those who knew Denis would have the opportunity to pay their respects, she was under no illusions that her neighbours’ primary motivation for attending would be to take advantage of the free food and drink. She also fully expected them to make the most of the opportunity to snoop around her house, which of course they did. What she didn’t expect however, was the curious conversation that would take place between her and the three enigmatic women that she had never met before and the extraordinary chain of events that followed.

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