Friendly Fire & Eclipse

Six friends are interviewed by the police after the disappearance of Lucy Lime, the strange unnerving girl - 'I am a walking Universe, I am' - whom they met on the beach beneath the cliffs.

Adie likes Gary who likes Shelley who likes Adie. Relationships are strained as they 'sort out what they can put up with, and what they can't' - under the shadow of a soldier on a Great War memorial.

Eclipse by Simon Armitage and Friendly Fire by Peter Gill were specially commissioned by the National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme for young people.

If we hope to have discerning practitioners and audiences tomorrow we must ensure that work of quality is available to young people now. The Connections series is designed to provide such work in easily accessible volumes.

Peter Gill was born in 1939 in Cardiff and started his professional career as an actor. A director as well as a writer, he has directed over a hundred productions in the UK, Europe and North America. At the Royal Court Theatre in the sixties, he was responsible for introducing D. H. Lawrence's plays to the theatre. The founding director of Riverside Studios and the National Theatre Studio, Peter Gill lives in London. His plays include The Sleepers Den (Royal Court, London, 1965), A Provincial Life (Royal Court, 1966), Over Gardens Out (Royal Court, 1968), Small Change (Royal Court, 1976), Kick for Touch (National Theatre, London, 1983), Cardiff East (National Theatre, 1997), Certain Young Men (Almeida Theatre, London, 1999), The York Realist (English Touring Theatre, 2001), Original Sin (Sheffield Crucible, 2002), Another Door Closed (Theatre Royal, Bath, 2009), A Provincial Life (National Theatre of Wales, Sherman Cymru, Cardiff, 2011), Versailles (Donmar Warehouse, London, 2014) and As Good a Time as Any (Print Room at the Coronet, 2015). Simon Armitage was born in West Yorkshire and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds. His collections, which have received numerous prizes and awards, include Seeing Stars (2010), The Unaccompanied (2017), Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (2019), Magnetic Field (2020), Blossomise (2024) and his acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2007). He writes extensively for television and radio, and is the author of two novels and the non-fiction bestsellers All Points North (1998), Walking Home (2012) and Walking Away (2015). His theatre works include The Last Days of Troy, performed at Shakespeare's Globe in 2014. From 2015 to 2019, he served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2018. Simon Armitage is Poet Laureate.