During the making of Liminal Stranding, I didn't want to victimise or romanticise queer life; I wanted to present the darker side, the human flaws. Instead of kitchen-sink realism, I'd describe the realism in my work as "shit, piss, fart" — a resistance to social dogma, to authority, and to the absurdity of life.

 Here we go: a single toilet sits on its white plinth — quiet as Duchamp's Fountain — across Blue Dream, Liminal Stranding and, later, Blue Screen of Death. As the critic Hannah McGill observes, the toilet is where our public and private selves are negotiated: a site of sex, drug use, weeping and secret drinking, the one room that meets us at our worst. It sits at the crossroads of clean and filthy, ordinary and taboo.

For the queer community it carries another charge: cruising culture, and the gender debates over who it belongs to, make it a semi-private public space, a liminal zone, a battleground of access. Especially under constant public surveillance, it may be the last safe place we can still claim without intrusion. Turning the theatre into a toilet, while keeping the front semi-transparent screen as a "one-way mirror" that lets the audience indulge a theatrical voyeurism with the fourth wall intact — this is where the design of Liminal Stranding begins. Inside that frame, through the gaze of a young Chinese international student, we experience his encounters in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.

Living through that lockdown alone, I saw how it reshaped people's values, divided the classes, and transformed each life. Everyone has their own lockdown story to tell — in collective memory there is no longer a Common Era and a time Before the Common Era, but a pre-COVID and a post-COVID era. Quarantine forced everyone into extreme isolation, made to face an uncertain future — and the self. To exaggerate this paradox of isolation and safety, I let only one character — Harry, the Chinese international student — appear physically on stage; the rest of the cast remain "phantoms" around him, until Hassan, Harry's friend, steps onto the stage at the end and draws him out of this internal prison. Watching the sunrise together on Brighton beach, Harry looks back at the camera and calls the audience "shadow people" — a common hallucination brought on by sleeplessness under substance abuse.

Jimmy, the one who overdoses, is modelled on George Dyer — Francis Bacon's lover. Their relationship is the seed of the whole collection: Bacon, raised in Ireland in a British middle-class family, and Dyer, working-class — a love strained across the class divide. A white British working-class man in a red tracksuit, Jimmy looms on the screen like an imperial shadow haunting the Chinese student, and the class melancholia of the present.

Alongside the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements, the lockdown fell hardest on the kinds of work that demand presence — hospitality, the NHS, theatre-makers, artists, those who labour with their bodies. But the deeper subject is the bond between class and addiction. Cynthia Cruz describes a "class melancholia": faced with systemic walls to mobility and the quiet erasure of working-class life, people inherit a collective grief — a liminality of class identity — and turn to substances to self-medicate, which only deepens the stagnation. High living costs in the UK already push the young toward cheaper, more dangerous alternatives to alcohol.

And the grief does not dissolve when money arrives: even raised into a higher class, people still drink and use to escape the same pain — the old self dies, and the new self is not yet accepted in the class it has entered.Similarly, even as LGBTQ+ rights have been widely legislated and liberalised across Western society, the long shadow of the AIDS epidemic, of religion and social dogma — the stigma, the shame — remains deeply rooted in the community, and still pushes many to escape through substances. Matthew Todd's figures are stark: gay and bisexual men remain the group most likely to use illicit drugs, and "chemsex" has become a crisis of its own. In today's context, bisexual men and trans women may now show higher rates than gay men; after all, when someone can only be intimate while under the influence, it reflects a long-internalised homophobia and misogyny that still tie queerness to self-destructive tendencies.

At the end of the story, on the stony Brighton beach, Harry and Hassan watch the sun rise freshly over the sea's horizon; in their shared earphones, Jeff Buckley is singing "Lilac Wine". After hearing so many of the unfortunate, traumatic stories in the community, I wish for Liminal Stranding to serve as a requiem to these lost souls. Through this work, my goal is to raise awareness and to offer more support to young, working-class queer and trans people — to bring the "toilet" onto the stage, and give visibility and access to those who usually go unseen and neglected.