In the middle of an English wood there lies an abandoned school and chapel, built for charcoal-burners and their families. It is a little like a boat, beached amongst the beech and oak trees, its roof blown away in a great storm. In the summer of 1967 we played very near to it, without knowing of its existence. At the same time, riots were flaring in Hong Kong.

A derelict chapel is a melancholic sight, but a beautiful one too. One of the greatest images of melancholy in art is Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, an engraving. It is, with its sister pictures Knight, Death and the Devil and St Jerome in His Study, a wondrous source of thought and feeling about human beings, their sadness, and their world-making imagination.

Dürer came from Nürnberg in Germany, a lovely city built on the Pegnitz river. Here Dürer made his masterworks, and here the arguments of Luther’s reformation raged. Here the Nazi party held its rallies, here the Allied bombers dropped their explosives and incendiaries, and here, in a ruined city, the Trials were conducted after the war.

Melencolia weaves these threads through speech, gesture, projections and recorded music. Dark, mad and comic, it is the sixth in Suart’s continuing Eternity Cabaret series of one-man theatre works.

Peter has spent half of his life in Hong Kong, half in England, and half in books. He co-founded ‘the box’, a theatrical music ensemble, with Kung Chi Shing in Hong Kong in 1987. He writes and illustrates the Tik and Tok books (published by MCCM Creations in Hong Kong), which introduce children and adults to the mysteries lying, untouched, at our feet, and illustrates classic fiction for the Folio Society in London, lately Gulliver's Travels and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He is the best amateur tennis player to be found anywhere in his house.

The programme lasts for about 1 hour 50 minutes without intermission

Suitable for ages 14 and above. Children under the age of 6 will not be admitted