I was still more surprised at the amount of expression that actress Lucy Grey managed to coax out of it: homesickness and sorrow mixed with detachment and wonder. My thanks go to her and to Insignificant directors Phil and Amy.

The audience feedback that the Insignificant folks collected was mostly kind:

Reminiscent of ‘Major Tom’, Lucy portrayed the wonder of watching the earth from orbit,and the sadness as her country erupted into chaos beneath her. Very sad, and excellently acted (though I have to admit to being biased – I adore Lucy’s acting).

‘Revolution 99′ – Really impressed to see so much put into such a small space

‘Revolution#99′, which is an interesting idea, could do with a smidge more polishing and enlargement. There’s some further truly interesting thoughts and observations waiting to be winkled out there but which never quite made it on the night.

Sumit Dam – beautiful and opaque, a well placed shift of tone for the evening. Lucy Grey – a pleasure to watch being performed – tender.

Revolution 99 – very original take on the theme, though it felt less like a dramatic piece than a short story.

That last one is interesting. I don’t know what about the piece comes over like a short story, though I’m happy to accept that it does. Perhaps if I could work it out I’d be better at writing performance pieces.

A final note: I wrote this on the evening of 8 August 2011, as riots swept across London; and with the events of the Arab spring fresh in my memory. Those very different revolts mixed with vague memory of an real astronaut (cosmonaut?) whose country nominally ceased to exist while he was in orbit, possibly during the last days of the Soviet Union. But I couldn’t track down the story behind that memory. Did I imagine it? Or is it a real footnote to history of spaceflight? If you know, please do leave a comment.

At the time, I think I was intending to enter a short story competition for crime writers, but it was obvious that the end product wasn’t really appropriate: more straight-up character study than whodunnit. Having written it, I was a bit of a loss as to what to do with it: it’s not my usual kind of story.

So when Liars’ League Leeds, the Northern offshoot of the excellent Liars’ League, announced a few weeks later that the theme of its debut event was to be North & South, the serendipity was irresistible. It was duly read by Madeleine Thorne at the event in July 2011.

The picture is colored smoke, posted by def110 on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.