NO sooner has last weekend’s Little Festival Of Everything in Coxwold ended than festival director Alexander Wright is opening his new play about time, dreams and reality at York Theatre Royal tomorrow night.

Alexander’s company, The Flanagan Collective, will be premiering Beulah in The Studio for four nights, ahead of its run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The play takes its name from the world that Romantic poet William Blake created, somewhere in between heaven and Earth, as Alexander considers our concept of time, our life expectancies and our measurement of time during our stay in this world.

“The play delves into those inexplicable moments and spaces in our lives: where night mixes with day, where shadows look like people, where our dreams mix with reality and where our body tells us to believe something when our mind knows that it’s impossible,” he says.

Part story, part conversation and part musical, Beulah features poetry and live original music and song, drawing inspiration from everything from traditional folk ballads to Iceland’s Sigur Ros.

Directed by Tom Bellerby, the production’s composers, musicians and performers, Jim Harbourne, from Easingwold, and The River People’s Ed Wren, will be switching between ten instruments as well as using puppets and storytelling.

“I’ve been fascinated by William Blake for years as he understands the world in a very magical way but in a magical way that makes sense as to who we are and what we’re doing here,” says Alexander.

“He imagined that the world was made up of four concentric circles: Hell; Earth; Beulah and Eternity, or the equivalent of Heaven.

“He thought Beulah was a place of mild and pleasant rest that had windows into Heaven and back into our living world; so it’s an inexplicable space that we simultaneously understand but don’t understand. It makes absolute sense but absolutely no sense too.”

In a nutshell, we measure our age by our birthdays but in Alexander’s play, the character of Liam was born in a leap year, and Beulah explores his concept of time. “On face value, what happens in the plot is impossible by the rules that we live by, but by the logic in the play, that world can exist, does exist and is possible.”

Beulah is not a heavy piece, Alexander points out. “It’s also a fun story about a lion and an island sailing into the sunset, as well as a man called Liam and a girl called Lyca – the name of the girl in Blake’s poem Little Girl Lost And Little Girl Found,” he says.

Time ticks on as you read this article. “I love the language we use about time, as if it’s something precious and we’ve earned, like our wages,” says Alexander. “We ‘spend time’, ‘save time’; we ask, ‘Can I borrow two minutes of your time?’, but the reality is that time will just happen.”

Time’s up.

• The Flanagan Collective presents Beulah in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, tomorrow until Saturday, 7.45pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk