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Adam Lowe is an award-winning author, editor and publisher from Leeds, now based in Manchester. He runs Dog Horn Publishing and is Director and Writing Coordinator for Young Enigma, a writer development programme for LGBT young people. He sometimes performs as Beyonce Holes.

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A new stage show about a bisexual woman who witnesses key moments in radical English history, collector of tears by Sean Burn, is touring nationally in autumn.

collector of tears is a sweeping love story that spans four centuries in the life of the cursed Sunderland woman Tanya Sealt. Tanya’s curse is that she cannot age until she has cried. Tanya witnesses key radical moments in English history, collecting tears as she does and storing them in glass containers. As she opens each container, she shares the stories of the tears inside with her audience.

Tanya’s journey teaches her to fight for human rights, and creates the circumstances for her to come to terms with her own bisexuality and unageing identity. Then finally, on the day of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation on 22 November 1990, Tanya discovers the key to releasing her tears.

Colin Teevan says of the show: ‘Sean Burn’s collector of tears is a sweeping epic of a monologue that traverses centuries yet concerns itself with the most intimate of emotions. Full of surprising poetry, an artful weave of half-remembered myths, it is a theatrical Orlando for our times.’

This is a powerful, exciting play that celebrates queer identities and the long-running tradition of radicalism in England.