No-Name Roundabout - Michael Hulme

Four strangers are caught in journeys they never intended to take.Jo-Jo is swept from the futility of his everlasting life into a ‘slice-of-unused-history,’ the very one that Alice has made her catastrophic escape into. Punch, a hardened renegade, is blown backwards through a hedge into a magical wood. Finally, scooping them all into the 21st century, comes Evie, an androgynous and perplexed refugee from her own existence.Four now become eight and eight find new meaning on the derelict site of No-Name Roundabout. As they resurrect a collapsing transport café, they take a brief break on a parallel planet, chaperoned by a luminous, self-important rabbit. The travelling showman’s van takes its perplexed dinner guests on an uncanny trip through time. There’s also the question of the burned man under the hill to be resolved and how does the siege of Ryazan, in the 13th century, fit into the picture?All the while, our players are haunted by one baleful, inhuman presence. Until it is excised, an ugly knot will remain tangled in the weave of the planet’s cloth. Within a comedy of errors, tempered by mutual love and affection, can metaphysics and morality finally be resolved?