Plays

My most recent play is Tap Dancing with Jean Paul Sartre  the world’s first (and probably last) existentialist musical. It dramatises a fictional meeting between Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Jean Paul Sartre in Paris in 1956.

It was performed in the autumn of 2018 at Oran Mór in Glasgow, the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh and The Lemon Tree in Aberdeen. The cast were: Darren Brownlie, Ashley Smith, Kevin Lennon and Stuart Fleming. The director was Marilyn Imrie.

Oran Mór is very much my home theatre and I have also written three other plays for them: A Word with Dr.Johnson, Dr.Johnson goes to Scotland and The Jazz Club Murder.

Another home is BBC Radio 4, and my play The Great Passion about Johann Sebastian Bach was broadcast at Easter in 2017 and directed by Eoin O’Callaghan. It starred Simon Russell Beale and Melody Grove, with music by the Dunedin Consort conducted by John Butt.

A theatrical version was performed at Dartington Hall in August 2018 and directed by Richard Williams, with music conducted by Rob Haworth.

This play is currently being developed into a novel.

While I was at the Southbank Centre, I produced a number of staged readings and performances; one of these was a new version of Plato’s Symposium for the Festival of Love.