User:Marciabellamy

This is my user page. I'm working on an article about the playwright Stephen Plaice.

Stephen Plaice(born 9 September Watford 1951) is a UK based dramatist and scriptwriter who has written extensively for theatre, opera and television.

Early Career He was born in Watford UK in 1951 and attended Watford Grammar School. He went on to study German and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Sussex, Marburg and Zurich. An extensive account of his student days in Germany was given in The Romantic Road, a series of five programmes broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2009. He was co-translator of Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope (Blackwell 1986) and of Bloch's Heritage of our Time (Blackwell 1991). In the 1980s, wiith the poet Sean O'Brien, he was co-founder of the literary magazine The Printer's Devil.

Playwright

Plaice began his playwriting career as a translator of German plays at the National Theatre in the Seventies. In the Eighties he formed his own theatre companies, the short-lived Thumbscrew Theatre, and then Alarmist Theatre with the theatre director Helena Uren, now known as Helena Bell. Alarmist produced many of Plaice's plays and adaptations including his version of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug which, with the help of the British Council, was taken to Moscow by the company in 1990, one of the first British productions to be performed under perestroika. Later in the Nineties, Plaice worked frequently with Shaker Productions, a theatre company based at the Hawth Theatre in Crawley, run by Alison Edgar. Edgar's 1993 production of Trunks, Plaice's play about the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934, was a critical success and transferred to Battersea Arts Centre and to the Lyric Theatre Studio Hammersmith before going on to tour nationally. His short play The Last Post originally produced by Shaker was made into a film by Sarah Radclyffe Productions in 1995 and nominated for a BAFTA. The film was directed by Ed Blum. From 1987 Plaice was Writer-in-Residence at Lewes Prison, where he did the research for Trunks, and also for Prometheus Unlocked, a play about a prison arsonist. It was also here that his association with Glyndebourne Opera House began, after he invited a team from the Education Department to run annual workshops in the prison. In 1994, after seven years, Plaice left the prison residency and began writing scripts for ITV's The Bill, scripting more than twenty episodes. Plaice has also worked extensively with the Education Department of the Berlin Philharmonic, most notably in 2004 with inmates in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on a project entitled Seven Doors, based on Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. After working in opera for most of the decade, in 2008 Plaice returned to straight drama and wrote Nemesis, a play which documented the extraordinary marriage between John and Ada Galsworthy. John had been a visitor to Lewes Prison in the early 1900s.The play was given a rehearsed reading at the Minerva in Chichester, but has not yet been produced. A new play Mick and Me, about the author's imaginary friendship with a famous rock-star in the 1960s is in development at Watford Palace Theatre.

Opera In 1996 Glyndebourne produced the first of Plaice's librettos, the children's opera Misper, written with the composer John Lunn. There were further collaborations with Lunn for the youth opera, Zoë in 2000 (made into a film for Channel 4 later that same year, directed by Theresa Griffith) and Tangier Tattoo in 2005, both produced at Glyndebourne. These operas were all directed by Stephen Langridge with whom Plaice has enjoyed a long working relationship. Richard Morrison of The Times wrote that the creative team ' virtually redefined the genre' with Misper and that Zoë 'is a giant step forward again'. Tangier Tattoo, however, an opera set against a background of jihadist kif-smuggling in Morocco, and ostensibly created for a target audience of 20 to 30 year olds, was panned by the critics. In 2003 Langridge directed Plaice's first collaboration with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, the chamber opera The Io Passion, which opened the Aldeburgh Festival and toured to Bregenz later in the year. Plaice also wrote the text for Birtwistle's carol The Gleam for the choir of Kings College Cambridge for The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 2003. In 2010 Plaice wrote the libretto for Birtwistle's dramatic oratorio Angel Fighter which was premiered in the Skt Thomaskirche at the Bach Festival in Leipzig. In 2006, Plaice scripted a hiphop adaptation of Mozart's Così Fan Tutte for Glyndebourne under the title of School4Lovers.This production toured to the FNO in Helsinki and to the Estonia Thetare in Talinn. In 2007 Plaice wrote the libretto for Orlando's Gough's The Finnish Prisoner, a co-production between Finnish National Opera and the Lewes-based company The Paddock. The subject matter was the incarceration of Finnish Prisoners in the now demolished Naval Prison at Lewes during the Crimean War. The opera was directed by Susannah Waters. In 2008, with the composer Richard Taylor, Plaice wrote the children's opera Confucius Says for Hackney Music Development Trust. This won the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Education in 2008. He has collaborated again with Taylor on Ludd and Isis, a community opera commissioned for the opening of the new ROH Production Park in Thurrock in late 2010.

Music Theatre Plaice has also written extensively for music theatre. He collaborated with Yusuf Islam on the early drafts of Moonshadow, the Cat Stevens' musical, and took over the book of Daddy Cool, the Frank Farian musical, starring Michelle Collins, Harvey and Javine, which was staged at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 2006 before transferring to a purpose-built Theaterpalast in Berlin the following year. In 2009, with the composer Richard Taylor, he adapted Kipling's The Jungle Book for the Castle Theatre Wellingborough, and this is to be followed at the Castle in 2010 with a musical adaptation of Robin Hood, with the composer Grant Olding.

Plays 1986: Young Faust 1987: Leonce and Lena (adaptation) 1987: Prometheus Unlocked 1990: The Bedbug (adaptation) 1993: Trunks 1995: Home Truths 1995: The Last Post 1996: The Shortlist 1997: The Milk Train 2008: Nemesis 2009: Mick and Me

Libretti 1996: Misper 2000: Zöe 2004: The Io Passion 2005: Tangier Tattoo 2006: School4Lovers 2007: The Finnish Prisoner 2008: Confucius Says 2010: Angel Fighter 2010: The Moon on A Stick 2010: Ludd and Isis

Musicals 1995: Race the Devil 2006: Daddy Cool (with Amani Napthali) 2009: The Jungle Book (adaptation) 2010: Robin Hood (adaptation)

Poetry 1983: Rumours of Cousins (Yorick Books) 1992: Over the Rollers (Yorick Books)