WORK IN PROGRESS
1. 'THE GOTHIC GAME' MUSICAL
A wedding party inadvertently hires the caterers from hell, an are transported to a gothic castle peopled with vampires and other monsters, where they are invited to play a game of elimination to the death. An encounter with their inner demons exposes them to the truth about themselves and each other, which few relationships can survive. But, as Granny says, "It's hard to stay angry with people you've just murdered in cold blood". Based on a board game which caused more laughter than any other whenever it was played.
COMPLETED BOOK AND LYRICS. MUSIC IN PIANO SCORE - AWAITING PRODUCTION
2. 'THE WARS OF ALEXANDER'
Three act tragedy drawn from the romance by the Pearl Poet (?Ralph Strode), author of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. Anectanabus, last Pharaoh of Egypt, wisest of the wise, attempts to save his country from invasion by the use of magic, but his spells fail him. He secretly flees from the power of Artaxerxes and the Persians, disguising himself as an itinerant astrologer, but is determined to raise a son who will take vengeance on the Persians. For a partner he chooses the Queen of Macedon, Olympadas, who is famous for her beauty and strength of will, and whose husband, Philip the Fierce, is always away fighting, if not drunkenly celebrating his victories. Anectanabus uses his magic to persuade Olympadas that she is being visited at night by the god Amun, and in this disguise she willingly accepts his advances, and Alexander is born. By manipulating his dreams, Anectanabus also causes Philip to accept her story, and reluctantly welcome this cuckoo in his nest.
From the first Alexander is determined to protect his mother's honour. Tragically, fearing that his mother is too much under the influence of her astrologer, and that this very close friendship will give rise to rumours, he kills Anectanabus, and only then, by his mother's response, does he discover who his father is. He immediately goes into denial over the murder, and the need to prove himself the son of Amun becomes ever more pressing. When Philip is killed by one of his own generals, Alexander immediately seizes the throne, and, armed with all the wisdom of his teacher Aristotle, he sets out to conquer the world. He has no choice but to keep on proving himself again and again a child of destiny and the gods, but when he is in India with the world at his feet, and confronted by the Brahmins and the Gymnosophists to whom the way of conquest is so foreign, he is forced to question the validity of warfare, in which he has placed so much faith. Is he the father of civilization, evangelist of Greek philosophy, and progenitor of the world's greatest library, or the worst and most destructive monster the world has yet seen? Written at the end of the crusades, this work still has an all-too-obvious relevance to us today.
COMPLETED VERSION OF THE PLAY AVAILABLE
3. 'THE MASTER OF OPPENHEIM'
Alan is an artist who becomes obsessed with the work of an early master painter, most of which was destroyed in the Second World War. The arrival in his life of a young student with a violent family, and the suspicious reappearance of one of the 'destroyed' masterpieces, leads him to the discovery of secret cache of art works, and beyond that into a past life, and a love affair which has haunted him over hundreds of years. He finds himself walking a path which seems certain to lead to his own death, but one which he must walk if he is ever to escape from the past.
IN DEVELOPMENT AS A FILM SCRIPT
4. 'TATTERCOATS'
Film with music based on the Northumbrian legend, recorded by Joseph Jacobs, which is the English counterpart of "Cinderella". Set in Saxon England at a time when Northumbria was the cultural hub of Europe, and England was a divided kingdom this fairy tale takes on a stark reality. Tattercoats, who relies less on magic than personal courage, reclaims her own heritage by driving a flock of geese to London, and through her own belief she creates a fine entourage out of them, to gain entrance to the Royal Palace and the man she loves.
STORY NOW COMPLETE AS A CHILDREN'S NOVEL
5. 'THE BRIDGE'
A fictional love affair, involving real characters, casts new light on the story of endurance and determination which lay behind the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the start the project was beset with financial corruption, and claimed the life of the bridge's designer and paralysed the chief engineer, leaving his wife to carry the load of ensuring the completion of the work to the original specification. A New York landmark that was built on blood and sacrifice and set the benchmark for the scale of building which then began in Manhattan, a great work that gave life and destroyed it. The story is a lesson of survival.
FILM SCRIPT IN DEVELOPMENT
6. 'SNOW SPIDER'
Opera based on an Inuit legend recorded by Knud Rasmussen. A ghost comes in from her lost home in the ice-floes to tell her tale of harrowing human relationships, of her love for a poor disembodied head and the powerful but jealous man in the moon, and her discovery of the harmony and balance necessary for survival in the three worlds of earth, sea and sky.
IN DEVELOPMENT
7. 'GREEN GRASS FALLS'
A dark sexual relationship, based on desire and despair, which evolves between a woman doctor and her husband's lover grows into an intense bond between a victim and her parasitic killer. In her desperate search for an identity Kirsty both liberates and destroys all those with whom she comes into contact, until she makes the final sacrifice, leaving her legacy of pain behind her. A play of love and death.
STAGE PLAY COMPLETED, - AWAITING PRODUCTION
8. 'GREEN ROSES'
Tragic story of misunderstood love, involving an orchestral conductor and an autistic violinist, who had been kept locked away by her family. Following the Velvet Revolution in Prague, he brings her out of hiding, hoping to present her to the world as a genius and savant, but she can only feel the unknown pangs of love. She loses touch with her ability to play, and runs away. Years later, it is her ghost which opens him to a late creative flowering as a composer, a lesson in humility and a spiritual union.
FILM SCREENPLAY COMPLETED - AWAITING PRODUCTION
9. 'THEATRE OF LOVE'
TV Series, or Feature Film. A marriage of period imagery and the theatre of Shakespeare with the uniquely autobiographical music of Hector Berlioz, to tell the tragic love story of his relationship with Harriet Smithson, inspiration of nearly all his major works. A classic golden couple of post-revolutionary France, but with expectations too high and pressures too great to sustain their dreams. Berlioz wrote his own biography in the hope that someone would take it up with panache and humour, as he had taken up that of Benvenuto Cellini, but it begins in laughter and ends in tears.
SCRIPT COMPLETED - AWAITS PRODUCTION
10. 'GAUNT'
A stage musical representation of events during the period of misrule of John of Gaunt, whose contempt for the common man and introduction of the Poll Tax lead to the Peasants' Revolt and the birth of modern Socialism.
IN DEVELOPMENT
11. 'GILGAMESH'
An epic film representation of mankind's earliest recorded story, which became the Bible of the Babylonians, and was influential in the creation of the Jewish Bible. It also remains one of the greatest stories ever written.
IN DEVELOPMENT
12. 'SYMPHONY OF CHANGES'
Four movement symphony inspired by the evolutionary processes implied in four hexagrams of the 'I Ching'. A journey full of unexpected twists and turns, as it follows the path of growth and maturity.
FIRST PART COMPLETED AS 'THE WORLD TREE' - AWAITS PERFORMANCE
13. 'THE DIVINE PARADOX'
Potentially the greatest scientific discovery of the Middle Ages, the acceptance of paradox as part of God's plan, - which is to say an integral part of the structure of the universe -, was used by the 'Pearl Poet' as a justification of his humanist beliefs. An understanding of his part in the English Renaissance of the 14th Century not only creates a picture of his times as far more 'advanced' than was previously thought, but also leads us towards the identification of this elusive genius.
LOOKING FOR A PUBLISHER WITH IMAGINATION
14. 'PEARL CANTATA'
Setting for choir, four soloists and orchestra of the 20 'songs' which form the wheel of 'Pearl' (see above), arguably the finest poem of the Middle Ages.
FIRST PART COMPLETE - OTHERS SKETCHED OUT
15. 'THE KING'S ANGEL'
Play in ten short acts to be performed over a day, telling a fictional story based on true events in the life of Charles VIII of France, the self-styled pilgrim king, the 'lost world' of Mont Aiguille, and the very human angel he found to guide him.
FIRST FIVE ACTS COMPLETED
16. 'CHILDREN OF THE OCTAGON'
Novel. Dark fantasy exploring the relationship between an idealistic young barrister and the members of a secret society which he suspects to have been controlling his life.
FIRST DRAFT COMPLETED