23 Facts About Stephen Plaice

Stephen Plaice was born on 9 September 1951 and is a UK-based dramatist and scriptwriter who has written extensively for theatre, opera and television.

Stephen Plaice became Professor of Dramatic Writing at the school in 2018.

Stephen Plaice was born in Watford UK in 1951 and attended Watford Grammar School for Boys.

Stephen Plaice went on to study German and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Sussex, Marburg and Zurich.

Stephen Plaice was co-translator of Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope and of Bloch's Heritage of our Time.

Alarmist produced many of Stephen Plaice's plays and adaptations including his version of Vladimir 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, Stephen 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, Stephen Plaice's play about the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934, was a critical success.

From 1987 Stephen Plaice was Writer-in-Residence at Lewes Prison, where he did the research for Trunks, and for Prometheus Unlocked, a play about a prison arsonist.

In 1994, after seven years, Stephen Plaice left the prison residency and began writing scripts for ITV's The Bill, scripting more than twenty episodes.

Stephen Plaice has worked extensively with the Education Department of the Berlin Philharmonic, most notably in 2004 with inmates in Plotzensee Prison in Berlin on a project entitled Seven Doors, based on Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle.

In 2014 Stephen Plaice wrote and directed The Gospel According to Lilian, about the visitation of Anglican nuns by the spirit of Mary Magdalene in the 1950s.

In 2018, Stephen Plaice wrote Carriages at Midnight, a three-hander exploring the relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

The Independent on Sunday praised "Stephen Plaice's beautifully organised libretto".

Stephen Plaice 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 2006, Stephen Plaice scripted a hip-hop adaptation of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte for Glyndebourne under the title of School4Lovers.

Stephen Plaice collaborated again with Taylor on Ludd and Isis, a community opera commissioned for the opening of the new Royal Opera House Production Park in Thurrock in late 2010.

In 2016, Stephen Plaice was commissioned by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to create a new operatic adaptation of Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale with composer Julian Philips.

Stephen Plaice developed his libretto for this new opera, The Tale of Januarie, in Chaucerian Middle English and the opera was premiered to wide acclaim in spring 2017.

Also in 2017, with the composer Jamie Mann, Stephen Plaice created Counting Sheep, one of the ten Snappy Operas that Mahagonny Opera Group produced in designated schools throughout the UK.

In 2018, for Surrey Arts, with the composer Joanna Lee, Stephen Plaice wrote No Sound Ever Dies, a sonic suite that explores the glamorous era of the Brooklands racing circuit.

Stephen Plaice 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.

Stephen Plaice is currently collaborating with the writer Zoe Palmer to create a musical about Will Marion Cook, the first composer to bring black musicals to Broadway.