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STEINBERG'S
DAY OF ATONEMENT
(Winner of an international playwriting competition in
1995, its first professional run took place at Pentameters Theatre, London in May / June
1998, directed by Neil McPherson. Broke a thirty year box office record for that theatre,
and was subsequently a runner-up in the Art’s Council’s 1998 / 99
Meyer-Whitworth Award for new writing. A further production took place in Leeds in
June 2000 as part of the Wharfedale Drama Festival.)
Length (excluding interval): 100 minutes
(2 acts).
Cast: 4 male (including 2 teenage), 2
female.
Synopsis: During a career that has lasted
forty years, Steinberg, an Orthodox Jewish schoolmaster and Holocaust survivor, has
deservedly become a legend amongst his pupils. But now he finds he can cope less and less
with the generation gap between himself and his current crop, nor with the world of their
parents. After the meddlesome mother of his most obnoxious pupil succeeds in forcing his
compulsory retirement, occasioning also a near breakdown, she visits him, initially to
salve her conscience. But soon she discovers that she has much to learn from Steinberg's
spirituality. As their relationship develops, and Steinberg begins to look forward to her
visits, his loneliness leads him to misunderstand her motives. And, with the Day of
Atonement about to begin, he is forced to re-appraise his life, and those sacred beliefs
that he has never before thought to question.
CHILD
OF THE FOREST
(First professional run took place at the Finborough Theatre, London in
March / April 2000, directed by Neil McPherson. Achieved the second highest box office in
the theatre’s history. Previously given a rehearsed reading at the Man-in–the
Moon, directed by Jacob Murray.)
Length (excluding interval): 100 minutes
(2 acts).
Cast: At the first professional
production the cast, including doubling, consisted of:
3 male, 5 female (including 1 child)
Number of characters without doubling:
6 male, 6 female (including 1 child), 1 offstage female.
Synopsis: The time, 1940. The place,
Eastern Europe. Paola Simiak keeps the local shop in a tiny village situated in the midst
of dense forest. Paola is a dreamer, who loves to wander in the forest and to commune with
nature, and who has a deep and very personal relationship with God. She is also the butt
of her neighbours' ridicule, and the despair of her drunken and unfaithful husband, Jan.
But there is one overwhelming sadness in Paola's life ... she is childless. And her
frequent phantom pregnancies only seem to add to that sense of grief. Then, one day, as
she is wandering in the forest, she discovers a small bundle lying at the foot of a silver
birch ... a baby girl abandoned by its parents. "Can this be the child I was
promised?", she asks herself. "The child that God told me He was going to
send?" Paola sets about the task of bringing up the child in her own image. But, as
War engulfs the area, Paola has to make the decision which will lead them both to their
own inevitable destinies.
LITTLE
SQUARES
(Originally workshopped at the Soho Theatre,
London, had a script-in-hand performance at the Finborough Theatre in October 1999.)
Length (excluding interval): 110 minutes (2 acts)
Cast: Ensemble piece, which can be played by a cast of 3
males and 4 females.
Synopsis: In the Summer of 1991 Adam Marcuse, a
university lecturer from London, is on holiday in Los Angeles with his wife and their two
young children, when his wife suffers a devastating brain haemorrhage. The next few months
Adam spends at his wife’s hospital bedside, first in Los Angeles, and later back in
London, while his wife, paralysed in both mind and body, hovers on the edge of death.
Throughout this traumatic period, Adam copes heroically. But it is when his wife begins to
make an unexpected recovery that Adam realises how much he has come to relish both the
feeling of control, and the experience of being the centre of attention, that her illness
has given him. And that crisis is often so much easier to deal with than normality. This
autobiographical work is an attempt by the writer to describe his own actions and emotions
when faced with the above situation. And its resolution.
ALLPORT’S
REVENGE
(Runner-up in the 2000 Verity Bargate Award)
Length (excluding interval): 100 minutes (2 acts)
Cast: 2 male, 2 female.
Synopsis: Arnold Rosen has two sons, both
of whom suffer from a genetic disease of the kidneys. Eight years ago Arnold donated a
kidney to save his older son’s life. Now the younger one also requires a transplant.
Arnold makes a proposal which, while saving his son’s life, would destroy his own.
The focus of the play is on the moral dilemma which this poses, and on the family
tensions, rivalries, and feelings of guilt which arise from this.
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