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I first met Steven back in 1993 when I invited him to a workshop of a new musical I’d written. I’d recently seen his Earl’s Court Carmen and knew that this was a director who knew how to stage music in a wonderfully theatrical, imaginative and sensitive way. To my amazement (not to mention Daniela’s as, apparently, many such letters were routinely ignored!), he wrote back apologizing for not being able to attend, but requesting a tape – the tape led to a meeting – and the meeting to his invitation to compose incidental music for Unfinished Business in the RSC’s Pit. (We always laughed that, where I remembered being very open to all the suggestions he made at our initial meeting regarding my work, his impression was of a rather suspicious young individual who wasn’t about to accept random criticism..!)
Back to the RSC, and come production week, I contracted chickenpox and was unable to attend the tech – farewell RSC career, farewell collaboration with Mr. Pimlott, I thought. However, Steven was happy enough with the result to ask me again, and in the final reckoning we worked on 17 plays together, the last being the current Rose Tattoo. Steven also got me commissions for two musicals, The Water Babies and Six Pictures of Lee Miller, both of which he was able to produce, if not direct, whilst we were all resident in Chichester.
On the way, I received an irreplaceable theatrical education as we worked on everything from the highly immoderate excesses of Camino Real and The Master and Margarita to the stripped-down discipline of Richard II. Perhaps my best time was at Nottingham Playhouse, working on Tennessee Williams’ late play Vieux Carre. If memory serves, we only had 3 weeks in the rehearsal room to mount this substantial and tricky work, and so worked 3 sessions daily. However hard the work, though, it was a constantly stimulating and exciting time, watching him encourage a wonderful company (led by Mary McCloud, Jonathan Cullen and Michael Fitzgerald) to embrace all the characters’ frailties and demons and so reveal Tennessee’s love and understanding of all that is human. That Anthony van Laast has chosen to choreograph (and dance!) to a suite of music from this play at Steven’s NT Celebration is a source of great happiness to me.
Steven was very modest about himself – except, that is, about his definitive interpretations of Gilbert & Sullivan, unmatched certainly for their intense, ebullient panache – the very quality that so unforgettably filled his conversation and indeed his life.