Stephen has produced and directed four operas to date. Two ‘mash’ versions of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul. And Finding Butterfly, a updating of the Puccini classic. All were performed in amazing site-specific venues in London. All were aimed at gathering new audiences for opera. Finding Butterfly subsequently toured to Japan.

In 2017, after two thrilling productions of Verdi’s Otello and Shakespeare’s Othello which toured in London, Kent and Sussex, he was offered the artistic directorship of Kent Opera. The company is currently preparing a ten week series of workshops in HMP Swaleside to make a music theatre/opera piece with prisoners from the themes of Ot(h)ello.

Prior to this, Stephen set up OperaMachine to enable opera to happen “for the many, not the few”, and, in the first productions he formed a choir of refugees, Sanctuary Voices Chorus, to work alongside professional opera singers.

Stephen has ambitions to stage more opera. Productions of Verdi’s Macbeth, Lulu, Cunning Little Vixen… some Mozart… Also, in light of the refugee crisis engulfing the Middle East and the results of botched Western interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and North and West Africa, a fundraising concert for refugees based on the music of The Consul, on the V Day model from before .

He is currently working on a project with the Chinese soprano Li Li based on her scenario The Makeshift.

But it wasn’t always so. He’d never been to an opera prior to 2006, knew nothing about opera and had no particular desire to go to one. In that year, though, he met, socially, some opera student from the Arts University in Graz, Austria, offered  to do some acting workshops with them and early the next year, in a rehearsal room at the University, finally made a workshop in part of which they sang. And he got hooked.

Or semi hooked. On opera. It’s a stormy relationship. Love-hate. How could it not be?  Opera must be the most inbred, closed, self-satisfied art-form on the planet. This has to change if it has any hope of surviving as anything other than a cultural curiosity.