Stephen Plaice was Writer in Residence at Lewes Prison from 1987-1994.
Besides the children's opera Misper (1996) and the youth opera Zoë (2000), Stephen has participated in many education projects for Glyndebourne, including the production of the musical Race the Devil for the Arundel Festival in 1995, which was a collaboration between probationers and drama students, with the composer Adrian Johnstone.
More recently he has worked on three projects with Zukunft@BPhil, the education department of the Berlin Philharmonic.
In 2003 he devised a piece with music students Requiem For Whom?, which was performed at the Gedächtniskirche in Berlin.
In 2004 he worked with three schools in the Berlin suburb of Buch, using local graffiti as the starting-point for a project entitled Secret Signs.
In 2005 he worked with the composer Nigel Osborne and the director Stephen Langridge with inmates of Plötzensee Prison to produce a music theatre piece based on Bluebeard's Castle entitled Seven Doors.
In 2004 with the composer Joseph Phibbs he was commissioned to write a choral drama Rainland for the 25th anniversary of the East Sussex Music Service. This was performed by a chorus of over a thousand children and three soloists at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 2005 he was commissioned to write the libretto for a new adaptation of Mozart and Da Ponte's Così fan tutte, to be performed as an opera/hiphop fusion by professional soloists with a youth chorus. This is a Glyndebourne Education co-production with Finnish National Opera and the Estonian National Opera.
