Stephen Plaice's trilogy of operas with the composer John Lunn have all been produced at Glyndebourne and have set the standard for main-stage opera for a young audience in the last ten years. Richard Morrison of The Times said that they had 'virtually redefined the genre' with Misper and that Zoë was 'another giant step forward'. After Zoë, Stephen and John were commissioned to write an opera for the Glyndebourne Tour, with the brief that it should appeal to the lost generation of opera-goers, the twenty and thirty-somethings who usually never enter the opera house. The result was Tangier Tattoo, an operatic thriller, which toured nationally until December 2005.
Before working in the opera, much of Stephen's theatre work was produced and directed by Alison Edgar, artistic director of Shaker Productions who were based at the Hawth in Crawley, including the nationally acclaimed Trunks, and the trilogy of short comedies, The Last Post, The Shortlist and The Milk Train, which appeared in successive seasons of 'Briefs', Edgar's annual selection of short plays.
In Brighton in the mid 1980s Stephen co-founded the shortlived Thumbscrew Theatre and in 1987 Alarmist Theatre which continued to produce and tour plays until the late 1990s. These companies produced many of Stephen's early plays, adaptations and translations.