have a far more cluttered atmosphere, so the two pieces will play off each other. It may be that it differs from The Yellow Wallpaper in that there will be some spoken or chanted words as well as the words set to music. The other piece I am working on at the moment is a song cycle, collaborating with Jocelyn Freeman who runs a company called SongEasel. Jocelyn wants to introduce song to new audiences. She came to me after The Yellow Wallpaper and asked me whether I could suggest any texts to be set to music to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Byron’s Don Juan . My proposal was a song cycle of The Seven Ages of Don Juan , using Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ from infant to pantaloon. I have taken the 500 pages of Don Juan and turned them into eight stanzas written in ottava rima , with the first performance of two of the songs taking place in a church in Nunhead at the end of May. The music is by a British-Iranian composer, Emily Hazrati, and the
the piece. I went to some late rehearsals and studiously didn’t interrupt but just made a few simple, practical notes for the director, Amy. And as always, you must ask yourself, what authorial rights do you have? It gets to a stage, once there is a broad sense of understanding what this is about, that it becomes what the composer sees in the words you have given them. And I like that. DK: Could you talk further about your ideas for future projects in words and music? JS: Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a one-man play of Gogol’s short story ‘Diary of a Madman’, which went to the Edinburgh Fringe and played in London around 2000. I have been revisiting that and peeling it back with a view to it becoming a companion piece to The Yellow Wallpa- per : a one-man piece to go with the one-woman piece. At the moment I am working with a composer called Luke Styles on the instrumentation for that. Whereas The Yellow Wallpaper was very spare, this will probably
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THE ALLEYNIAN 712
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