Trelawney of the Wells

This National Theatre production opened at the Olivier Theatre on 18th February 1993 and ran in repertoire for the rest of the year.

The Music

A note by John Caird

I chose the music for this production as a tribute to the life and work of Stephen Oliver, who died in April 1992, aged 42. Over an extraordinarily productive life, Stephen wrote over forty operas and countless scores for plays, most of them at the RSC but also for the national and in the West End.  His scores for Peter Pan and for Nicholas Nickleby in particular will always be remembered  by admirers of his music. His great love of the theatre and of theatre people would have found a delightful focus in Trelawney and I would have asked him to write an original score for this production had he lived just a little longer.
The waltz melody I have used for Trelawney was originally written, in a shorter version, for Sasha, an operetta based on Ostrovsky’s play Artists and Admirers.  In its full version it was used in a masque called Il Sogno della bella Rosina, performed in Florence in 1987, and it was played at Stephen’s memorial service in the spring of 1992 by Jonathan Dove who kindly agreed to arrange the music for this production.