“As you lived, so shall you die.” The death threat to the writer was baffling. The choice of murder weapon unravelled the mystery.

He was found on his swivel chair, strangled, several metres of thread bound tightly around his neck.

“You’d have thought it would have snapped,” observed Detective Sergeant Ringer.

One end of the thread was tied to a leg of the writer’s desk. DCI Stafford gave the loose end a tug between latex-gloved fingers. “Nylon. The synthetic threads are stronger. Who is he, anyhow?”

“ABC Henri.”

“ABC you what?”

“Angry But Calm Henri.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“A made up one. Real name was Henry Burke. Author of the Detective Ron Moody series of novels.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Bestsellers if you believe him. The actual sales figures suggest otherwise. He had been dropped by his publisher.”

“Ron Moody, you say? Any connection with the actor?”

“Henri always claimed that Ron Moody the actor took his name from his character. Despite the fact that Ron Moody the actor has been called Ron Moody since 1930 and Henri’s first Ron Moody novel came out in 2004. He also claims that DBC Pierre – that is, Dirty But Clean Pierre, the 2003 Booker-prizewinning novelist – stole the idea for his unusual pseudonym from him. A year before Henri broke into print with his oddly similar moniker.”

“A bit of a storyteller then? Given to the odd porky pie?”

“Most writers are. Especially writers of fiction.” DS Ringer was a graduate, and liked to make pronouncements consistent with this.

“Well, that explains the choice of murder weapon. And the wording of the death threat.”

“It does?”

“Of course,” said Stafford, a perky smile flexing his lips. He was not a graduate and took pleasure in bewildering them. “He’s a spinner of yarns. And it’s yarn that’s done for him.” He stretched the thread taut and tweaked it, so that it gave out a musical twang. “Now all we have to do is find the perp. Mind you, I don’t think we have to look far. This is not so much murder, as self-murder. You could say it’s ABC Henri’s last yarn.”

“But how could he do this to himself?”

DCI Stafford gave the swivel chair a kick and set it spinning, still holding the loose end of thread. As the chair rotated, the tight ligature around the dead writer’s neck unwound. “WD-40 on the chair mechanism so it spins freely. By the time it gets going, the momentum was such that he couldn’t have stopped it even if he’d wanted to.”

“But why?”

The Review section of the Saturday Guardian lay open on the desk at the paperback bestseller charts. The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo was in first position, followed by its sequels in second and third. “Good career move,” said Stafford.

“As you lived, so shall you die.” The death threat to the writer was baffling. The choice of murder weapon unravelled the mystery.

Many thanks to our brilliant director Poppy Burton Morgan and Will Reynolds the genius of design, lighting and projection. Thanks also to our amazing pianist Richard Casey and to Carlos Del Cueto, the conductor and musical director. Thanks to Heather Doole who produced for Metta Theatre and to Liz Webb who produced for the New Music Players, and to Emily Jenkins, the assistant director. But most of all, thanks to our incredibly talented and committed cast:
Cocteau (baritone): Andrew McIntosh
Princess (mezzo): Lucy Williams
Orpheus (tenor): Peter Kirk
Eurydice (soprano): Emily Phillips
Raymond (counter-tenor): Ben Williamson
Eurydice (video artist): Loren O’Dair.

The picture above shows Andrew McIntosh as Cocteau and Peter Kirk as Orpheus. You can view some more photos from rehearsals here. We’re hoping to produce a touring production in 2011, with a fully scored instrumentation.

cocteau in the underworld trailer from william reynolds on Vimeo.

William Reynolds, designer and video maker for the forthcoming Grimeborn Festival production of Cocteau in the Underworld, has put together a fabulous trailer for the opera which is now available for viewing on vimeo.

For anyone who’s interested in knowing a bit more about CITU, here’s an article written by the show’s producer, Heather Doole, running in The List.

Cocteau in the Underworld, music by Ed Hughes, words by me, will be performed in a double bill with Philip Glass’s opera of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles, in this year’s Grimeborn Festival on Friday 20 and Saturday 21 August.

Director is Poppy Burton-Morgan, with design and video by William Reynolds.

The Mahler was nothing new. He used it to block out the voices. In point of fact, it was just the one voice he wanted blocked, his wife’s. He found it took the Symphony of a Thousand to drown out the Nagging of One. (So why, on this day, was it playing when she was not in the house?)

No, theirs was not a happy marriage. It had not been for some time. Neither of them could say with any certainty how and when their differences had first arisen. It was the accumulation of a thousand tiny rankling grievances on each side that had led to a state of perpetual, mutual disappointment.

That so many of their grievances were, in themselves, insignificant, only made matters worse. There is nothing more guaranteed to nurture resentment than the dim awareness that one is not being entirely fair.

Had either of them voiced their complaints against the other, they might have seen them for what they were: laughable. And the resulting laughter might have led to some kind of reconciliation, all their resentments floating away in a bubble of hilarity. Perhaps it was embarrassment that prevented them from voicing their complaints.

Besides, every resentment stands for another. The wife who complains of her husband’s snoring is really saying that he has never satisfied her in bed. The husband who complains that his wife isn’t interested in sex any more is railing against the spiritual emptiness of the universe.

In their case, strip away the peripheral niggles and you would see that everything came down to one kernel of hostility, to which they both clung for different reasons, and from opposite sides. It was all about music. To be more specific, Mahler.

He was a passionate admirer of Mahler’s No. 8. She claimed it left her cold.

One resentment stood for another. In the degree to which he loved that piece of music she saw how little he loved her. Her refusal to be moved by what he held to be the one work of human creation that expressed his soul became the husband’s old lament, my wife doesn’t understand me. Of course, he did not stop to ask himself whether he understood her.

He liked to play the Mahler at full volume, naturally. The Bose sound system meant there was no distortion. Significantly, however, he never played the Mahler when she was not in the house. It was undoubtedly a hostile act, designed to antagonise her more than to soothe him.

So, again, why was this day different?

For one thing, it was his birthday. And it seemed that the occasion had led to an unexpected rapprochement. The first move came from her. Perhaps it was a sign of how desperate he was for reconciliation that he accepted it without hesitation and without an inkling of suspicion. With joy, in fact.

But of course, the manner in which she made her move was calculated to disarm him completely. In hindsight, it seems she knew where to strike. Clearly she understood that his greatest passion was also his greatest weakness.

She gave him a marble bust of Mahler as a present. There were no touching speeches, no embrace, not even a grudging peck on the cheek. Just a certain shamefaced gruffness on her part. And bewildered happiness on his. Perhaps she did understand him, after all.

She was very precise about where the bust should be placed: on the shelf behind his desk. It would be directly over his head when he was working, as she knew he would be that morning.

There are all kinds of deceptions involved in a marriage, including self-deceptions. Some are minor; others, not so. The second greatest deception that she perpetrated on her husband was that she pretended to be an utter technophobe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He did not know that she had attended a series of night school courses on various aspects of computer, communications and information technologies, as well as a weekend seminar on Acoustical Engineering. He had blithely assumed she was having an affair.

If only.

The greatest deception she had perpetrated on him was connected to the second greatest.  And it was simply this: she was plotting to murder him.

She knew very well that his Bose sound system was Bluetooth compatible. But she pretended not to know where the ON button was. She’d covered Bluetooth wireless technology in several of her courses. But she always referred to it as Greentooth. She knew what frequency of sound would cause the shelf above his head to vibrate enough to cause a heavy object placed on it to shift: 311.127 Hz. And she knew that 311.127 Hz was approximately the frequency of the E♭ above middle C, a note that occurs with some regularity in Mahler’s 8^th.

Her strategies of misdirection were successful.

The new marble bust was given pride of place on the shelf. She told him she was going next door for an hour so that he could work in peace. (He failed to register her sly reference to his habit of only playing Mahler when she was at home; a minor self-deception on his part.)

While the neighbour was in the kitchen making the coffee, it was a simple matter of sending a signal from her mobile phone to activate the Bluetooth-compatible Bose at full volume.

Next door, when the music blasted out, he was startled but not dismayed. It seemed somehow appropriate on this day when his wife had for the first time acknowledged the great passion of his life that he should accept this unexpected bonus, and sit back and wallow in the emotional magnificence of his favourite piece of music. In many ways, it was, for him, the perfect way to go.

A must-see event for any fans of Cocteau! Or Ed Hughes. Or Philip Glass. Or even of me.

The Festival programme is:

Grimeborn – The Opera Festival
Curated by Andrew Steggall

Monday 9th August and Tuesday 10th August

Britten – THE PRODIGAL SON

Mendelssohn – THE HOMECOMING

Wednesday 11th August and Thursday 12th August

Bernstein – TROUBLE IN TAHITI

Burke & Waterfield – SPILT MILK

Friday 13th August and Saturday 14th August

Britten – THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA

Monday 16th August

Scott & Curtis – VICE

Sunday 15th August and Tuesday 17th August

Rogers – THE RAVEN

Roulston – CROW

D’Heudieres & Evans – POISON GARDEN

Wednesday 18th and Thursday 19th August

Moore - THE DIARIES OF ADAM AND EVE

Le Gendre – HOW I WONDER

Campkin & Reynolds – STONE HEART

Friday 20th August and Saturday 21st August

Hughes & Morris – COCTEAU IN THE UNDERWORLD

Glass – LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES

There’s more about the festival as a whole here.