Composers and their stage works 



Dreams From a Summer House

Alan Ayckbourn & John Pattison

A musical play : Words by Alan Ayckbourn; Music by John Pattison

A clever, highly original musical which provides challenging roles for eight actors/ singers and combines the ingenious comic expertise of Alan Ayckbourn with John Pattison's fully integrated score (published separately) that ranges from the operatic to pop.


Grayson and his formidable wife, Chrissie, are hosting a garden party at their Leatherhead home. Robert, an artist formerly married to their eldest daughter Amanda, has borrowed the garden summer house to work on illustrations of Beauty and the Beast for a children's book, but Robert is not so much painting as drinking and berating womankind in general, and Amanda in particular. So, it's an uphill struggle for Amanda's young sister, Mel, who nurtures an unrequited love for Robert. As the summer evening progresses and Robert becomes ever more cynical, the subject of his painting, Belle, suddenly materialises before him, closely followed by an irate Amanda, her cowering husband Sinclair and Baldemar, a beast, come in search of Belle ...

  • "It is almost impossible not to be seduced by this fanciful flight of the imagination. The story develops a cliff-hanging drama of its own (like a good fairy-tale, in fact) and, despite the many excellent jokes, the musical becomes an unashamedly sentimental celebra-tion of romantic music ... John Pattison's score is often gorgeously lush, and the love duet between Robert and Belle has a quality of tender yearning to rival anything in The Phantom of the Opera ... The warm good humour of Dreams from a Summer House is especially welcome. Enchanting, ingenious and often uproariously funny..." Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

  • "Funny, beguiling, melancholy: Sondheim with a smile." John Peter, Sunday Times

Cast: M4 F4

Setting: a garden summer house

Perusal material available from Samuel French Limited

Libretto ISBN 0 573 08104 2
Vocal score ISBN 0 573 08599 4