THE LIGHTHOUSE

This new musical has been developed by the collaborative team of Daniel O’Brien – book (Dick Turpin’s Last Ride, Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds and UK Tour, Cider with Rosie and Three Men in a Boat UK Tours, Double Indignity Bridewell Theatre), Peter White - music (MD, Le Miserables US and UK Tours; Hairspray UK Tour; Legally Blond UK Tour) and Dougal Irvine – lyrics (The Snow Queen Nuffield Theatre; Future Fest Lyric Hammersmith; The Other School St James Theatre; Blood Wedding Royal and Derngate).

Following a workshop at Jerwood Space in December 2014 the team is currently trying to find the time to rewrite! The current script and examples of the music are available on request.

​The Lighthouse is a story of morality and immorality, prejudice and honesty, slavery and freedom, love and hatred, underpinned by an all-pervasive sense of the supernatural. It is set in and around an 18th century English town, Blackerton Point, on the Somerset coast, a few miles away from the slave port of Bristol.
 
The story revolves around how the town devotes most of its energies to the business of wrecking – the luring of merchant ships to their doom on the rocks that threaten safe passage from Bristol to the wide Atlantic Ocean. It is a society mired in the morality and practices of a bygone era. Isolated, superstitious, violent and immoral, its inhabitants go about their illegal, yet highly profitable business.
 
Presiding over the coastline, situated on a rocky outcrop, stands a Lighthouse whose inhabitants are secretive and reclusive. The old Lighthouse Keeper and a young dual-heritage girl co-exist alone. Nobody knows them well and nobody wants to know them. Just so long as the light is doused on a stormy night when a fully laden ship is in the Channel.
 
The Lighthouse is a chilling portrayal of prejudice, superstition, morality and enlightenment, told through the eyes of an outsider.
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