New play set in Sussex revisits Cold War paranoia at The Spring Arts Centre in Havant

​It tells the story of Hagen who has cut himself off from his East German past and raised his daughter in England on the farm. When his daughter returns home with her German boyfriend, Hagen is hurled back into the nightmare of his imprisonment by the Stasi. Terrible suspicions torture him. Surely he’s safe now? Will he ever escape his interrogator? And will he lose his daughter?

Stephen is an award-winning writer for radio and screen – including numerous plays for BBC Radio 4 and several episodes of the long-running BBC1 drama Doctors. He joined Bench Theatre in 2020 and his short play Issie and Dora was performed by them in July 2021.

Explaining this play’s origins, he says: ‘The original spark came from something I was thinking of writing for something else – about somebody who was breaking up a concrete floor to make a patio, and in doing this it stirs up all kinds of memories of a trauma he went through when he was a prisoner.

‘From that, the idea grew and I made him a prisoner in East Germany. Then I had it that he had been living in England for about 15 years – he was running a fruit farm and wanted to be outside as much as possible.

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‘I've had quite a long fascination with the Iron Curtain and communist regimes before the fall of The Wall. and I lived out in Budapest in Hungary in 1985 for a year – I was just a youngster. The first play I ever had produced was a radio play by BBC Radio 4 which was set in Budapest. I went on to write two other plays set there as well. I've got quite an attachment to Hungary and eastern Europe – I’m interested in communist repressive regimes and how people survived them and what happened to them afterwards.’

The play has been a long-gestating project for Stephen – he visited Berlin in 2015 to research this play, visiting the former Stasi headquarters which is now a museum.

‘I first wrote a version of the play after that, and then I've been revising it and strengthening since then and I hope it's the best it can be now.’

The triple-hander features Bench stalwarts Richard Stacey as Hagen, Erin Offord as Rosa and James Andrews in the dual role of Julius and the interrogator.

‘It's only a cast of three, but they've all worked together before and they're really lovely and very kind. They're also very perceptive about their parts and very willing to try out things – and do things in different ways. It's been a very enjoyable set of rehearsals.

‘It's a key thing that it's the same actor playing both Julius and the interrogator. I don't want to reveal everything about the play, but Rosa's father becomes more suspicious and paranoid about Julius and feels he's somehow connected to the man who interrogated him when he was held by the Stasi back in the 1980s.’

Breaking The Wall is at The Spring Arts Centre in Havant from February 8-11. Go to thespring.co.uk.