Working in the Following Genres:
Full-Length Plays
One-Act Plays
Collections of Scripts
Peter Harrison is a former newspaper crime reporter and BBC radio and television presenter. Versions of his play, about Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most celebrated hangman, both as a two-man show and an ensemble piece, have been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, The Lowry ( Salford Quays, G.Manchester ), Unity Theatre (Liverpool ), The Dukes (Lancaster ), and the Buxton Fringe Drama festival where under the title Odd Job Man it won both the New Writing award and the Drama award in 2004. |
About the Pierrepoint play, at The Dukes, Lancaster, Clare Brennan, of The Observer said this - "I'm a civil servant. I don't have feelings", the words of an individual meshed in the state bureaucracy in Peter Harrison's short, sharp play based on real events ... As he paces the stage perimeter, Albert Pierrepoint, a mesmerising Martin Oldfield, sizes up the man in a plain serge suit who shuffles the same trajectory,or lies, curled on the bed, or sits, head bowed, silently unaware of anything beyond his gaze -a haunting Gareth Cassidy. The man in the cell, it turns out, is Timothy Evans. Our anxiety for him mounts. When his end comes, he cries his innocence. Later, it is discovered, he was innocent. This is not, Pierrepoint insists, any concern of his. Like all bureaucrats, he is only part of a process. "Nothing to do with me." |
Peter set a record for the Windsor Drama Fringe Festival, having plays accepted in four successive years - All Hallows Eve (2008), The Lift (2009, now re-titled Falling Apart ), We That Are Left (2010, now re-titled Voices ) and All Those Endearing Young Charms (2011, now re-titled Tsunami ). Tsunami, apparently, introduced the Windsor Fringe drama festival's first lesbian kiss! 'The Windsor experience gave me a great deal of fellow-feeling with the nominees on Oscar Night,' he recalls,' having to watch, sitting there in the public gaze, as the envelopes were torn open and someone else was named each time.'
His play, Voices, also won the Hale One-Act Play Drama Festival in 2012.
Possibly Peter’s most dramatic experience in the theatre came in 2012, repeated by popular demand a year later, with the performance of his play about one of the most notorious murder trials in English legal history. |
'The Circus On Lime Street,' dealing with the tragic miscarriage of justice which saw a Liverpool petty thief, George Kelly, convicted and hanged for the Cameo Cinema murders, a conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal more than 50 years later, was staged by the 100th Meridian Company in the actual Victorian courtroom in St. George's Hall, Lime Street, Liverpool,where Kelly had vainly fought for his life against his corrupt police accusers. 'It was distinctly spooky,' Peter remembers, 'to see the actor playing George Kelly climb up the same stone steps into the same dock for the trial, exactly as poor, doomed Kelly himself had climbed them in reality sixty years earlier.'
Please note, The Circus On Lime Street and Odd Job Man, are not available online from Lazy Bee Scripts. |
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