Research

    Tchaikovsky

His full name is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and he is a Russian Composer. A lot of the play is based around him with Rosie constantly talking about him because she idolises him and considering the music we perform in the concert was written by him. He was born on May 7th 1840 and was very musical from a young age and actually composed his first song in 1844- only aged 4! As the years went on he continued his love for music and produced a lot of amazing things such as Swan Lake in 1876. He was quite well known for his music during his time alive and he is still remembered by music lovers all over the world. As we discuss in the play he attempted suicide after being in a bad marriage that didn't last long. 

Luckily, he continued his amazing work for quite a few years after this traumatising experience up until the day he died. His death was believed to be a decision made by 'a court of honour' after finding out he had been having a relationship with another man. He might have only gotten into this marriage so people wouldn't think he is gay but this made his life worse as the marriage didn't work out and everyone found out the truth about him anyways. His story is quite sad today but back then it wasn't acceptable to be romantically involved with a person of the same sex. Although the official cause of his death was Cholera a lot theories are still around today that he might of committed suicide and succeeded this time or he could have been murdered due to the fact being gay was extremely illegal in Russia at this time. 

   Patrick Maber

Patrick is a play writer who wrote the play we are performing for our end of year show, The Musicians. He has also wrote other great pieces such as Dealer's choice and Three Days In The Country. He was born on the 19th September 1964 in London and he spent a lot of his free time in his teenage years working with The National Theatre. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in 1987. He had a love for comedic performances so he continued to do some stand up performances before moving on to writing.  

He has had problems to do with gambling which he has openly spoke about almost ruining his life and decided to dedicate his first play about gambling with a card game, based around his own personal experiences. He then moved around a bit trying to continue his passion with a variety of different things until the director of The Royal National Theatre at the time offered him a playwright commission which ended up getting him an award for Best Comedy in 1995. Throughout the years he continued his career and gained other awards such as: Writer's Guild award for best west end performance, Critics Circle award for best play and a few more.