Accompanying The Necessity of Atheism was a very different drama, THE USUAL INCENTIVE. Just as Paper Trail had shown the secrets to be found in archives, The Usual Incentive was about the terrible secrets that can lie in the papers in a briefcase. It was based on the story of E.D. Morel, a supervisor with a Belgian shipping company at the turn of the nineteenth century, who realised from the paperwork he was handling that the Belgians were in fact running a vast slave labour empire in the Congo. The ‘incentive’ in the play’s title proves to be quite horrifying.

In 2015, Anglia Ruskin Creative put on a very different tale from the past, I’M BACKING BRITAIN. This told the tale of the ‘Backing Britain’ campaign in 1968, when a group of young women typists in Surbiton launched a campaign to help Britain out of its economic problems by working an extra half hour every day for no extra pay. It’s a play about idealism and reality, as the initial enthusiasm runs into hostility from the unions, cynicism from the press and unwelcome support from the National Front. It’s also about how the sixties generation was still very much in the shadow of the Second World War – the campaign was the young women’s attempt to serve their country as their parents’ generation had done during the Blitz.

Sean’s writing often makes use of ghosts. Ghosts always make for good theatre and story-telling, but they can also help us to explore our relationship with the past – after all, ghosts are voices from the past and can enter directly into dialogue with the present. A double bill of ghost tales in 2016, AN INCIDENT ON THE LINE and SO MUCH FOR BUCKINGHAM looked at the way the past can reach out from the grave and shake the present. An Incident on the Line takes its inspiration from an incident in the life of Charles Dickens, when he was involved in a horrific railway crash at Staplehurst in Kent; it was awkward for him because he was travelling discreetly with his lover and her mother. In the play, a strangely empty modern train travelling the same route, carrying a young English teacher and Dickens enthusiast, is troubled by Mercy, a vengeful ghost convinced she is Dickens’s love child. So Much for Buckingham is about one of the dead king’s many admirers who visits his recently-discovered grave in Leicester and encounters his ghost, which turns out not to be at all as she had imagined him. In 2024 So Much for Buckingham was staged by Combined Actors of Cambridge in the Cambridge Festival of Drama.

Sometimes the past will provide an appropriate setting for a more recent story. PARTY NIGHT was inspired by the horrifying story from France of Jean-Claude Romand, a fantasist who spent 18 years convincing his wife and friends that he was a qualified doctor who worked at the World Health Organisation: when in 1993 he was about to be exposed, he snapped and murdered his wife, his children and his parents. For this version, the story was moved to the UK and set in the 1970s and the play concentrates entirely on the relationship between Valerie and her husband Keith, who purports to be a senior surgeon at a London hospital. It’s a story about fantasy and reality and, in its way, about love. As Valerie puts it, when she has learned the truth:

There are other ways of living in fantasy. A TV report in the 1980s inspired A CABINET MEETING, in which a group of elderly men meet in a London flat, as clearly they do regularly, and seem to play at being a government, calling each other ministers, drawing up plans and agendas. We soon realise that they are not actually deluded (although the President is certainly slipping into dementia) but are in fact the legitimate government of Poland, still living in exile in London forty years after the end of the Second World War. Many of their countrymen have succumbed to mental illness and live out their days in mental hospitals in Surrey, but the fall of the Berlin Wall brings a chance that the Communist government might fall too and they might then be able to hand over their authority to a legitimate government – otherwise they have been living a completely irrelevant and wasted fantasy life for nearly half a century. But have they got enough of a grip on reality to actually do it?

The First World War, also known as the Great War, still has a powerful hold on our collective subconscious and it’s a theme Sean’s writing has often returned to. THE WAR TIME is a play for young people, commissioned and first performed by Longsands Academy for the 2015 Cambridge Drama Festival. In it, two children on a school trip to the First World War battlefields get separated from the party and travel back in time to 1914. They experience some of the reality of the war and even discover an unexpected link between the men buried in the war cemetery and themselves. It’s a play about the differences there can be between the history we learn at school and the reality of what it seeks to describe and explain; in its way it’s also about the nature of historical truth.

The GREAT WAR CYCLE is a series of plays which will eventually cover every year of the war, from 1914 to 1919, looking at a key decision that was taken in that year and what its impact was for people at the time. 1914: ASSASSINATION BEFORE LUNCH is about the assassination by Serbian terrorists of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and exactly why that led to the outbreak of war. 1915: DEAD IN THE WATER is about the German decision to sink the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania, which was carrying a number of Americans, and what the consequences were. 1916: HIS PLAN OF ATTACK is a sort of riposte to the caricature version to be found in Oh! What a Lovely War!: it looks at General Sir Douglas Haig and his decision to launch the big offensive on the Somme in July 1916. It uses his letters and especially his long conversations with his military chaplain to take a much more human approach to this still highly controversial man.

The Great War was also an important theme in Sean’s 2018 Christmas show staged by Combined Actors of Cambridge, THE GIRL IN THE GLASS. This is a Christmas ghost story set against the setting of Cambridge at the end of the First World War, when the ‘Spanish’ Influenza epidemic is at its height and the Dean of King’s College, Eric Milner-White, is planning a new Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols to be sung in the chapel on Christmas Eve. However, his plans for it to include a prayer for the war dead stir the angry ghost of a long-dead Puritan, and the strange figure of a seventeenth-century girl appears in the glass of the chapel. Meanwhile a local boy, whose father is one of the thousands of missing in the war, joins the choir and runs straight into Cambridge town/gown snobbery at its worst. There’s a happy ending (this is a Christmas show after all) but the play explores themes of loss, fear and the hold of the past on the present (as well as women’s suffrage and the dangers of girls on bicycles) along the way.

Combined Actors of Cambridge also staged THE GHOSTLY GIFT OF MISS CONSTANCE COUPER, an ambitious drama inspired by the true story of the ‘ghosts of Versailles’. In the 1900s two English ladies, the Principal and Vice Principal of St High’s College, Oxford, wrote a book telling how, on a visit to the Chateau of Versailles, they had supposedly travelled back in time to the court of Marie Antoinette. In this fictionalised version, their story, which is also one of rivalry and revenge in Oxford college politics, is intermingled both with the violent upheavals of the French Revolution and with the story of two young women who arrive at the college in 1968. Although these three very different times seem to have little in common, in fact they all show women struggling to negotiate a world created by and for men.