Derek is a poet, author and playwright. His 1-act and full length plays have been performed throughout the world. His series of full length murder mystery comedies featuring crime novelist and amateur sleuth Agatha Crusty has notched up several hundred performances, including the Middle East, USA and Australia, as well as the UK.
His latest play – an hilarious, fast-moving adaptation of HG Wells’ The Invisible Man, with three actors playing all fifteen parts, won four and five star reviews when it played in London’s Jack Studio in January 2020. In 2023 it did a 30+ performance tour in Wales and the South West of England with Our Star Theatre Company. Another adaptation (but with a larger cast!) is The Lady Vanishes – from the novel by Ethel Lina White on which the classic Hitchcock film was based, which toured in 2018.
One play which achieved notoriety in Wales when it was first performed – was an out-and-out comedy: Reclaiming Stonehenge – based on the premise that if Scotland can get back the Stone of Scone, Greece wants the Elgin marbles back and India wants its Koh-i-noor diamond, Wales should have Stonehenge back!
Other full length plays include 100 Minutes – a play celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first UK-Ireland flight in 2012, which was performed in Wales and Ireland. And, on a similar theme, Heroes Without a Parachute is a play about the pioneering airmen in the Royal Flying Corps who helped changed the whole course of the First World War.
He has written several biographical plays including Call Me Dusty, which celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the start of Dusty Springfield’s career and toured to 13 venues in 2013, and The Railway Children Lady – a play about the extraordinary life of children’s author, Edith Nesbit which toured in 2015. He has also written a large number of 1-act plays and comedies and is the organiser of the Pint-Sized Plays international writing competition for short plays.
He has abridged for audiobooks many dozens of books for Hodder Headline, Random House and Harper Collins among others. These have ranged from Jane Austen to Ruth Rendell. In addition his first full length children’s novel called ‘Is’ – about a girl who thinks she is Isambard Kingdom Brunel reincarnated – is published by Parthian.
He is currently completing on a second crime novel – The End of the Line – and a new full length witty and irreverent play about Handel, Bach and Scarlatti called Baroque ’n’ Roll.
