Award-winning British playwright, librettist and lyricist Stephen Clark died on Oct 15. His death was announced on Twitter by his collaborator, the composer Howard Goodall.
Clark, who was based in Brighton, worked on three well-received musicals for Singapore companies. They were Sing To The Dawn in 1996, the Singapore Repertory Theatre's adaptation of Ho Minfong's novel and Forbidden City in 2002, also by SRT.
He also penned the lyrics for last year's The LKY Musical, co-produced by Metropolitan Productions.
Clark was a student of Stephen Sondheim's at Oxford University in 1991. He won a Laurence Olivier award for his lyrics for the re-worked version of Martin Guerre, a musical about religious intolerance which was produced by the influential Cameron Mackintosh .
He adapted The Mahabharata for musical theatre in 2007, with music by Nitin Sawhney. He wrote the book and lyrics for the 2007 musical adaptation of Love Story, composed by Goodall and based on Erich Segal's best-selling novel of the same name. It received an Olivier nomination for best musical.
Clark was also a critically acclaimed playwright. His play Stripped, about a relationship between a man and woman in their 30s, received a Jefferson Award in 2003. The award is given to acknowledge excellence in theatre in the Chicago area.
At the time of his death, he was working on the book and lyrics for an upcoming musical, Mu-Lan, slated to be staged in Singapore in 2017. He had begun work on another musical about pilot Charles Kingsford Smith, who made the first trans-Pacific flight from America to Australia.
The last line of Clark's biography on his website, stephenclarkplays.com, says: "Stephen's new play, Le Grand Mort, is inching ever closer to production …"
Le Grand Mort is French for "the great death".
