Snape Maltings, Open Spaces Residency, 2019
Performed by Forensis Music Theatre at the Tête à Tête: The Opera Festival, 2023

In 1983, Peter Tatchell stood as the Labour candidate for the seat of Bermondsey in the upcoming by-election.

Following a bitter and fractious campaign that extensively targeted Tatchell’s gay rights advocacy and left-wing politics, the seat was won by Simon Hughes of the Liberal party (who himself came out in 2006) in what remains the largest swing of any by-election in British political history.

This new multi-media verbatim opera interrogates the personal and political impact of this campaign, and the long shadow it has cast on British politics, using the very words of those who lived through it.