It included directing one of Rowan Atkinson's first appearances on the Oxford stage in a 1976 show, After Eights, partly written by Richard Curtis (whom he first met at Harrow); also a revue in 1978 for the Oxford Theatre Group on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe which again featured Richard Curtis, as well as Angus Deayton, Phil Pope, Tim McInnerny and Helen Atkinson-Wood.
Blue Pacific Island (1985), with Juliet Stevenson and Anthony Bate, was followed by the trilogy A Man Alone in 1986, the first play of which won him a Giles Cooper Award.
King Priam, a one-hour account of the Trojan War, written as a series of interconnected monologues by the leading participants, in response to a blind-date commission, and starring Paul Scofield, was broadcast in 1987.
No one could have wanted this compulsive, gripping epic a second shorter... a Trojan War for our time",[citation needed] while Anne Karpf, reviewing the plays in The Guardian described them as "Irresistible.
In 1986 he wrote a spoken text[9] for Howard Goodall's new realisation of Purcell's Dido And Aeneas for The South Bank Show, and, in 1994, a script for an episode of the Terry Wogan -hosted Do The Right Thing.