Stephen Plaice (born 9 September 1951) is a UK-based dramatist and scriptwriter who has written extensively for theatre, opera and television.

An extensive account of his student days in Germany was given in The Romantic Road, a series of five programmes broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2009 and repeated in 2016.

His short play The Last Post originally produced by Shaker was made into a film by Sarah Radclyffe Productions in 1995 and nominated for a BAFTA.

It was also here that his association with Glyndebourne Festival Opera began, after he invited a team from the Education Department to run annual workshops in the prison.

After working in opera for most of the decade, in 2008 Plaice returned to straight drama and wrote Nemesis, a play which documented the extraordinary marriage between John and Ada Galsworthy.

There were further collaborations with Lunn for the youth opera, Zoë in 2000 (made into a film for Channel 4 later that same year, directed by Theresa Griffith) and Tangier Tattoo in 2005, both produced at Glyndebourne.

[2] However, Tangier Tattoo, an opera set against a background of jihadist kif-smuggling in Morocco, and ostensibly created for a target audience of 20- to 30-year-olds, was less favourably received by the critics.

In 2012 Glyndebourne Education produced Lovers Walk, a chamber opera composed by Luke Styles to a libretto by Plaice.

In the same year, Plaice was commissioned to write the libretto for "Rainland", a large scale choral drama composed by Joseph Phibbs.

It premiered in the Thomaskirche at the Bachfest Leipzig (de) to positive reviews: "a major work, one which points to a new direction for sacred music.....Birtwistle transforms the text, which Stephen Plaice has created for him in simple, magnificent, vivid sentences of Lutheran vehemence, into a seven-part arch form, a dramatic cantata, a compact oratorio".

Paint Me a chamber opera with the Portuguese composer Luis Tinoco was premiered in Lisbon in 2010, a Teatro Nacional de São Carlos / Culturgest co-production.

Along with the composer Richard Taylor, Plaice wrote the children's opera Confucius Says in 2008 for Hackney Music Development Trust.

[8] Plaice's opera-theatre piece In & Out of Love, a sequence of opera duets embedded into a narrative about two singers and starring Marcia Bellamy and Red Gray, toured the South East of England in the spring of 2013 and also in 2014 in an expanded version.

In 2016, Plaice was commissioned by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama to create a new operatic adaptation of Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale with composer Julian Philips.

In 2018, for Surrey Arts, with the composer Joanna Lee, Plaice wrote No Sound Ever Dies, a sonic suite that explores the glamorous era of the Brooklands racing circuit.

A new opera Raising Icarus created with the composer Michael Zev Gordon was premièred at the Birmingham Rep in April 2022.

In 2019/20 a new children's 'post truth' opera Henny Penny, music by Julian Philips, was developed to tour schools in Islington, as part of an OWRI/AHRC initiative to promote the teaching of foreign languages.

The production, directed by Stephen Langridge and starring Danielle de Niese, Allan Clayton, Matthew Rose, Kate Lindsey, Nicky Spence, Brendan Gunnell and Michael Wallace, opened to great acclaim on 12 August 2020.

Plaice is currently collaborating with the composer David Buckley on a chamber opera Oracle, commissioned by the Klanggg Festival in Fribourg for performances in Switzerland in 2025.