THE work of Elgar is performed in concert halls and cathedrals up and down the land but people in Worcester will be the first to see his life adapted for the stage.

The play Elgar And Alice will premier at the Swan Theatre on June 5, running for three days before embarking on a UK tour.

Elgar is played by Gerald Harper, who is supported by Janet Hargreaves, Joy McBrinn and Katrina Norbury, who is related to Winifred Norbury (of Enigma Variation No. 8) and still lives in a house that Elgar regularly visited.

The play rests on the tensions in the marriage between the son of a Worcester piano-tuner and the daughter of a major-general, between his hankering after a country life and her longing for fashionable society, between his music and her ambitions as a writer, between his doubts and her certainties, and between his need for other muses and her unquestionable part in his achievement.

By studying Elgar the man, the writer Peter Sutton has discovered how he may have created music out of his environment, and puts forward a novel and ground-breaking solution to the enigma behind the Enigma Variations.

For more information go online to www.elgarproductions.info