A man wakes up at forty to a broken marriage, a beckoning bedsit, and the realisation that he has done nothing to make himself memorable. Then he clambers into the attic... After a lay-off of 25 years, he seeks redemption via the sixteen feet of treacherous brass tubing he never mastered in his youth. Resuming his old French horn, he sets himself an impossible task: to perform a Mozart concerto in front of a paying audience of horn fanatics.
Jonathan Guy Lewis plays “Jasper” - and everyone he encounters, on this voyage of musical discovery: his old school conductor, the greatest German soloist since the war and, most of all, his estranged teenage son.
Jonathan Guy Lewis’s television career has seen him play leading roles in London’s Burning, Soldier Soldier and, in Coronation Street, Ian Bentley. Major theatre credits also include A Few Good Men (Haymarket), An Inspector Calls (Aldwych), Peer Gynt (National Theatre), Speaking In Tongues and Alphabetical Order (both Hampstead) and Breakfast With Jonny Wilkinson (Menier Chocolate Factory). His debut play Our Boys won the Writer’s Guild Award for Best New Fringe Play and was revived at the Duchess Theatre in 2012. He is a lapsed horn player.
Harry Burton’s directing credits include Harold Pinter’s The Lover (Bridewell) and The Dumb Waiter (Trafalgar Studios), The Leisure Society (Trafalgar Studios), Quartermaine’s Terms (tour), Casualties (Park Theatre) and Barking in Essex (Wyndhams Theatre). He has directed two films for Channel 4: Working With Pinter and Thinspiration.
Jasper Rees is a journalist and author. His acclaimed book I Found My Horn: One Man’s Struggle with the Orchestra’s Most Difficult instrument is published in the US as A Devil to Play. He is also the author of Bred of Heaven: One Man’s Quest to Reclaim His Welsh Roots. Both books were serialised on Radio 4’s Book of the Week.