Donald Smith, director of the Netherbow, asked me if I would devise a dramatic presentation to bring the story of Alexander Men to the public.

He had read the book I co-edited with Ann Shukman 'Christianity for the Twenty-First Century - the life and work of Alexander Men' quite independently, in fact, before he met me.

There happened to be a Russian theatre company performing at the festival in that year (1997) whose director I knew. Mark Rozovsky agreed to collaborate on a production to be performed by Russian actors and which we hoped to bring to Edinburgh after premiering it in Moscow.

Rozovsky stipulated that he must have a workable script by the end of the year - it now being late September. I concluded that the only hope was to adapt an existing masterpiece: T.S. Eliot's 'Murder in the Cathedral'.