Tonight sees the culmination of almost ten years' hard work as a first-time playwright makes his world debut, with none other than David Suchet as his leading man.

Roger Crane is a successful New York lawyer who rediscovered his teenage love of scriptwriting after meeting a theatre producer at a wine-tasting.

"When I was at school, I wrote plays for my own amusement which were never produced," says Roger.

"At college I wrote the first half of a play about Malcolm X which the students did a reading of.

"The conservatives on campus got mad at me because it was about Malcolm X, while the liberals said I was making fun of him because there were jokes in the play.

"I thought if I got in so much trouble just from this play I had better go back to law school and just write on the side!"

He never got back to writing until the chance meeting with the unnamed producer. "He said Write a murder mystery, they sell.'"

Roger got the idea of writing a fictional murder mystery about the Pope dying and then remembered the 1978 death of Pope John Paul I, after only 33 days as pontiff.

"I thought, I don't have to write it so fictional after all!

"The underlying basic facts of the story are hard to dispute," says Roger. "I've used all the real names of people who were there but it is not a documentary, it is seen through my eyes."

The Pope's untimely death has been the focus of many a conspiracy theory, with the Mafia, an illegal Italian Masonic lodge, Opus Dei and even the Vatican Bank being implicated by various writers and journalists.

Roger says: "I thought it would be interesting to write it from a cardinal's perspective, one of the people who was there when the events were happening."

David Suchet plays Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, who in real life died four years after the Pope.

The idea of using Benelli as a central narrator was sparked when Roger read his obituary in the New York Times.

"When he died the hospital announced that his death was due to heart problems due to his refusal to go to hospital in a timely basis. The Vatican issued a denial.

"I loved this idea of him refusing to go to the hospital until he had made his confession."

David Suchet was first approached to take the lead role four years ago and finally accepted after a few more years of script tweaking and tightening.

He heads up a huge cast of 16, directed by David Jones.

Roger says: "It has been a long time, close to nine or ten years. I knew nobody in the theatre when I started. I only got an agent six months ago.

"It is getting on the stage, which is what I wanted. It will have every chance and if it works, I can't ask for more than that."

  • 7.30pm, some 2pm Sat matinees, from £10, 01243 781312