Pleroma

Dylan Shaw is a successful commercial composer. His move to writing “serious” music has met resistance from academia, especially from influential musicologist Livak Rigor, who is also a music reviewer for a mainstream newspaper. Dylan’s girl friend, soprano Clara Sinclair, complains that Livak has threatened her with bad reviews unless she agrees to join the cast of his University opera production. Dylan retaliates by attacking Livak during the live TV broadcast of a music recital. Clara quarrels with Dylan for “ruining her chances” with Livak and leaves him. Upset, Dylan confides in his manager, the wily Sven Thorlberg. He laments that he would earn more money from his music if he were dead: then, taking his own idea seriously, persuades Sven to help him activate the outrageous scheme. Three years later, after Dylan’s supposed drowning, we find him composing in a beach shack on an obscure Pacific island, Soladore, sending Sven new works to pass off as early ones and earning better money from them. The fact that Dylan’s body was never found intrigues TV arts presenter Eve Longburn. She finds another clue embedded in a piano piece by Dylan which spells out the name “Soladore” in code, which island she knows from her hippie, surfing past. She shares with Clara her suspicion that Dylan is still alive. Clara, now an internationally famous soprano, gossips to Livak. They tease Sven about the “rumour” that Dylan is not really dead. Alarmed, Sven arrangers with two enforcers, Wally and Crunch, to have Dylan’s “accidental” death made permanent. Eve, Clara, Livak, Sven, Wally and Crunch converge on Dylan’s beach shack at Soladore. Eve, getting there first, assures Dylan she does not want to exploit his situation for a hot story. She wants him to escape with her to another island. Wally and Crunch arrive on assignment. Clara and Livak turn up to gloat. Clara is enraged to find Eve already there, and in bed with “her man”. Wally and Crunch are outraged when Sven also shows up. They feel Sven is in breach of contract. Warning of an impending hurricane sends them all racing to take shelter in the island’s only church. Here, amid lightning, thunder and howling wind, an obscure struggle is seen to take place between Dylan and Crunch, silhouetted against a plate glass window. At its climax, a large heavy Cross falls on Sven, with Crunch on top clinging to it. Sven is dead. The plate glass window is smashed. Dylan has vanished again taking with him Livak’s desired pleroma: that Dylan remain obscure, unknown and forgotten.