After thirty years of uncontentious collaboration (Goodbye Paradise, Warm Nights on a Slow-Moving Train, Intimate Strangers, Neon Street) on musicals, plays, miniseries and screenplays, Denny Lawrence and I suddenly realised that no-one since 1632 had actually written a play in Shakespeare’s manner – with soliloquies, ghosts, songs, murders, Renaissance rogues, adulterous lovers, hangmen, pirates, divided rulers and prison cells – that was an actual serious play and not a humorous sketch or a Beckettian by-blow like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
So in one of Denny’s fortnight stays in Australia – he worked for six years in New York – we wrote rapidly in nine days the first act of this explanation of Shakespeare’s twelve Italian plays (he set no plays in Moscow, Madagascar, Virginia, Beijing or even Dublin) and his absence from Stratford and London from 1585 to 1588. Three months later, in four days, we did a second act, and, a year later, in five days, after spirited criticism from John Ralston Saul, Bruce Beresford and Stephen Ramsey, a much-revised second act. John Bell was keen to do it but his Board said no play written after 1620 was within their mandate. The cast size daunted other managements; and, frankly, the audacity of taking on the Bard, whoever he was, head to head, and using all his devices, including sonnets, plays within plays, and, like Hamlet, a murder mystery.
I then turned seventy, and, thus focused, asked Wayne Anthoney, who I have long suspected of being Shakespeare’s reincarnation, to do an Adelaide reading of it. He cast it, then made me direct it. I have directed no plays since 1957 at high school but found it surprisingly easy, and the two leads, former students of Wayne’s, world class. We then did a budget, sold some shares, asked some old friends for five hundred dollars each, and, pushing our luck, decided to make a feature film of it also (hiring Kubrick’s old cameraman Mike Molloy) and, with only two weeks’ rehearsal, an actor with shingles who dipped out and an ailing Shakespeare who might not make opening night, here we are.
‘Make voyages,’ Tennessee Williams once said, ‘attempt them.’
And here we are.
Name:
‘More voyages, … and here we are.’
What an inspiration you are, brave man, at 70 embarking on this adventure. Safe sailing, steer well, avoid the rocks, and gud-speed.
Best of luck, Bob. I wish I could see the play but will settle for the cinematic version.
Onya Bob
Bob,this might sound like a silly question, but have you imbued the Shakespeare character with an accent at all? English, Warwickshire, London?
Warwickshire, harsh.
Very much of the time Bob. Good. Maybe these days it would be the upper clas put-on toffs accent of a UK-based Mike Carlton or Geoffrey Robertson
Dear Mr Ellis,
I have been a fan of yours in many contexts for many years; indeed I was pleased to meet you once when I worked at the Canberra Theatre Centre in the 1990s. I am afraid though, like any true fan, I gushed a little too much.
I am these days a post-graduate student in Theatre Studies at the University of New England focusing on Australian pseudo-Shakespearean blank verse drama and, as such, and also as a fan, I am very interested in your project Shakespeare in Italy. I note that you note here that your play makes use of the sonnet form, and I also very interested to know if you follow Shakespeare’s other patterns and use unrhymed iambic pentameter – i.e., dramatic blank verse – throughout the text of your play. I am also interested in knowing whether your play’s characters use the Early Modern English (EME) second person pronouns thou or thee naturally among themselves in their dialogue.
If your characters do use the EME second person naturally among themselves, and if your work does use iambic pentameter, then it is highly likely that it then fits within the genre of Australian pseudo-Shakespearean blank verse drama – a genre that has long been neglected in Australian theatre scholarship but which my research has identified as including approximately sixty plays stretching back to the second-ever publication of a play in colonial New South Wales: Charles Harpur’s The Tragedy of Donohoe (an early version of the text that would eventually become his Stalwart the Bushranger) published in extracts in the Sydney Monitor newspaper in 1835. Many of the names of the authors of these plays are sadly long-forgotten, but you may be interested to know that your play may well be in very good company: Francis W.L. Adams – who worked with William Lane in Queensland and was very much a figure in very early Labor politics – wrote several plays within the genre, Alfred Deakin wrote one (on Quentin Massys) in his youth and even Kenneth Slessor contributed a theatrical fragment The Man of Sentiment in his Vision days.
My thesis is due to be completed in the next year, and I would very much like to be able to know if Shakespeare in Italy is within or without my research ambit. I very much hope it is, but regardless of such am very pleased to be able to send you this missive, thank you once again (a little more restrainedly one hopes) for your wit, wisdom, grace and inspiration over the years and to wish you and your collaborator Denny Lawrence all the continuing very best success for Shakespeare in Italy now and into the future.
And I shall remain,
Your servant, Sir,
And with very best wishes,
Clay Thistleton