Shakespeare For My Father
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[edit] Shakespeare For My Father
This play, the first in a series about her family, was written by Lynn Redgrave with help from her husband John Clark in 1992. It concerns Redgrave's relationship with her father, the imposing actor and head of the family, Sir Michael Redgrave. She was a shy and somewhat sickly child who saw little of her busy father when growing up, and lived very much in a fantasy world of her own making. Her daydreams, because of watching her father perform, consisted largely of Shakespearean plays and characters. Clark did a computer search of all of the Bard's plays for emotional themes which would fit in with what Redgrave wanted to say. Together they came up with a "memory and message" play which gave her an opportunity to slip into many of the characters, following her father's life through to his death from Parkinson's, and her ultimate forgiveness of his failure as a parent. The play was put together by Clark and Redgrave and their incomparable lighting designer Thomas Skelton (this was to be his last show before his death) over a week on the stage of the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, and was toured cross-country for a year by CAMI. When the tour finished, Clark decided to take it to Broadway, against everyone's advice, and staged it at the Helen Hayes Theatre on 44th Street, next to 2 big Broadway musical hits. He financed it with their family money which was threatened with confiscation by a collections lawyer for their bankrupt attorney law firm [1]. Fearing a response akin to Springtime for Hitler, they credit enthusiastic critic John Simon with its huge success, for it played 274 performances in the 1993/1994 season, a record for a one person show at the time, earned Redgrave a best actress Tony nomination (which she lost to Madeline Kahn), and went on to play the Haymarket in London, Canada, and Melbourne. They both finally averred "This was the very best thing to come out of the House Calls fiasco".
