Shakespeare for My Father is a one-woman play written[1] and performed by Lynn Redgrave. The play concerns Redgrave's relationship with her father, the imposing actor and family patriarch Sir Michael Redgrave.
Redgrave 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. The "memory and message" play gave her an opportunity to slip into many of the characters, following her father's life through to his death from Parkinson's disease, and her ultimate forgiveness of his failure as a parent.
The play was produced and directed by Redgrave's then husband John Clark with lighting designed by Thomas Skelton. It was presented for a week at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara before touring the United States for a year in a production sponsored by CAMI.
The play then opened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theatre[2], where 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 Award nomination (which she lost to Madeline Kahn), and went on to play in Canada, Melbourne, and at the Haymarket in London.