Shakespeare For My Father
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Shakespeare For My Father is a play by Lynn Redgrave, written with assistance from her then-husband John Clark.
The 1982 play is intended to be the first in a series about her family. It concerns Redgrave's relationship with her father, the imposing actor and family patriarch 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 lighting designer Thomas Skelton [1] and 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.
When the tour finished, Clark decided to take it to Broadway, against everyone's advice, and staged it at the Helen Hayes Theatre. He financed it with their family money which was threatened with confiscation by a collections lawyer for their bankrupt attorney law firm [2]. 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 Award nomination (which she lost to Madeline Kahn), and went on to play in Canada, Melbourne, and at the Haymarket in London.
