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■ LIKE MOST I welcome the end of lockdown. Before this second pandemic of recent history arrived I expected my play Gazpacho to enjoy a season at the Carlton Courthouse; a La Mama offering for Seniors Week. Appropriate as I was born just before WW II. I am very grateful that La Mama have reprogrammed Gazpacho for the third week in May 2021 .Why did I write it or better - why do I write? Since 2008 I have been the theatre critic for 3MBS and subsequently a critic for the Melbourne Observer, although I prefer the term performance since I have also reviewed works from Opera Australia, Victorian Opera, Opera Melbourne, The Australian Ballet, much music theatre and even installations involving the live human figure. Five years ago I decided it was time to put my own head on the block and wrote Virginia And Some Of Her Friends, a 60-minute play with music . Characters: Virginia Woolf, her sister the painter Vanessa Bell, Lady Otteline Morrell and the New Zealand mistress of the short story, Katherine Mansfield. I decided to include songs and my long time colleague Faye Bendups, composer and theatrical polymath asked "Where are the lyrics?" Suddenly I became a librettist! With Faye that's how it works. From Virginia to Lucrezia Borgia and another all female cast in The Masque Of Beauty. Lucrezia was a woman much traduced in her time (1480 to 1519 ). She was not the daughter of the Pope Alexander Sixtus, but his niece.There's no proof she ever poisoned anyone. She was the much beloved sister to her brother Cesare Borgia; a very successful military leader, dangerous man to cross but a cool dude. In an age when men dressed more flamboyantly and colourfully than women, he often turned out in black.He would have been right at home in Melbourne . Away from the Italian Renaissance and early England in the 20th Century to 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, this war and its attendant
● Peter Green complexities has been a lifelong fascination. Since my 20s I have read all I could find about the war but alas only in English since only recently have works in Spanish been translated. Some eight years ago I got Blood Of Spain, an oral history by Ronald Fraser. He interviewed combatants and victims from all sides during his long life in Spain from 1957 to his death in Valencia in 2012. Recently I bought and read The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston. The play was inspired by an event in Fraser's book .It concerned four Republican prisoners held overnight by Franco's troops in a barn along with a pig. In the early morning they will be lined up against the village's cemetery wall and shot . These prisoners spend the night talking and for amusement hold a mock trial of Franco and the pig.The pig they acquit, it's his first offence. Not so Franco for, as one of them says, "crimes too numerous to mention in our limited time." But the main character, if that inadequate word will suffice, is Garcia Lorca , Spain's most famous and celebrated poet and playwright Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House Of Bernada Alba, to name a few. Born June 5, 1898, murdered August 18,1936 by a Francoist death squad, he was murdered because according to Franco he was "a socialist" and a "Freemason belonging to the Granada lodge" who engaged in "homosexual and abnormal practises". Lorca never appears on stage but is present in some of his poetry and brilliant human observations. That's why I write.
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