National Library of Australia - Home page
NLA News - home January 2003 Volume XIII Number 4
Clifton Pugh, Peter O'Shaughnessy as Hamlet, 1961

Clifton Pugh 1924-1990
Peter O'Shaughnessy as Hamlet 1961
oil on masonite; 121.2 x 90.7 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an13228577

Peter O’Shaughnessy

 

As an actor, director and producer for the stage, Peter O’Shaughnessy has presented the work of playwrights ranging from Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov to modern dramatists, such as Ionesco, Pinter and Samuel Beckett. He has been a pioneer in the production of the plays of Beckett, having directed the Irish premieres of Not I and Footfalls (1978), Rockaby and Theatre I (1984); the Australian premieres of Waiting for Godot (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1959); and the English and world premieres of Theatre I and Theatre II , at Cambridge (1977). As a writer, editor and lecturer, he has promoted early Australian history and folklore.

O’Shaughnessy has directed productions of eight of Shakespeare’s plays and played 40 Shakespearean parts, among them Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and Shylock. For the British Council he has lectured on the plays of Shakespeare to universities in many countries of Europe , and in West Africa and South America . In the theatre world, his most lasting legacy may prove to be his sponsorship of the talents of the young Barry Humphries who has acknowledged that, without O’Shaughnessy’s nurturing and promotion, the character of Edna Everage would have been nipped in the bud after 1956 and never come to flower, while the character of Sandy Stone would never have taken shape as a presence on the stage.

The National Library’s Manuscripts Collection contains O’Shaughnessy’s papers (MS 2272), which include the texts of plays he has written—some yet to have theatrical production—a voluminous series of mostly autobiographical articles which might constitute the bulk of a book published in the form of memoirs, and correspondence, diaries, notebooks, literary drafts and notes, research material, newspaper cuttings, photographs and sound recordings. The correspondence documents O’Shaughnessy’s associations with numerous theatrical and literary figures, often in his role as a writer, theatre director and actor. Among the correspondents are Phillip Adams, Samuel Beckett, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Claude Marks, Barry Oakley and his mother, two brothers and close friends. The Humphries letters form a significant part of the collection, and reveal the decisive influence O’Shaughnessy had on Humphries’ early career.

The drafts include material concerning Australian and Irish history and folklore. Much of it relates to General Joseph Holt, a United Irish military leader involved in the 1798 Irish rebellion and transported to New South Wales in 1799. Holt’s journal of his 13 years in the colony is among the four or five most valuable accounts of that period in the foundation of the colony and ranks with the journals of Tench and ‘ Barrington ’. Kangaroo Press’s publication in 1988 of O’Shaughnessy’s A Rum Story marked the first time the authentic text of the journal had ever been published. It will remain as an important aid for further scholarly research; as will O’Shaughnessy’s version of the first part of the Holt journal, published by Four Courts Press in Dublin in 1988 under the title Rebellion in Wicklow. Among the O’Shaughnessy papers are documents and scripts written by him about the seven Young Irelanders, transported to Van Diemens Land after the abortive Irish Rebellion of 1848. In 1988, under the title The Gardens of Hell, Kangaroo Press published O’Shaughnessy’s transcript of the Tasmanian section of the Jail Journal of John Mitchel, the firebrand of the Young Irelanders.

 

Select Biography

Australia, 1923-1950

Peter O’Shaughnessy was born in Melbourne in 1923. His acting career began in 1943 as an amateur actor playing with the Melbourne Art Theatre players directed by J. Beresford Fowler, who had been a member of Alan Wilkie’s Shakespeare company during the nineteen twenties and early thirties (See A.D.B.). With Fowler, he acted in many plays by Shaw, Ibsen, Coward and Shakespeare and began to come into his own as an actor with the roles of Othello and Richard II. In early 1945, he became a professional actor, and while continuing to act with Fowler, earned a living playing parts in ABC radio plays and school broadcasts, and in radio soap operas for Morris West’s Australasian Radio Productions. In 1948, the Irish actor-manager Anew McMaster’s Shakespearean company visited Australia and O’Shaughnessy was engaged by the company to play several major roles: Horatio in Hamlet, Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew, and Antonio in The Merchant of Venice.

England, 1950-1953

In 1950, O’Shaughnessy left for England. During the next three and a half years he worked in repertory theatre, adding to his Shakespearean repertoire by playing such parts as Boult in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Lennox in Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.

Australia, 1953-1961

O’Shaughnessy returned to Australia at the end of 1953 and joined Melbourne ’s newly formed Union Repertory Company for a season before leaving to work independently.

From 1954-1961, O’Shaughnessy produced, directed, and/or starred in more than 35 plays. Actors who played in his productions included his wife, Shirley Smith, Monica Maughan, Barry Humphries, Wyn Roberts, Patricia Kennedy, Tim Burstall, Sydney Conabere, Dorothy Bradley, Margaret Wolfit, Walter Brown, Pamela Greenall, George Whaley, Neville Thurgood, Frank Gatliff, Fred Parslow and Joan Harris. During this period, O’Shaughnessy extended his Shakespearean repertoire with productions of Hamlet, Love’s Labours Lost, Julius Caesar, King Lear and Macbeth. Settings for Love’s Labours Lost and King Lear were designed and executed by Arthur Boyd. Other highlights included the Australian premieres of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1957), and Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and Ionesco’s The Lesson (1959); and the children’s plays The Bunyip and the Satellite (1957) and Mumba Jumba and the Bunyip (1959), with settings for the latter designed and executed by Clifton Pugh; and The Lunch-Hour Revue (1958), in which, under O’Shaughnessy’s tutelage, Barry Humphries began to develop the character of Edna Everage. Material crafted and tested during The Lunch-Hour Revue took its final shape at The New Theatre as the Rock’n Reel Revue. Now fully fledged, Edna Everage took audiences by storm and they were first introduced to the character of the seedy, nostalgic suburban chronicler, Sandy Stone. O’Shaughnessy had made sound recordings of the C.J. Dennis works Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1956), The Moods of Ginger Mick (1958) and Australian poetry (1958) for Score Records. In that same year he persuaded the director of Score, Peter Mann, to record and issue Wild Life in Suburbia, featuring Barry Humphries in the reminiscences of Sandy Stone and The Migrant Hostess—the new title O’Shaughnessy had given the sketch originally called The Olympic Hostess.

O’Shaughnessy also served a short stint as a guest drama critic for The Argus, in 1955.

England and Ireland, 1961-1964

O’Shaughnessy was an actor with The Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in 1962 when he took leave for a short period to present Courtship through the Ages and Bernard Shaw’s A Village Wooing at The Dublin Theatre Festival. At Bristol, he played one of the leading roles in a production of Piscator’s adaptation from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and rejoined the Bristol Old Vic Company to take the same role when the play was presented at London’s Old Vic Theatre and later at the Phoenix Theatre. In 1963, O’Shaughnessy’s one-man performance of his adaptation of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman premiered in Cork. During that year he was also a member of Laurence Olivier’s Chichester Festival Theatre’s Company. In 1964, O’Shaughnessy belonged to the BBC Radio Repertory Company for six months, before resigning to take a program, The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet, celebrating Shakespeare’s quatercentenary, to the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Australia, 1965-1970

O’Shaughnessy returned to Australia in 1965 to perform Diary of a Madman at the Perth Festival of Arts. Between 1965 and 1970, he directed, and/or starred in plays such as Dylan and Inadmissible Evidence; and, for the Q Theatre’s Lunch Hour Theatre, various short plays and a one-man show of his own compiling, entitled Bernard Shaw on Love and War. In 1965 and 1966, at the invitation of The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the Arts Councils of Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales, he toured towns in those states with his immensely popular one-man show, You Wouldn’t Read About It, an ‘excursion’ through Australian history, as seen through folklore, ballads, and official documents. His theatre productions during this period included Off to the Diggins’ and Jemmy Green in Australia for the 1966 Adelaide Theatre Festival, and The Recruiting Officer for the Adelaide Festival of 1968; a touring production of Waiting for Godot sponsored by The Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust. Old Botany Bay, a program of songs and ballads to commemorate the bicentenary of Cook’s exploration of New South Wales was presented at the Sydney Technical College and recorded for Paul Hamlyn records. The Restless Years was written for television, and later published in book form. E.M.I. issued recordings by O’Shaughnessy of Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, Australian Poetry and While the Billy Boils, a collection of poems and stories by Henry Lawson. In 1967, O’Shaughnessy produced and starred in Othello, performed at the theatre of the Sydney Conservatorium and financed by the New South Wales Arts Council. O’Shaughnessy issued a libel suit against The Australian newspaper for its review of the play. After a series of trials that went as far as the High Court, in 1970 the case was settled when Rupert Murdoch agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of damages to O’Shaughnessy.

Ireland, Canada and England , 1971-1985

O’Shaughnessy presented a production of The Restless Years at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1971, and later at the Opera House, Cork. In 1972, he directed his own translation of Feydeau’s Le Dindon (The Game Cock) at the Everyman Theatre, Cork. Later that same year he directed Beckett’s Play and Krapp’s Last Tape—in which he played the title role—at the Focus Theatre, Dublin.

In 1972-1974, O’Shaughnessy worked in Canada as the director of the Drama Department of the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Productions during this period included The Three Sisters, Overruled, Troilus and Cressida, Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Diary of a Madman and The Master Builder.

O’Shaughnessy returned to Europe in 1974 and, in the subsequent years, produced, directed and/or acted in many plays in Ireland—among them Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Pinter’s The Caretaker in which he played the caretaker – and the Irish premieres of two of Pinter’s plays, Landscape and Silence; and the Irish premiere of the original four´ act version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

In 1981, during a short term as a Drama teacher at the Cork School of Music, and with some assistance from the poet, Anthony Blinco, he wrote a play based on Aislinge mheic conglinne, the oldest story connected with the city of Cork. Out of 137 entries, the play, The Fabulous Journey of Mac Con Glin, was unanimously chosen by the four judges as the winner of the Irish Times—Dublin Theatre Festival play competition of that year and was given production as part of the Festival program.

O’Shaughnessy was a member of the Oxford Playhouse Company in 1976-77 and it was under the aegis of this company that he directed the English and world premieres of Samuel Beckett’s Theatre I and Theatre II at the ADC theatre in Cambridge. In 1978, he directed the Irish premieres of Beckett’s Footfalls and Not I for the Dublin Theatre Festival. In 1979 he made a short version of Nevill Coghill’s translation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde which was warmly approved by Professor Coghill. His recital of this abbreviated version resulted in an invitation from The British Council to tour the program abroad. Between 1980 and 1986, O’Shaughnessy gave this recital and Shakespearean lecture/recitals and his one-man show, Discovering Shakespeare for The British Council at universities and theatres in Holland, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Chile, Gambia and Senegal.

Australia, 1985

O’Shaughnessy revisited Australia in 1985 as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. In 1986 he directed Taking Steps, by Alan Ayckbourn, for the amateur company of the Adelaide Repertory Company. Later that year, he and Professor Stephen Prickett co-directed a production of The Winter’s Tale, performed in the precincts of the High Court, Canberra. His recital in Sydney, supplemented by musicians specialising in mediaeval music, of the first half of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde followed, as did his recital in Canberra of a Dickens program at the Canberra Repertory Theatre. Soon afterwards, in the same theatre, O’Shaughnessy gave several lecture/recitals on King Lear. In 1988, during another visit to Australia, O’Shaughnessy and Professor Stephen Prickett collaborated a second time, co-directing a production of Much Ado About Nothing. In March of the same year, Kangaroo Press published O’Shaughnessy’s A Rum Story. The Gardens of Hell was published in the following month.

Peter O’Shaughnessy now lives and works in England. Recent achievements include the publication, in 1998, of Rebellion in Wicklow.

 

Selected Theatre Work

The Bunyip and the Satellite and Mumba Jumba and the Bunyip

Richard Stone details the history and success of these children’s plays in an article entitled `Bunyippy Traits: Peter O’Shaughnessy, Barry Humphries and Bunyips on Stage´ in the January 2003 issue of the National Library of Australia News. The Bunyip and the Satellite was written by O’Shaughnessy in collaboration with Jeffrey Underhill. The play was produced and directed by O’Shaughnessy at the National Theatre in Melbourne in 1957 and again at the Independent Theatre in Sydney in 1958. Mumba Jumba and the Bunyip was written by O’Shaughnessy and directed by him for the New Theatre in Melbourne in 1959 and again at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne in 1960. In subsequent years, the play was produced in Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney. Both plays contain lyrics by Barry Humphries.

Discovering Shakespeare

Discovering Shakespeare had its beginning in the 1960s, when O’Shaughnessy presented one-hour ‘lecture/recitals’ on Shakespeare to Australian secondary students. During the 1970s, O’Shaughnessy performed some hundreds of ‘lecture/recitals’ at schools across Ireland. A revised version of his one-man recital, Will, (or Discovering Shakespeare), ‘in which the mirror is held up to the nature of William Shakespeare’ is available on cassette tape in the National Library’s Manuscript collection entitled Papers of Peter O’Shaughnessy 1812-2001 (MS2272).

 

Selected Writing

In 1967, at the invitation of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, O’Shaughnessy wrote and acted in a television program entitled The Restless Years, an exploration of Australian history and the emergence of an Australian national ‘character’. The program gained the first international award ever earned by ABC television, a second prize in Irish Television’s (RTE) Golden Harp competition.

After the screening of The Restless Years, Jacaranda Press approached O’Shaughnessy with a proposal that he compile a ‘coffee-table’ book covering and enlarging on the same material. In effect, it would aim to be a popular coverage of Australian history from the foundation of the colony until Federation, enlivened by pictures, the spoken word and song. Recognising that he would be unequal to such a task without the aid of an historian, and mindful of the fact that in compiling the television program he had drawn freely on Professor Russel Ward’s rich collection of Australian folk songs and ballads, O’Shaughnessy asked Professor Ward if he would make a scholarly contribution to the book in the form of a series of introductory prefaces. Professor Ward agreed to the collaboration and Jacaranda Press then invited the artist Graeme Inson to research visual material and design the format of the book. The book, also called The Restless Years, was accompanied by a record featuring folk singers Marian Henderson and Alex Hood and the harmonica player Richard Brooks. It proved a great popular success and went into a second edition.

Peter O’Shaughnessy has published six books: The Restless Years (in collaboration with Professor Russel Ward and Graeme Inson), A Rum Story, The Gardens of Hell (Australia) and The Fabulous Journey of Mac Con Glin and Con’s Fabulous Journey to the Land of Gobel O’Glug (Ireland). His most recent book, Rebellion in Wicklow, was published in Dublin in April, 1998, by Four Courts Press. He can be contacted at 19 St Johns North, The Broadway, Winchester, Hants, England; email: peteros19@yahoo.co.uk.

Back to NLA News Index Back to January Issue Back to NLA Home Page
NLA News - home

To order a particular issue of the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.