Biography and Notes (further contributions welcome) :
The picture of Peter O'Shaughnessy is displayed by kind permission of National Library of Australia's collection, ref http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an13228577. 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 Australian 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
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