Canberra REP has transitioned to digital programs, phasing out our colour printed A5 booklets at the end of Season 2024.
Please note that the complimentary flyer is designed as a Play Bill - more information is available below.
BABY JANE
Adapted and directed by Ed Wightman
from the novel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell
An Amateur Production By Arrangement with Ed Wightman
CAST • CREATIVES • PRODUCTION • TEAMS • DONORS | SUPPORTERS
SYNOPSIS
Reflected memories are not always real.
From one of Canberra’s-own we present the World Premiere of Baby Jane. This is an amazing work, with no holds barred. The classic Gothic thriller, about two reclusive sisters living together in a decaying Hollywood mansion –one a former child star of early vaudeville desperate to reclaim her early fame, and the other, a successful Hollywood actress whose career tragically ended after a terrible car accident.
Baby Jane opens wide the complexities of family, sibling rivalry, talent and fame and how they can go terribly wrong.
SETTING
Blanche Hudson’s mansion in the Hollywood hills, early summer, 1980.
RUN TIME
2 hr incl. 20 min including interval
Bar service available up to 5 minutes before start of ACT 1, during interval & after the performance
Please note this production does contain psychological abuse and violent episodes.
DIRECTORS' NOTE
I had long thought that Henry Farrell’s novel Whatever Happened to Baby Jane would make a fantastic stage play. Indeed, I was surprised to learn it had not been adapted for the stage before. In my research, I discovered that Farrell himself had planned to adapt it, but it seems this adaptation was never realised. The play became my pandemic project, and gave me something to channel my energies into during that strange and unsettling time – though it did seem perverse to be working on a new stage play at a time when the theatre industry had all but ceased to exist. I continued to work on it, however, and the longer I did the more convinced I become that this story would work as a stage show. And the adaptation came surprisingly quickly. Of course it is one thing to write a piece of theatre, it is another thing entirely to get it produced. Enter Canberra REP. I always thought the play could work well at REP and it was one of the first companies I thought to pitch it. I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their belief in the project and for taking a gamble on a new and untried adaptation. I have endeavoured to stay faithful to the story and themes of Henry Farrell’s novel, which I think is a more psychologically layered and complex work than the famous film it inspired, but my first and foremost concern was to make it work as a piece of theatre. The central characters may at first seem a million miles removed from most of us, but in actual fact the struggles and challenges they grapple with – guilt and loneliness, fears of irrelevance and invisibility, lost and unfulfilled dreams, and ever-present ghosts of the past – are ones to which I am sure most of us can relate, as well as being the stuff of great drama.
I hope we have created an entertaining show for you – as well as an unsettling, amusing and thought-provoking one. I would like to express my gratitude to all who have worked so hard to bring this play to life for the very first time – my fearless, hard-working cast and a talented and tireless creative and production team. It truly takes a village. Thank you for coming. We hope we enjoy Baby Jane.
Ed Wightman
AUTHOR • Henry Farrell
Henry Farrell was born Charles Farrell Myers in Madera County, California, in the central valley, and published his first works in science fiction magazines under the name Charles F Myers, including a series of stories about a female alien trickster figure called Toffee in the 1940s and 50s. He switched to the pseudonym “Henry Farrell” when he started writing thrillers and horror stories, many of which were adapted to TV and movies. His first novel under that name, The Hostage, was published in 1959 and filmed in 1966 on a low budget with John Carradine and Harry Dean Stanton.
He wrote What Ever Happened to Baby Jane in 1960, with the film made in 1962 with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis playing the two leads - Crawford showed interest in the film first and suggested Davis for the role of Jane. The making of the film is the subject of the first series of Feud with Jessica Lange as Crawford and Susan Sarandon as Davis, from the conflict between the two actresses before the film started production through to the dramatic events of the Academy Awards of 1963, when Davis was nominated and Crawford was not, but Crawford accepted the award on behalf of an absent Anne Bancroft, who was performing Mother Courage in New York. The film resuscitated the careers of both Crawford and Davis, with both appearing in numerous thrillers and horror movies afterwards. The film was remade for TV in 1991 with sisters Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave as What Ever Happened to….
The success of Baby Jane meant that Farrell was called in for the follow up film, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, based on an unpublished story written by Farrell called What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte – he co-wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Lukas Heller, and won a 1965 Edgar Award from the mystery writers of America for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. The film ended up starring Bette Davis and Oliva de Havilland after Joan Crawford quit early in production, citing a respiratory illness.
Subsequent work continued to be somewhat derivative of Baby Jane, including adapting his 1963 novel How Awful about Allan for TV in 1970 with Anthony Perkins and Julie Harris, about a young man with psychosomatic blindness, living with his sister and facing increasing paranoia; Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, a 1967 novel about a young woman accused of murdering her lover and her father and her relationship with the sociologist studying her for a thesis on criminal women, filmed by Francois Truffaut in 1972 as Un Belle Fille Comme Moi (A Gorgeous Girl like me); The House that Would Not Die for TV in 1970 starring Barbara Stanwyck in her TV debut, about a woman who inherits an apparently haunted house in Gettysburg and gets tied up in investigating the haunting and What’s the Matter with Helen (1971), an original screenplay with Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters as two women who open a dance studio in 1930s Hollywood for budding Shirley Temples, and the tension as secrets from their past come to haunt them. He also wrote a number of TV episodes, including an episode of the TV adaptation of William Inge’s Bus Stop, an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, and two Perry Mason episodes.He passed away in March 2006 at his home in Pacific Pallisades.
compiled by Simon Tolhurst
