I unearthed Anthony Shaffer, the renowned British playwright and author of the world’s most famous Whodunnit, ‘Sleuth’, living in the dark blue wilds of Miallo, in Far North Queensland, an area uncomfortably seething with suspicion from a populace often showing aggressive hostility to strangers. Surely an odd choice for a celebrity?
Rainforest-clad mountains, surrounded ‘Karnak’, the spread Shaffer and actress-wife Diane Cilento have now called home, where they astonished the locals and not a few friends by building a $1.2m. theatre - the Karnak Playhouse - miles from anywhere, with 500 seats, a dramatic stage crowned with a shiny brass sun; audio-visual box, a restaurant, bar, advertising department, administrator's office, faxes and switchboards. It is 20 minutes from the sleepy little northern outpost of Mossman, two hours from Cairns, set in the middle of cane-farms and tired old fibro cottages, where the popular rumour is that the couple are nutters. Why? Shaffer, when I arrived to meet him, was sprawled on a sofa in his study, an airy room lined with books, a solid English desk and dominated by a huge sculpted wooden mantaray. He sat me down on one of two facing leather sofas, walked around me a few times, then screwing up his eyes behind mauve-framed spectacles, he drew in smoke, and pondered the question: "What on earth are you doing here?" ‘We…ll’ the man who wrote 'Sleuth', 'Whodunnit?', 'The Wicker Man', and adapted Agatha Christie books for the movies, exhaled. He and Ms. Cilento had had a chat after dinner about four years earlier. "I said to Dee: 'We just can't live here all year around. There's no theatre to go to!' (A suck on the cigarette). "Not just because it is one's profession, but because it is also one's passion and pleasure. D'you know what I mean?" La Cilento, the lady whose face goes on provoking love-affairs with cameras, had agreed: "Why don't we build one?" she said. Shaffer is trying not to be put off his train of thought by the harsh ring of the Fax behind him and the rat-tat of hammers and the whining electric saws across the valley outside, where they are building 'the monster we have created'. Resting on his knees as we speak is a yellow-bound script he is working on, and which four actors are due to bring to life in a fortnight; would I like him to read to me, he asks, part of his new play, ‘Murderer’? Spectacles perched on his nose, he recites the lead actor's opening speech that will soon launch the play in London, and in a week or so will have its world premiere at this miles-from-anywhere playhouse.. 'To become a murderer....that, in the last few years, has crystallised into my single, constant, unappeasable passion. 'Not a casual killer in a bar-room brawl. Or a senseless slayer in a squalid domestic squabble. But a great classic murderer...who actually knows that once a man has killed deliberately, his inhibitions are destroyed...' At midday, with the sun streaming in, there is, nevertheless, a spooky atmosphere. Mists are swirling about the jungle-clad hills outside. And I mention a weird sense of hostility that seeps in from the lonely roads. On one-way bridges on the way to 'Karnak', where I had pulled to one side to let a farm utility pass, instead of getting a North Queensland wave or a nod of thanks one is greeted with a cold, suspicious stare.... "You’re damned right," says Shaffer. But it suits him down the ground. He flies in and out of Cairns International Airport, 40 miles down the road, to London or San Francisco, as frequently as he might have caught a No.9 bus into the West End to his law practice years ago. What happened to that career? He draws heavily on his cigarette, going back over the memory... "I had, you see, been engaged in an undefended divorce action. There is, presumably, no easier case for a solicitor. Unfortunately there was this mix-up in court. There was this woman in the box, the one I thought was my client, and I was asking her questions we’d gone over about her husband’s behaviour and astonishingly she was shaking her head. No, she said, he didn’t do that. But what about the other thing? No, he had never done that either. I was getting a bit frazzled about all this when the judge suggested a short recess and invited me and the other solicitor into chambers. He said to me: "I am afraid you have cocked things up." I hadn’t been questioning my client at all! It was another woman of the same name and I lost the case." Tony said he had taken himself out of the Law Courts and across the road to where a cinema was playing ‘hour-shows’ of shorts and cartoons. While he was sitting in the one and fourpennies, licking his wounds, he idly noticed the screen advertisements. "They were terribly boring and I thought: ‘I can do better than that.’ So next day he made a call to Britain’s biggest screen advertising agency and asked for a job. "I told them I was a lawyer and that didn’t excite them." However he was asked to drop by. A dedicated man, he went ‘aboard’, taking a lowly position writing commercials for contraceptives. He was good at it and his climb up the advertising ladder spectacular. "I found myself with a chauffeur-driven company car and earning an enormous amount of money. But, you know, I was not happy." At the time, Tony’s twin brother, Peter, was already an established playwright, living in New York. His ‘Equus’ and ‘Royal Hunt of the Sun’ had been smash hits wherever they had been staged. Tony felt he might be able to write plays as well; in fact he’d had one on his mind for 20 years. So he gave up his advertising directorship, handed back the car and rented a small flat to work in, sitting down at a typewriter for six months tapping out a play he called ‘Sleuth’. When it was completed he bundled up the manuscript and airmailed it off to Peter, asking him to ‘have a look and see what you think’. Peter Shaffer read it and sent his brother a telegram: ‘Welcome to the Club, Old Boy.’ ‘Sleuth’ was staged all over the world and then made into a movie with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. It left Tony Shaffer with the problem of writing a play that was better. "Otherwise they will be waiting to cut one down. The tall poppy thing." Some weeks before I went to see him, he had been back in London for research and had attended the court trials of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, accused of killing 13 women. "I wanted to see what a man who had done such terrible things was really like. He seemed a perfectly mild little fellow. Scruffy, really. Undersized. I couldn’t see how he could have done that sort of stuff. While I watched him our eyes met." Now the pages of yellow legal pads on the table before us held the lines of ‘Murderer’, the play about an inadequate serial killer who had an eagerness to be caught....He read from the pad: ‘...if I cannot be famous, at least my crime will make me infamous for all time. People will wonder enviously if they, themselves, can cross that great divide between timorous man and proud killer.’ ‘One’ had quite early on, discovered, said Tony, glancing out the window, that a lot of locals plainly did not want the emerging Shaffer-Cilento Karnak Playhouse. It meant strangers driving up from Cairns and across from Port Douglas. And strangers had to be watched. "The opposition was violent," said Shaffer. "I don't mean I was personally assaulted. But I do mean I have had poison-pen letters addressed to me. Of a vile kind. And there was an attempt to 'stitch me up' with a police charge." (An allegation of ‘flashing’ on the Port Douglas beach.) "There was some concealed agenda. And I didn't know what it was." It was only after he and Diane had returned from a trip to New York that the scales fell from the bespectacled Shaffer eyes. A neighbour who had contracted to slash the encroaching jungle on the sprawling 'Karnak' property, took him to task. 'Naughty! Naughty! You shouldn't be doing that sort of thing.' "What sort of thing?' asked a puzzled Shaffer. So 'one' was taken for a drive to one of the boundaries. "There was, of course, a marijuana plantation. Fenced off with bandicoot wire. Someone had been growing dope, not just on our land, but all around this valley." Police helicopters flew out bags of the stuff, arrests were made and charges laid which still remained unheard. And reality at last sank in. "Of course they don't want hundreds of people coming in here. People means police.." Concerned that hundreds of theatre-goers cars would cause serious congestion on the narrow, one-way bridges and wreck their roads, the Douglas Shire at first said no to the Karnak project. Ex-lawyer Shaffer went to council meetings and dug in his well-shod heels. Were the narrow roads and bridges the only objection? They were. "All right. We'll use the Ballyhooley." The Ballyhooley, a little steam train that once hauled sugar-cane in and out of the nearby farms, is now to transport tourists in bright-painted, open carriages. "They'll be met by buses - before the troublesome bridges - and brought on to the theatre just as they do at Glynebourne in England." Who will come? "In this area there is absolutely no entertainment for tourists. Not even a cinema. We bring plane-loads of people from all over the world and at night give them nothing to do. And people living in Mossman, Port Douglas and even Cairns, 40 miles away, are starved for good theatre. At Port Douglas the Sheraton Mirage has someone playing the piano and a girl singing." Tony said he now found himself ‘turning away’ from the Hollywood he enjoyed in the days he scripted Agatha Christie's ‘Death on the Nile’, then ‘Evil Under The Sun’. "The Hollywood film industry is in a state of virtual terminal disgrace. I don't see it as a fit job for gents. I don't see it possible to write to accommodate the kid-world where there is an average IQ of 70 and a vocabulary of less. And that's just what they are trying to do. They achieve their purposes with violence and sex - ice-picks used on people who are in the middle of orgasm. Hollywood has lost its mind. A whole lot of middle-aged men trying to second-guess and palliate whole generations of uneducated cretins. I think they should be ashamed. "Here we will show people what is enjoyed in the West End and on Broadway. Here," he pauses, seemingly still bewildered by the reality, "on Upper Whyanbeel road, Miallo."
