AustLit

Kelver Hartley, the eccentric Foundation Professor of French at the University of Newcastle, Australia, achieved local fame when he died leaving to his university a legacy valued at close to $2 million. What was most strange was that he had spent his last years living as a virtual pauper. An academic who chose to live as a recluse may seem an unlikely subject for a theatrical work, but rumours about Hartley's life abounded, and he made no attempt to dispel them, indeed encouraging them by the occasional enigmatic comment. This eccentricity itself, stemming perhaps from an inability, or unwillingness, to separate fantasy from reality, appeared to Foveaux Kirby to constitute rich material for a play drawing on all the resources of multimedia presentation. The result is by no means a conventional dramatised life story, but rather a fantasy and a puzzle boldly constructed from factual and fictional elements, including large shreds of Hartley's own creative writing.