Bright Lucifer, written by a teenage Orson Welles, will have its London premiere at the The White Bear Theatre in November.
The production will be one of the first at the award-winning, off-West End theater following a $1.7 million refurbishment there. Bright Lucifer will run November 8 through December 3.
Bright Lucifer includes a new opening section in which Welles (played by Wellesnet contributor Brice Statford) introduces the play with a magical flourish.
Welles had intended to stage Bright Lucifer at the 1935 Woodstock Summer Theatre Fest as a follow to the previous summer’s event in Illinois. However, his mentor, “Roger Hill, feeling himself lucky to have survived the 1934 fest both financially and emotionally, nixed the idea of staging the new play.
Despite being dismissed by some as an adolescent horror story, Bright Lucifer has some autobiographical references when put into the context of Welles’ career. It figured prominently in Barbara Leaming’s 1984 biography, Orson Welles, which was written with Welles ‘ cooperation.
Bright Lucifer is the tale of two men on a fishing trip in the north woods; one a burned-out horror film actor named Jack, clearly modeled on John Barrymore, and the other his brother Bill, a newspaper editor, who as Leaming believe to be an amalgamation of Welles’ guardian Maurice “Dadda” Bernstein, Skipper Hill, and John Houseman.
With the two men is Bill’s adolescent ward, Eldred, who is the “ Lucifer” of the play’s title, and obviously a self-portrait of Welles himself. Like the author, Eldred is an orphan, smokes cigars, has hay fever, and has studied Nietsche.
On September 27, 1997, 12 years after Welles’s death, the play was finally given its world premiere performance in Madison, Wisconsin, where Welles had briefly gone to school as a 10-year-old.
A bootleg recording of that production with audio samples was detailed by Wellesnet’s Mike Teal in September 2014.
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