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Reclusive Australian author Colleen McCullough, after jealously guarding her best-selling novel The Thorn Birds from all other attempts to adapt it for the stage, has announced plans to premiere a new musical version.
The 71-year-old writer says it will be directed by the award-winning Michael Bogdanov.
McCullough's novel, which has sold more than 30 million copies since it was published in 1977, is still regarded by many fans as the most romantic ever written. Germaine Greer recently dubbed it "the best bad book ever" in response to publisher Virago's decision to reissue it as a modern classic.
The American mini-series based on the book in the early 1980s remains one of the most widely viewed television dramas.
Starring Richard Chamberlain as an errant Catholic priest and Rachel Ward as his young lover, it was beaten into second place for audience numbers only by Roots, the groundbreaking US series about race.
"There are certain iconic moments in television history that mean something to people and The Thorn Birds was one of these," Bogdanov says.
McCullough wrote the first draft of her hit novel in just three months in the evenings after her day job as an impoverished neurophysicist working in the laboratories at America's Yale University. The book's publication turned her life upside down.
Its huge international success forced her to give up academia and in the late 1970s she moved to Norfolk Island to avoid the pressures of fame.
Concentrating on other kinds of writing, including a seven-volume series on the history of Rome, McCullough did not pick up a copy of The Thorn Birds for 25 years until Gloria Bruni, a German composer and opera star, sent her some songs she had written, inspired by the story.
The two women have since collaborated on the content of the show, but were not happy with "the book" of their new musical until Bogdanov became involved.
"I picked up a copy of the book at Cardiff [Wales] airport on my way to America shortly after Colleen and Gloria contacted me," Bogdanov says. "I had not read it before, but I found, like most people, I could not put it down. As soon as I landed in America I contacted them and said I wanted to work on the musical with them."
Bogdanov, who has directed opera and musicals and who set up the English Shakespeare Company after a period in the 1980s working at the National Theatre in London as an associate director, travelled to McCullough's home on Norfolk Island to work on the dialogue.
He and Bruni also worked with McCullough on the script in Wales, where Bogdanov now runs the Wales Theatre Company, the company behind the new musical.
The role of Meggie Cleary has gone to the musical actor Helen Anker and the role of dashing priest Ralph de Bricassart has yet to be cast.
"It is going to be a challenge to suggest that sense of loneliness on the stage," Bogdanov says, "but I can see how we can do it. Expectations are going to be very high."
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