WRITER - "L'ALTRO"

"L'ALTRO" - A VICTORIAN SCANDAL

in one act

Lord Francis Douglas, Lord Drumlanrig, with his brother, Lord Alfred Douglas.

Giorgio Quintini was a great reader. He devoured books, and especially memoirs. His phenomenal memory meant that he remembered the most abstruse details years later. This short play for three actors, a trialogue, draws upon his interest in the period of the decadence in Victorian Britain and parallels he felt it had with contemporary Italy.

After the success of "Intervista a Colette", and then with "Il Gestore", both monologues, he branched out into a subject which had fascinated him for some time, the death of Lord Drumlanrig, the elder brother of Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde's lover). It was thought to have been suicide, possibly because he was being blackmailed over a possible intimate relationship with the then Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. Giorgio took it for granted that this was true in order to write a play about hypocrisy.

A letter from the present writer dated 12th May 2000, which gives some of the background and other details, including the correct titles and relationships of those involved, shows that it was then, just after moving to Ovada, that Giorgio had picked up the topic again and was writing seriously. He had certainly finished it by January 2001 but it was not performed until the end of September 2002, when it was played at the Teatro Gioiello in Turin as part of a season of new works.

The actors were Piero Nuti, Giuliano Bonetto and Andrea Beltrami (in that order below).

Giorgio always appreciated the advice of a leading local writer, Camilla Salvago Raggi, and sent the script to her, probably hoping for an opening for the play in Ovada, something she thought was unlikely in her reply to him dated 24th October 2002.

The play certainly pushed the boundaries of decency to the limits with some very explicit description in the central scenes. It does not seem to have been performed again after Turin for it needed more than just a single narrator and thus Giorgio could not offer to give his own readings.

The typescript of the play opens, as does Colette, with a description of the set but then moves straight away into the odd conversations of these three men, one of whose identities is never revealed.

Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, sometime British Prime Minister.

The play opened thus:

And eighteen pages later it ends mysteriously.

Like his other works, this is not a historical reconstruction but Giorgio Quintini drawing on history to write about things which  interested him. Perhaps one day these fugitive works may be collected and published.

Lord Alfred Douglas and Lord Drumlanrig.