FROM THE DESK OF Roland Rocchiccioli

In my schooldays a week seemed like a month. I was a boarder, and the winter term – which in those days was twelve-weeks – went on forever!

THESE days a month seems like a week. I left secondary school at the end of 1964. In the March of 1963, 20-months before I left school, a baby was born in Melbourne. A sobering thought, but that baby is now the doctor who takes care of my several medical problems!

I never celebrate New Year – it serves only to remind one that another 12 months has passed and how much remains to be achieved. I don’t make resolutions – they have the capacity to indicate failure if you fall-by-the-wayside; however, I have dedicated the next five years to a plan. If it worked for Communist Russia then, perhaps, it might work for me! Having made and lost a fortune, it is time to consolidate; to replenish the depleted bank balance.

In February I shall be in Sydney for ten days workshopping what, I hope, will be the final script of the stage plays ‘Letters From The Heart’. It will be directed by the English actress, Belinda Lang. Together, we have worked for the past 6-months editing the piece. It has been a fascinating journey and I’ve learned an enormous amount.

This is not my first play. ‘Now You Can Eat Father Christmas’ was a one-man piece I wrote and performed about the life of my late mother, Beria. It had two-seasons in Melbourne, and a season in Gwalia, Western Australia, the now-ghost goldmining town where I grew-up. I performed the play on the back of the old mail truck. Serendipitously, it was the same truck which took the weekly mail and stores to my parents when they lived in Murrin-Murrin in the early 1940s. There were three houses in Murrin-Murrin, triangularly positioned and a mile apart. My parents, Beria and Ginger, lived in a two-roomed iron and Hessian camp and slept in a bough shed.

For the performances, the mail truck was perched on the edge of the now open-cut Sons of Gwalia goldmine with the lights of the operation burning in the background. Paradoxically, and I remember this from my childhood, the harshness and the dangers of the operation were, by night, deceptively transformed by the hundreds of twinkling lights into a magical, fairytale-like landscape. In reality, the former incline shaft was one of the most dangerous in Australia. The headstones in the local cemetery are a testimony and record the short lives of many Italian men who left their families and villages behind and travelled halfway around the world to escape the grinding poverty left in the devastating wake of both world wars. Now they rest in the hot, red earth of a landscape which is the antithesis of all they knew, and loved. Even the stars are different.

The opportunity to take the play back to its genesis, and to know that both my parents would have touched the wooden tray of the truck on which I was performing, was a powerful emotional force.

‘Letters From The Heart’ is an epistolary piece which had a try-out in Brighton, UK, with Hugh Bonneville (Downtown Abbey) and Caroline Langrishe (Judge John Deed). Since then it has undergone major changes and rewrites. You would be amazed how difficult it is to ‘get it right’! Audiences are savvy, and if you leave an untied loose-end they will spot it, immediately. Also, you have to walk fine-line between story-telling and the truth.

The play uses letters written between the two characters Diana and Rupert and spans a period from 1941 to 1997. It starts in England, takes in the fall of Singapore, and ends in Western Australia. Letter writing is a lost art and part of the charm of this piece is the intimacy of the letters – people writing to each other about the characters and events which define their daily lives; in this instance – the Second World War. You write things in letters you might not say in person, and they allow the writer the luxury of a point of view without interruption. Also, people are less inhibited when they are committing their feelings to paper. King George V and Queen Mary wrote to each on a daily basis. The presence of the other person can prove an inhibitor when it comes to revealing the secrets of the heart.

I have kept several hundred letters which Beria wrote me over the years. Recently, a friend sent me copies of letters which Beria wrote to her in 1941. They are fascinating. Beria was still alive when they arrived and some of the events and the people were a total mystery to her. When I was at boarding school we had to write home with a two-page letter ever Sunday night. It’s hard to imagine a student doing that today! If ‘Letters From The Heart’ fulfils its potential – and that is always problematic – it could easily change the colour of my life. Impresario, John Frost, who owns and operates the Gordon Frost Organisation – has grand plans for Australia, the UK and the USA. That triumvirate would be exciting!

Happy New Year to you. I hope 2019 is filled with new and exciting adventures.

Contact: [email protected]. Roland can be heard every Monday morning – 10.30 – on radio 3BA.