Czech born Misha Williams was assistant director to Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre and commissioned by the company's literary manager Kenneth Tynan to translate Vaclav Havel's "Conspirators". 

Misha own first play (about Byron) was produced by the National Theatre Company and his second, a satirical Western about the Wounded Knee Massacre, he directed on the newly opened Young Vic Stage. He was artistic director of two London Theatre venues, New End in Hampstead and later Bankside Globe Playhouse, Sam Wanamaker's venue. He has directed the popular TV series, "Brookside" and "Eastenders". 

His own biographical account of Vita Sackville-West, the prestigious drama, "All Passion Spent", was highly praised and the acclaimed "Border", (about an escape across a false Iron Curtain) for BBC Screen Two series won him the best TV film award at Cannes (FIPA) and screenings at London and various international festivals. 

In Theatre and TV his productions have been hailed as visually stunning and innovative and have won praise for his flair in drawing outstanding performances from actors.

 - Why a stage play about Fawcett?

 - Why use the Theatre for such an epic story than the Movies or Television?

The answer is that we live in an over commercialized climate. Film and TV would not want the Fawcett story without a large fictitious dose of sex and violence added and the mystical element would not be considered good "box office". Anyone is free to make an Indiana Jones Fawcett film, but it would be far from anything near the truth.

Hollywood and the BBC have approached the Fawcett family on many occasions over the last sixty years for the rights (and the blessing) for a such a project. The family have always denied them access to the large secret archive of Fawcett's diaries, letters and papers that tell the real story. This was for a very good reason. Brian Fawcett was very careful when writing his best selling work "Exploration Fawcett" to leave out eighty percent of the real facts.

He believed the media and the public were not ready for them. Brian used the more adventurous bits of his father's notes and wove them into a very entertaining and memorable "autobiography". The really crucial material he saved in a old trunk for posterity. After some years of winning the Fawcett family's trust, writer/director Misha Williams has been allowed to dramatize the contents of this trunk. At last everything, all the tantalizing gaps in the Fawcett Saga, are now about to be filled.

Misha Williams with arrows shot at Fawcett during one of his expeditions.

These arrows were given to Misha by the Fawcett family.

And what a story! More astonishing than even an Indiana Jones fiction. There is even evidence about the outcome of the fatal expedition and what actually happened to Fawcett, his son Jack and Raleigh Rimell. More importantly their actual objective was not what the public were led to believe.

Having personally being on a solo expedition to the location of Dead Horse Camp in Amazonia and having worked in a film and television, the writer Misha Williams feels that Theatre is the perfect medium for this astounding material. There are many levels of reality in the Fawcett Saga and only Theatre with its emphasis on dialogue and great stylistic freedom can do justice to this "epic of the mind".

The play is based entirely on real conversations and personal diaries and therefore aims at one hundred percent authenticity. But you may ask...

 - Are real conversations taken from life actually interesting?

In this case yes, because they reveal the thoughts and feelings of highly remarkable and original men and women. Some of them, such as Harold Large, Fawcett's closest friend (and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) are introduced to the public for the first time ever.

Since 1928 when Commander Dyott (on the eve of his rescue expedition) turned down Nina Fawcett's vital information and chose to put forward a story of "clubbing to death by Indians" which would please his employers, the North Atlantic Newspaper Alliance and make sensational headlines, the media and the Fawcett family have been at loggerheads. Chateaubriand, the Brazilian newspaper tycoon and the Villas Boas brothers sustained this fiction, adding that Fawcett had slapped a native chief's young son and had brought about his own death through "a misunderstanding of Indians".

Brian Fawcett produced a spare set of Fawcett's dentures in the presence of these illustrious Brazilians. The dentures did not fit the skull that they claimed was Fawcett's but nevertheless they still refused to accept this glaring evidence. So, ever since the family have closed their door to the media until now. With your help, very soon the solution to this great mystery will be revealed.

Misha Williams 

Writer and Director