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Masquerade 5 - 27 March 1982

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Programme Cover & Info

Cast

The Sun................................................Maynard Williams

The Moon.................................................Celena Duncan

The Frog........................................................Robert lang

Jack Hare, a Hare.........................................Roger Rees

Mrs Pennypockets a fortune Teller of Sorts.Gaye Brown

Tara Treetops..........Sarah Brightman

Craw, a Crow..................................Anastasia Rodriguez

The Practical Man...........................Desmond McNamara

Mrs Fish........................................................Gaye Brown

The Sprit of the Water...........................Chrissy Wickham

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Book Description & Buy from Amazon

Book Description from Amazon.com   In paperback, the book that touched off the treasure hunt of the century-with a full explanation of the Masquerade Riddle. For three years, treasure-seekers from both sides of the Atlantic sought a fabulous golden hare buried by artist Kit Williams. Williams had devised an unusual guide to the hare's whereabouts: a multilayered riddle that he told in a fairy tale of his own imagining, and presented in dazzling, cryptic, paintings. When the hare was finally unearthed by a British engineer, many were left wanting to know exactly how the clues worked out. In this paperback reprint of Masquerade, the author supplies an illustrated preface that pulls the strings, finds the goal, and points to what's important: the village chemist's daughter, the atomic weight of the elements, the shadows of the equinox, Henry VIII's first wife. Williams explains how numbers and colours correspond to the intricate ballet, and how the eyes really do see the answer. And of course, here are the magical pages that tell the tale of Jack the hare, and his journey to the sun. They are still there to discover, ponder, rediscover. And understand at last. Suitable for ages 7 and up. 73,000 copies in print.

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Excerpts from The Man of Masquerade by Susan Raven, June 20th 1982 Copyright The Times

"I became a painter because I was a painter," says Kit Williams. He was almost put off art at school; "but I always knew I could do it. And thinking visually was useful in physics, and I spent my time building television sets and sending up rockets. When I left school... my mother was so fed up she sent me off to join the Navy."

Kit started painting on board the aircraft carrier Victorious. To keep steady when the ship was moving, he used to tie down the canvas, and the seat he was sitting on; he even tied his arm to an armrest. "They thought I was very strange, but my divisional officer somehow understood. He gave me a tiny compartment to paint in."

Leaving the Navy, Kit toured the British coast in a caravan for nearly a decade, taking less and less demanding jobs so that he had the energy to paint and to think. He discovered English painters like Blake and Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer: "I felt related to them, I identified with them." Today, he says "Botticelli is my man." One can see traces of all of them in his obsessed and haunting canvases.

In Whitstable, Kit used to collect driftwood on the shore and make little boats with his address inside, and push them out to sea, hoping to get replies from half way across the world. "In the end, somebody in England picked one up and wrote to me — a young man about to go to Cambridge University. It was he who brought me an entrance form for the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool."

Kit submitted an intimate little picture of two people and a Morris Minor parked on a river bank. It became one of the 80 selected for the exhibition and was immediately bought by one of the Moores family.

The Portal Gallery in London saw this Liverpool picture and asked him if they could show his work. And it was after their second Kit Williams exhibition, in 1976, that publisher Tom Maschler asked him to do a children's book... and that was when Masquerade was conceived.

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Tara Treetops Poster

Tara Treetops Poster - scan from a Sotheby's auction catalogue in 1988 (thanks to Toby Malcolm for that) & to Masquerade website - link below

This is The Golden Hare which was the prize from the Treasure Hunt which was sold at auction, at Sotheby's, to an anonymous buyer, for £31,900.   All Info from link below

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Masquerade Links

where you can see some of Kit Williams Art

Click here to read more about the book etc

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