Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a German transvestite, outlived the Third Reich and then the brutal East German Communist regime. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, in her old age she became a German media darling, albeit a controversial one when her involvement with the Stasi secret police was revealed.

American author Doug Wright heard the story and was drawn to it like a bee to honey. It resulted in I Am My Own Wife, his Pulitzer Prize-winning play based on von Mahlsdorf's life, which opens at the Merlin Theatre in Melbourne this week.

Funny, I was just trying to convince Ben to adapt the Marquis De Sade's Dialogues for the stage. The English Theater, in specific, and this would have to be a package deal -- in return for my assistance, I must be assured the part of Dolmance, the perversely polysexual Pan. Ben would have some cherry role (I'm thinking Chevalier De Mirvel), there's actresses coming out of the eaves, and the rest, as they say, will be German theater history.

Wright has already done this, in a sense, by adapting De Sade's life in Quills. The screenwriter's screenwriter, he has sensibly measured out his career in experiments with sexuality. They screen well. Damn you, Wright, always one step ahead! I suppose we won't be seeing our Berlin darling here where she belonged for another year or so: Aussies and Zealand-friends, won't you see this one out? It'd be interesting to see how Wright handles such a complex figure: a [righteous] murderer and Stasi informant, floating over incomprehensible waves of change.