The play, currently on stage as part of the High Performance Rodeo festival, tells the story of a disenchanted academic, a Shakespeare specialist known as Prof, who is asked by the college president to help her struggling son with his freshman English course.

Murrell, one of the giants of Canadian theatre whose plays include Waiting for the Parade, Death in New Orleans, Farther West and Memoir, a play about French actress Sarah Bernhardt, has spent most of the last ten years immersed in the world of opera.

As librettist to composer John Estacio, he wrote the operas Filumena and Frobisher for Calgary Opera. Together with composer and Vancouver symphony conductor Bramwell Tovey, Murrell, who in 2008 received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement, wrote The Inventor.

In 2010, Murrell returned to his first love - writing for the spoken theatre.

His new play, Taking Shakespeare, was selected by Calgary's One Yellow Rabbit performance company as its contribution to the annual festival of new performance works, the High Performance Rodeo.

In a Shakespearean twist, Denise Clarke of company took the role of the young man, Murph, and asked her good friend, the playwright, to play the role of Prof.  Murrell says he approached the role with some nervousness as he had not acted in more than fifteen years.

"The director, Blake Brooker, says John was like a shark that had been taken out of water," says Clarke, "when we put him back in he was a little slow and took a minute or two, then once he sort of woke up, I'm telling you this is a beautiful performance."

Murrell says the play is a classic odd couple situation. Prof and Murph have absolutely nothing in common, except for Shakespeare's Othello. And while the play is the object of Prof's veneration, it is the source of Murph's frustration.

"The distance to be travelled between these two characters is enormous" says Murrell, "and the opportunity to do this with a dear friend is very special because we start out in opposite corners of the universe and then the two characters have to find each other."

They find each other with the help of the Bard and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.

Why Othello?

"To me it's the most beautiful of the plays in terms of its poetry and it's also the most difficult" says Murrell adding  "so what more preposterous task could an already disenchanted and burned out old Prof have than to teach Othello to a young man who knows nothing about Shakespeare?"

The current Calgary run of Taking Shakespeare is a world premiere. Murrell and Clarke have inaugurated the roles of Prof and Murph and they may get to reprise them once the current run ends. Murrell says there is already interest from others theatres in mounting the play or hosting a touring production.

If John Murrell's theatrical track record is anything to go by, Taking Shakespeare will eventually be seen by many theatre-goers across Canada and internationally as well.