More Pat Flower.
Premise
Miss Peach and Mrs Plum, meet across the Lace counter in a department store and discover that both sides of the counter yield elusive truths.
Cast
- Ruth Cracknell as Miss Peach
- Aileen Britton as Mrs Plum
- Noel Brophy as Mr Prune
Production
Flower originally wrote this and Easy Terms for Robin Lovejoy's lunchtime theatre program. This program folded before Lovejoy even read them but once he did he recommended them to the ABC and Flower became the main contributing writer to season one of Australian Playhouse.
It was shot in Sydney. ABC records say this happened on 21 August 1966. Alan Burke directed.
Burke told a 2006 NIDA oral history that it was written for a NIDA exercise. Said it was "wonderful vaudeville".
He also talked about it in a 2004 interview with Graham Shirley:
Lace Counter was extravagant in writing. A bit like The Skin of our Teeth of Thornton Wilder. She [Flower] wrote it in fact for three characters for the NIDA kids and there is a sales lady, a customer and the gentleman floor walker and that’s the cast. And they discuss a variety of topics and it turns vaguely into a philosophical argument and the customer and the sales lady exchange places and things like that.
But it was all fairly direct naturalism and I thought ‘you know, this play would lend itself to wildly fantastic treatment’ and so we did. We used the idafor (sounds like) which is this back projection thing I had never used but I said ‘that’s what we want’ and we had images behind the sales lady who was Ruth Cracknell, altering according to what was being spoken. We also had a plain striped shot that could be just at the back wall of her shop. But we used a lot of subjective things and things were reference to ‘I don’t know who he is’ and we used a little clip from oh, the beginning of one of the commercial series which we got permission to use, which has changing identification photos flashing on and off and I thought ‘that’s nice, we’ll use that’. Things of that nature and at one stage there is reference to ‘the bomb’ and behind Ruth we put up the explosion and slight pause and then she’d brush the fallout from her shoulder before she continued with the thing. That sort of style. It worked very well and when they changed places, they would simply walk round and be on the other side. But we did an edit and they changed costumes and sat on the counter and swung their legs simultaneously on either side and landed down as sales lady and customer in reverse casting...
When they talked about a subject you ... ah... I suppose do I mean expressionistic. I’m not quite sure but when they brought up a topic you illustrated it where you could behind their head, you know on the projection...
I was very very pleased with it and even David Goddard, whom we will come to in a moment and who didn’t like my work at all, liked that... Ruth Cracknell, Aileen Britton and lovely Noel Brophy and I had wanted those three and at one stage we’d programmed it earlier about a year before and none of the three was available. And I said well, if I had to replace one I’d consider it but if you’ve got to replace three it’s going to be second string and I don’t want to do that. And I in fact engaged the three actors and had to tell them it was off which was very embarrassing but I got the cast I wanted a little while later and it was absolutely perfect casting. They were wonderful...
I could see images exactly of the people I wanted and as everybody says ‘good production is ninety percent good casting’ and my perception of what Ruth and Aileen and Noel Brophy would do, was exactly I think what the play was at and I stuck out finally after we’d engaged them. In fact Goddard had made a sort of a dictum ‘don’t ever stop a play because you can’t cast it. You can always recast something’, speaking probably from English experience where perhaps you could. But I’m afraid I flaunted his dictum by saying ‘look, there isn’t a cast I can get and I don’t think I’m going to go ahead with it and we’ll sadly cancel the castings which we did. Luckily it was far enough ahead not to be too much of an embarrassment but I’m so glad I stuck out for it, it was exactly what I wanted it to be when it hit the screen...
Film editor - Liko Krejcik. Technical producer - Fred Haynes. Designer - Quentin Hole. Producer and director - Alan Burke.
Reception
The Age gave it a poor review, calling it "nothing more than a prolonged dialogue".
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| Canberra Times 26 Sept 1966 p 15 |
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| The Age TV Guide 22 Sept 1966 |
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| The Age TV Guide 22 Sept 1966 |
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| SMH TV Guide 26 Sept 1966 |
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| The Age 1 Oct 1966 p 23 |
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| TV Times 26 Oct 1966 p 1 (qld) |
The Lace Counter (first broadcast 26 September, 1966)
This was written by Pat Flower, who is best known for her thrillers (eg. The Tape Recorder), but who also did a few comedies; The Lace Counter falls into the second category. It’s basically a two hander about one lady (Aileen Britton) purchasing lace from another (Ruth Cracknell) and… that’s about it. There is lots of word play. Lots.
Flower originally wrote this for stage – Alan Burke, who directed, said the script was conceived as a NIDA exercise – and this really belonged in a theatre rather than on television (and at a shorter running time). Burke described it as “wonderful vaudeville”; he tries to jazz things up with a few wacky camera angles and interludes but it’s still essentially a theatrical piece. The two leads are excellent, particularly Cracknell – they are the best thing about it.
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