Australian TV Plays: AP#1.28 - Easy Terms (24 Oct 1966)

More Pat Flower

Premise

For the smallest weekly payment, Miranda Vane can buy peace, truth and status, only to discover the hard sell stems from husband and salesman alike.

Plot

The story takes place in a fancy flat. Miranda Vane talks to a salesman. Her husband comes home.

Cast

Gerda Nicholson as Miranda Vane
Edward Hepple as the salesman
Fred Parslow as Miranda's businessman husband, Julian Vane

Production

Flower originally wrote this and The Lace Counter 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.

The play was shot in Melbourne with sets designed by Trevor Ling.

According to ABC records it was filmed 19 Sept 1966.

Original music - Frank Smith. Lighting - Leigh Hardy. Technical producer - Robert Forster. Designer - Trevor Ling. Produced and directed by Oscar Whitbread.

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald critic accused it and Marleen of having "hollow nothingness."

The Sydney Morning Herald said "This was Miss Flower's sixth or seventh in the series — even the faithful have lost count — and it only increased the wonder at how her scripts are accepted so frequently. Set in an "op" art flat crammed with sterile bad taste, the characters were creatures who could not exist. They endlessly gave smart chatter such as: "Kiddies are only an afterthought" . . "My husband may pop off with a popsie" . . . "We can make our own earth here in Heaven." A sermon on the folly of selling one's soul for trashy possessions may have lurked there — may have, but who wants a sermon in a playhouse?"

The Canberra Times said "there cannot be very many viewers left these days for the Australian Playhouse series on ABC, which has rapidly become The Pat Flower Show... Easy Terms makes a grand total for the authoress of nine out of twenty-eight, which is over thirty-two per cent. No one, I am sure, would be even inclined to comment and everyone would wish her luck if they were becoming more and more entertaining, but a play like Easy Terms, a creaking study of possession-culture "fantacised", was surely more suitable fora select audience in experimental Jane St. Theatre, Kensington, than for general entertainment."

The Age called it a "plotless, formless hunk of tripe" in which "the actors went on just mouthing words."