Australian TV Plays: GMH - The Concert (3 June 1961)

A play that I think was originally written for the ABC but shown on commercial TV (GTV-9). Rod Kinnear directed. 60 mins.

A white woman falls for a black man. Gasp! Dark Under the Sun touched on similar issues.

Premise

Anne is a nurse who is blinded in an air raid during World War Two. Her aim is to move back to France to the village where she was blinded and help blind people. Determined to be independent, she originally lives with her sister Jenny then moves in to her own apartment.

While Jenny is away for two weeks, Anne falls for one of her upstairs neighbours, a writer called Jennings, not knowing he is black. Jennings decides not to tell Anne he is black and moves away. He tells his friend Standish about the affair.

Cast

Ruth Gower as Anne Rivers
Chester Harriott as Richard Jennings
Yvonne Heaslip as Jenny Rivers
Barbara Brandon as mother
Cyril Gardner as father
Moira Carleton as Matron
Arthur Duncan as Steve
Donna Duncan as Ella
George Fairfax as Standish
Lewis Taggart as landlord

Original play

The play by Joseph Schull had originally been written as a radio play. It aired on the BBC radio in 1950 and played three times. Schull was a Canadian who served in the navy and stayed in Britain after WW2 see here. I think he went back to Canada and visited again in 1959 to Britain see here. A thesis on Schull is here.

A BBC version of the radio play was performed on the ABC in 1951.

Other adaptations

The play had been filmed several times in England, including once with Moira Lister in 1954 for BBC TV and once in 1959 with Diane Cilento and Earl Cameron, again for the BBC. (The director of the latter was RObert Allan, a Canadian.)

Apparently in the 1954 edition used a subjective camera the audience was kept guessing as to the identity of Jennings, the hero, until the end "and had a tremendous impact on the viewer". A review calls it "brilliant" see here.

The 1959 revealed the race of the man up front - see here. This was a version of the script that Schull revisioned for TV (the 1954 was basically a filmed radio play). His new TV version showed in Canada in 1958. A review of the 1959 version is here.

Production

In January 1958 the ABC Weekly reported that the ABC Drama Dept was negotiating to buy the screen rights to the play.

I'm not sure why GMH did it. George F Kerr, the ABC's normal writer, did the script. I think it may have been written for the ABC but they decided not to do it.

The stars of the play were an English actor, Ruth Gower, and three black American actors, Chester Harriott, Arthur Duncan and his wife Donna.

Ruth Gower had come to Australia in 1960 to appear on stage opposite Basil Rathbone in Merry Go Round. Arthur Duncan and Chester Harriott had appeared on GTV-9 variety shows.

It was filmed in Melbourne in October 1960, while Gower was acting at the Princess Theatre in the play.

Chester Harriott was then touring Melbourne doing a song-and-piano act with Vic Evans. It had three coloured actors.

Rod Kinnear directed.

Reception

The TV reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald said that "a number of sets and some individuality in acting could not altogether bind this drama together as firmly as one would wish." Although the script had "its moments of pathos" and "some powerful (if repetitive) things to say about black-white relationships", Ruth Gower "hardly varied her two expressions — of hesitant humour and of proud stubbornness — and she was not able to show fully the qualities the Negro writer finds so compelling" and "the feeling of precise locality varied from scene to scene" and "one missed an abundance of fine, full close-ups—something that cannot be compensated for by any number of sets."

Listener In disliked it saying it was sluggish.