Program from Will Sterling and Laurence Collinson. Episode of The Lively Arts.
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| Age 29 Oct 1964 |
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| Age 5 Nov 1964 |
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| SMH 2 Nov 1964 |
From Graham Willet article
The Moods of Love also provided the basis for a quite remarkable experiment in translation across media.17 In 1962, television producer, Will Sterling, presented a paper at the UNESCO Conference on Playwriting in Adelaide in which he argued that the reason why there was so little Australian drama on television was that so few writers wrote specifically for that medium. Laurie, who was at the conference and presented a paper on whether Australian-made television was possible or even necessary, was in the audience and, immediately after, button-holed Sterling saying, ‘in his forthright way’ that he had plays available and had been writing and he would be happy to make his material available. The result was a version of Laurie's play Uneasy Paradise which was shown on ABC TV in June 1963. The collaboration was a success, and the two of them stayed in touch, looking for other ideas. In 1964, they entered into an intense exchange of letters (Laurie having gone by this time to England, Sterling being in the USA) out of which came the experimental television film, The Moods of Love. The poems (including some new ones) were voiced over by professional actors, a score was commissioned from the distinguished composer Robert Hughes and performed by members of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and images were filmed in a ‘multiplicity of colourful locations’ around Melbourne. The ‘poetic fusion of pictures, natural sounds, word and music’,18 described by Sterling as ‘a free rhapsody, a fantasia, a symphonic poem …’ was aired on 10 November 1964.
The Moods of Love told the story of an innocent young woman and her romance with a rather more sophisticated young man. Although initially the young man shares her feelings, and the relationship brings them much happiness, problems emerge when it becomes clear that her feelings are deeper and more intense than his, and he finds himself driven away from her suffocatingly desperate love. He finds someone else but, rather than tell her of his new affair, he leaves her to discover this infidelity for herself. Which she does. After great suffering she comes through, becomes herself again, a little wiser perhaps than she had been. All of this is told through seventeen poems – variously serious, comic, tragic – spoken over the visuals. Only the woman was seen on screen; her lover was the camera, which worked as a ‘visual narrator’. It was set in Melbourne, in winter – ‘the bleakness, the harsh bare poetry …, the stillness of night, fog, rain, windswept streets, empty beach, dark reserves, dank parks’, all to convey an affair that ends unresolved, broken …
But there was a secret life to Moods, as well. One that friends of Laurie’s knew about, but which was kept well away from the public. The fact is, most of the more recent poems – and all of the sonnet series – were written in response to Laurie’s first great experience of love. Love, not in the sense of sympathy, understanding, compassion – all those aspects he had enumerated at the Melbourne University celebration – but romantic and carnal love. And, Laurie, being who he was – love, homosexual.