Australian TV Plays: A Night Out (7 Nov 1961)

A Harold Pinter play.

Plot (from BFI Screenonline)

Albert Stokes is dressing to go out when his mother calls him from upstairs. She expresses surprise that he should be going out. He insists he has already told her three times that he is attending a work party to mark the retirement of Mr Ryan. She complains that she had thought he would stay in to play cards, becomes upset when he insists he cannot stay for dinner or change a lightbulb in 'grandma's room' and takes offence when he reminds her that grandma has been dead for ten years.

Eventually, after Albert reassures her that he is going to the party out of obligation and promises to be home early, she allows him to leave, after some fussing over his appearance and worrying that he is 'messing about with girls'.

Meanwhile, Albert's colleagues Kedge and Seeley wait for him at a coffee stall by a railway arch. They discuss Saturday's football game involving the firm's team, in which Albert was playing. Albert's performance was blamed for the team's defeat and won him the enmity of team captain Gidney. When Albert arrives, he is unenthusiastic about the party. When Kedge implies that he is afraid of Gidney, Albert becomes irritable, especially when Kedge asks after his mother. Eventually, Albert agrees to go.

At the party, while Kedge and Seeley dance with girls from the office, Albert is awkward, particularly when two girls come to talk to him. While Mr King, the company manager and party host, is proposing a toast to Mr Ryan, one of the girls screams and claims that someone has touched her indecently. Although the culprit is Mr Ryan, Albert finds himself accused. As Mr King tries to restore order, Albert walks out. Gidney follows him, demanding he apologise to the girl. Albert tries to walk away, while Seeley defends him. When Gidney calls him a 'mother's boy', Albert knocks him down and walks out.

Much later, Albert returns home, drunk. His mother, asleep at the table, wakes and fusses, expressing shock at his dishevelled appearance. Albert stays silent, struggling to control his mounting anger as she rattles on, asking why he can't bring some nice girl home to meet her and complaining that he doesn't care about her. Finally, however, he snaps, grabbing an alarm clock and moving to strike her with it.

Albert wanders the streets and finds himself under the arches. A girl approaches him and invites him to her flat around the corner. Silently, Albert follows her. In the flat, the girl demands he remove his shoes, complaining about the noise he is making. She shows him a picture of a young girl in a tutu - her daughter, she explains, currently in an exclusive boarding school.

Albert lies that he works in films, as an assistant director. The girl is impressed at his 'breeding', and says she once worked as a continuity girl. Albert stays largely silent as the girl witters on, attempting to demonstrate her respectable status and complaining at his poor manners as she begins to undress.

Eventually, he loses his temper, ranting incoherently, spilling out all the pent up anger of his evening. He rips the picture from its frame and reads the inscription on the back - it is dated 1933. Angrily, he tells her that the photo is not her daughter but herself. She protests. He begins to order the dejected girl around, demanding she brings him his shoes and put them on. He leaves, complaining of the cold.

He returns home, to be met by his mother. She is shocked that he raised his hand to her, but as she sees his state of exhaustion, she begins to comfort him, telling him he is 'a good boy' and holding him. Albert says nothing.

Cast

John Ewart as Albert
Neva Carr-Glynn as Mother
Brigid Lenihan as Girl
Noel Brophy as Mr. King
James Elliott as Kedge
Lou Vernon as Mr Ryan
Tom Farley as Old Man
John Godfrey as Seely
Nat Levison as barman
Richard Meikle as Gidney
Joseph Szabo as Horne
Carole Boyce
Carole Taylor
Martin Magee as Barrow

Original play

Aired on British TV in 1960 for Armchair Theatre. Philip Saville directed. Sydney Newman produced. Pinter wrote it.

It was one of three plays the BBC commissioned from Pinter. This was reportedly very successful ratings wise. 6.4 million people saw it, a record for a television drama. BFI Screenonline wrote an essay on it here.

According to the piece As well as demonstrating its author's remarkable ear for the rhythms of everyday speech, 'A Night Out' bears the thematic hallmarks that established Pinter as the most celebrated playwright of his generation - the difficulty of true communication, the thick layers of meaning buried in language and the mutually destructive patterns of behaviour that can come to dominate relationships.

You can borrow a copy here.

Other Adaptations

The BBC also did the play for radio in 1960...a version which had been broadcast in Australia by the ABC. It aired on Melbourne radio in July 1961 and December 1961.

Review of 1960 British radio play is here.

It was filmed for Canadian TV in 1964.

Production

I think the acclaim that greeted this was clearly irresistible to the ABC. They could have just shown the British version but decided to do it themselves.

It was shot in Sydney. Alan Burke directed.

Designer Desmonde Dowling constructed four unique sets.

It was the 20th live play directed by Alan Burke who said "though this is a drama it is never far from comedy. Pinter's special talent is to see the ironic humour in ordinary people's frustrations, as well as the incipient horror in their most everyday actions. The playwright's vivid life among people with tangy speech and his experience as an actor give him an extraordinary command of language. In fact Pinter can record day to day conversation more accurately than most playwrights writing in English today and can lift the audience's scalp with its implications."

Burke told Graham Shirley in 2004:

Very pleased with that. The first Pinter to my knowledge to be done in this country professionally anyway. The story arose because I wanted to do The Birthday Party of Pinter’s and Paul got the rights for me and read it and fainted and said ‘you’re not going to do that terrible play’. He thought it was a play called The Party which is quite a different play but when he read the Pinter he disliked it cordially and vetoed it. And I said ‘oh dear, we’ve got the rights, what do we do about that’? And I said ‘of course, there’s the other one Night Out which I love and it’s certainly not wildly in the way that Birthday Party is, you know off centre, it’s much more direct’. And Paul read that and said ‘fine’. So we got onto the Agent and they agreed to allow us to do Night Out instead of Birthday Party.
GS So just to clarify because I’m not too clear on this. He had bought The Birthday Party and the television rights to Birthday Party and he wasn’t happy with the content of it so you went for Night Out and you were able to exchange.
AB So they exchanged, the Agent allowed that instead of and Night Out was very good. John Ewart and Neva Carr Glynn as mother and son and a wonderful performance from Brigid Lenihan , a lovely New Zealand actress who at that stage had worked in Australia for a while. We played it absolutely as written. It was written for radio and I’d in fact had heard a BBC production of it on radio and loved it, thought it was so good. And it was a lovely play in that it had leading roles for solo people but it also had a party scene which was beautifully written and the centre of conversation passed from one group to another in a way that made it very good for television. You could cut comfortably around it and I enjoyed that immensely.

Reception

The Sunday Sydney Morning Herald called it "a brilliant bit of production, and one of the best contemporary dramas the Sydney studios of the A.B.C. has done yet. "

The Sydney Morning Herald thought Ewart was "excellent" but felt the female leads over-acted