Blue Murder (2 Dec 1959)

 An original Australian play. From Englishman-living-in Australia, George F. Kerr. 60 mins. In Melbourne 2 March 1960.

Plot

A producer, Martin Johnson, arrives in Sydney hoping to persuade theatre star Thelma Lane-Forest to appear in a play. Thelma has not acted since her last play received bad notices, particularly one by Australian theatre critic Philip Gage. Thelma has also arranged for a journalist, Lundy, to "ghost" her life story. She has a son, Ricky, who does interviews for television.

Ricky is romantically involved with Jeanette Gage, the sister of Philip. Philip dislikes Ricky.

Lundy arrives at Thelma's house on Sydney's north shore. He is met by Ricky who explains he has murdered his mother and intends to blame this on Lundy. Ricky then kills Lundy.

Jeanette and Philip arrive at the house and discover the dead bodies of Thelma and Lundy. Ricky says that Lundy murdered his mother. While Jeanette believes him, Philip interrogates Ricky's story and eventually figures out the truth.

Cast

• Ric Hutton as Ricky Lane-Forest
• Nancye Stewart as Thelma Lane-Forest
• Derani Scarr as Jeanette Gage
• Colin Croft as Philip Gage
• Hugh Stewart as Martin Johnson
• Richard Davies as Lundy

Production

George F. Kerr was an Englishman living in Australia.

Kerr seemed to like these thrillers. He also wrote Heart Attack.

It was shot in Sydney at Studio 21, Gore Hill. A script is at the NAA (not available on line though). Ray Menmuir directed.

In John Croyston's oral history with Graham Shirley, he said the ABC were going to do a play but couldn't get the rights so Kerr went home and wrote a new one in two days using the same cast and sets. I used to wonder if it was this play, because he said Ray Menmuir was the director. But I found out from TV times that it was Heart Attack

According to TV Times this began as some dialogue for stage play but one that was never produced. "On reading it through I suddenly saw it as the heart and soul of a television play."

It was set in Australia. "I believe one should write about the place one lives in," said Kerr.

This was its first performance. He said it was written at 90 minutes but that he had to reduce it to 60 minutes. This was done after the play had already been cast. "Every unncessary word went," said Kerr. "Now it's as tight as a drum. Of course, you could go on and on and on cutting. After all, the essential feature of any mystery play is: 'I'm dead. Who did it? Call the police.' But the audience finds it so much more interesting if you fill the story out a little."

My thoughts on the script

This feels like he adapted it from a play he wrote in England. I could be wrong. It is set in Australia but reads like it takes place a never-never land.  

It feels like a stretch that Philip was an Australian theatre critic in London and is now in Sydney, and his sister loves Ricky. 

The suspense is quite strong once Ricky kills his mother and Lundy turns up. I get the feeling this would have made a nice tight half hour. The early scenes feel like padding - Martin Johnson is a character introduced then doesn't appear again.  And the interrogation between Philip and Ricky went on too long.

I'm not sure George Kerr was the best adapter of his own work. Mind you, there might be another explanation.

Everyone talks in a Dial M for Murder stye of chat. 

Still, there is definite novelty in a theatre critic being the hero.

Other adaptations

The story was also adapted into a radio play which was broadcast in 1960.

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald felt the plot was illogical, but also called it a "neatly constructed thriller, very competently produced" with "enough gloss on the writing and production to overcome any lingering questions raised by logic; and the play succeeded admirably on its own chosen level - it was craftsmanlike, thoroughly professional and pleasantly diverting." 

Frank Thring in TV Week said "an anticipatory shiver of cold foreboding ran through me when I saw the name of George F. Kerr attached" to the play because "Mr Kerr, as all collectors of bad plays will remember, was responsible for Heart Attack... I am sorry to report that Mr Kerr has done it again... this monstrously amateur little playlet." He said that acting consisted of "unrelieved dreadfulness" adding "anyone who could become involved in such a shambles of their own free will deserves all they get."

 

SMH 3 Dec 1959 p 5

The Age Supplement 25 Feb 1960 p 2

The Age 25 Feb 1960 p 18

 

SMH 2 Dec 1959 p 21

SMH 2 Dec 1959 p 21

 

From the script at NAA

From the script at the NAA

Vic TV Times

The Age 2 March 1960

Forgotten Australian Television Plays: Four from George F. Kerr
by Stephen Vagg
February 27, 2022
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian television plays looks at four written locally by George F. Kerr: Enemy of the People (1958), Blue Murder (1959), Heart Attack (1960) and Jenny (1962).

Some time back I did a piece on the Australian TV play She’ll Be Right (1962), which was written by a bloke called George F. Kerr. Kerr was an Englishman who came out here in 1957 and wrote a bunch of things for ABC television and radio, as well as a stage play, before heading back home in 1962. During that five-year period, he was probably the busiest writer on Australian television. An ABC Weekly profile on him is here.

Kerr had an interesting backstory (I’m going to repeat some stuff from the She’ll Be Right piece, apologies). He was an accountant who enlisted in the army at the beginning of World War Two, was captured and made a POW, during which he presumably had a lot of time to think about what he’d really like to do with his life. When Kerr got out, he decided to try his luck at writing and managed to sell some TV scripts, receiving particular acclaim for A Month of Sundays (1952), based on his war experiences. He was a drama editor at the BBC for several years, before moving to ITV in 1955 to work as a script editor and drama executive, penning several early episodes of the legendary anthology series Armchair Theatre.

Kerr moved to Australia in 1957, accompanied by his wife who Kerr had met by being her tutor while she was at school, which would get him arrested now, but I guess the times were different.

In 1950s Australia, having an English accent and the words “BBC” on your resume carried a lot of weight at cultural institutions. Kerr was one of many English given key jobs – others around this time included Neil Hutchison, head of ABC drama, Hugh Hunt, head of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, John Sumner, head of Union Theatre (which became the MTC), and Royston Morley, a writer-director at the ABC. This didn’t pass unnoticed, or uncriticised at the time – indeed Labor MP Arthur Calwell, then deputy leader of the Federal Opposition, gave the ABC a serve in Parliament about it at the time, pointing out their in-house jobs could have gone to Australians.

Kerr’s Australian TV credits include Symphone Pastorale (1958), A Little South of Heaven (1961), Farewell Farewell Eugene (1960), The Dock Brief (1960), The Concert (1961), and The Multi Coloured Umbrella (1958).

Today, I want to talk about three scripts Kerr wrote which I have read via the National Archives of Australia, but haven’t seen (I’m not sure copies exist). They are Enemy of the People, Blue Murder and Jenny. I will also talk about a play he wrote which I haven’t read or seen, Heart Attack.
An Enemy of the People (1958)

This was based on the 1882 stage play by Norwegian author Henrik Ibsen – a work probably best remembered for inspiring that subplot in Jaws (1975) about the mayor who refuses to believe there’s a shark because it’ll affect tourism (the all-time great “monster on the loose” movie subplot… it even appears in our own Aussie 10BA croc movie Dark Age). Steve McQueen starred in a famously determined-to-change-his-image-attempt-which-didn’t-work-out film version of the play in 1977 that no one saw.

An Enemy of the People is a first-rate piece of drama. Almost. It’s about a doctor in Norway, Dr Stockmann, who discovers the natural baths which form the basis of his home town’s tourism industry have been poisoned from a local factory. The doctor tries to warn everyone but gets shut down by powerful forces and fired from his job as health official, declared “an enemy of the people”. Stockmann decides to stay in the town, preach the truth, and set up a school with the help of his wife, daughter and this random sea captain. The doctor ends the play declaring the strongest man is he who stands alone – kind of forgetting he’s saying it right next to three people who have pledged help for him. You can read a copy of the play here.

Ibsen shows his skill as a dramatist by personalising the conflicts – for instance, the doctor’s brother owns the hotel at the baths, his father-in-law owns the polluting factory, his daughter is romanced by the local newspaper editor. Several of the play’s themes are (depressingly) still relevant today: the ignoring of scientific fact in the face of financial considerations, the lack of moral spine from the media.

An Enemy of the People is also really, really fascist. Like shockingly so. I get “fascist” is an overused word these days but it’s hard to read the play and not think “geez this doctor is a bit of a Nazi”. It’s definitely, specifically anti-democratic and pro-eugenics: Stockmann rants about the evils of the majority and how liberals are bad and how some people are just superior to others and everyone should shut up and follow the brilliant ones and liars should be wiped off the face of the earth. It’s actually quite alarming to read, and would explain why the piece isn’t as revived today as often as other Ibsen works like A Doll‘s House and Hedda Gabler.

And the thing is, An Enemy of the People doesn’t have to be fascist – while Stockmann goes on (and on) about the “majority”, the majority are not really the villains in this play, we only see a few of the townsfolk and they’re all ones worried about money. Outside of the doctor’s immediate family, we don’t meet any mums, kids, old people, the sick… It’s like Ibsen took a superb dramatic situation and plastered needless fascist propaganda all over it. Sure, you could argue “well, the doctor is a kook and the people who take these sort of stands are kooks” but the dramatic weight is stacked so much in Stockmann’s favour (I mean, he’s right about the poison and his opponents are all depicted as weak money grabbers), it’s hard to not feel Ibsen is endorsing the doctor’s point of view.

So anyway, the ABC decided to film An Enemy of the People for Australian television in 1958. Ibsen was always a safe choice at the time, fascism or not – no one’s going to bag you for doing Ibsen, they’ll come off as uncultured.

An Enemy of the People had been produced on ABC radio in 1941 and 1954 and for the BBC TV in 1950. In 1961, the ABC would film two other Ibsen plays, one a classic, Hedda Gabler and one hardly anyone remembers, The Lady from the Sea. BBC radio did An Enemy of the People on radio in 1941, 1944, 1950, 1951, 1955, and 1956, and would do it in 1960 and 1964 and on TV again in 1961 and… anyway the BBC really liked doing An Enemy of the People.

The big kick for the version of that play that I’m discussing today is that Kerr adapted the story to be set in Australia. That’s actually a terrific way to use a classic: rework it to be set locally. It’s become very common on Australian stages in recent years (hi there, Andrew Upton), and has bled into our cinema: you have Australian-ised versions of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (The Wild Duck (1983), The Daughter (2015)), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Twelfth Night (1986)) and Macbeth (M (2006)), Chekov‘s Uncle Vanya (Country Life (1994)) and, on a more international scale, the work of Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rogue, Romeo and Juliet). The ABC may have been inspired by the fact that the BBC did a 1950 radio version of An Enemy of the People that relocated the action to coastal Scotland (this adaptation would be later filmed for television by the BBC in 1977 and shown in 1980).

The only thing is, Kerr wasn’t, well, Australian – which isn’t itself fatal (he was living here when he wrote it) but he struggled to capture the country on the page – its people, the way they talked, how society operated. Everyone in his version of An Enemy of the People sounds English, which I know some people do (and did) in Australia, but not so many in regional Queensland; that’s where his version of the play is set – a fictitious coastal town called Jacaranda (great name).

Another problem is that the adaptation is set in 1958 – there’s reference to the CSIRO, airplanes, new Australian immigrants from Europe – but Kerr doesn’t properly update the text, so the story doesn’t ring true. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we have seen in recent years that economical factors and ignorance can trump science, that’s not the issue. The issue is Kerr had not rewritten the play sufficiently to account for the fact that 1958 Australia is a different place from 1882 Norway.

For instance, there’s reference to the doctor being a “health official”, as in the play – but in post-war Australia the person who had that job would be from a state or federal government department(s), and Kerr makes no mention of government departments. He places a lot of emphasis on the power of the local newspaper, as in the play, and local papers do have power, especially in country towns – but Kerr totally ignores the invention of well, radio, in particular the ABC which would, in theory at least, be more independent and have offered the doctor another way of getting his message out.

Kerr has Stockman (he loses the second “n”) get the results of tests from the CSIRO but never has him get the CSIRO involved after that without explaining why. He doesn’t explain why the doctor doesn’t call up the state or federal department for the environment and/or the local state/Federal MP, or why Stockman doesn’t write a letter to a newspaper in the city. Kerr has the townsfolk talk about having to raise money to fix pollution via a loan from the townspeople, as in the play – because that’s presumably how it worked in 1882 Norway, but not in Australia where you ask the government.

I stress, you could still tell the same story of An Enemy of the People in 1958 Australia (you could tell it in 2022 Australia), you just have to update it properly to ground it in reality, and Kerr does not. All he’s really done is change place and character names and sprinkled a little bit of slang and modern day technology in without truly updating it. Kerr was too faithful to Ibsen in terms of text and not enough in terms of spirit.

Incidentally, Kerr removes some the doctor’s most eugenic-istic rants from Ibsen (eg. “all who live by lies deserve to be exterminated like vermin”) but still keeps the doctor decrying the majority, his creepy plan to set up a school of young boys he plans to indoctrinate, and the doctor saying he is strong because he stands alone despite three supporters being next to him.

Mind you, the basic story still works dramatically. For all the unpleasant ideology, and unconvincing updating, as a piece of dramatic construction An Enemy of the People is great material, the noose tightening on Dr Stockman as the town turn on him, etc etc – it just never rings true.

The ABC production of An Enemy of the People was directed by Royston Morley, another expat Englishman, so I’m guessing the final product didn’t feel any more authentic than the script – though Morley did marry an Aussie girl, and I haven’t seen the final product, so I could be wrong. Incidentally, the TV version was shot in Sydney and starred James Condon (as the doctor), Eleanor Elliott, Aileen Britton, Moray Powell and Lou Vernon. That was a good cast for the time.

The ABC went on to occasionally “Australia-ise” a text for their television plays: Rex Rienits’ London-set Wide Boy (1952) became Sydney-set Bodgie (1959), Romilly Cavan’s Undercover Cat (1962) was shifted from London to Sydney as Bertrand (1964), and I’ve written about how a stage play called The Big Killing (1965) was relocated from England to Palm Beach, Sydney. However, this was not done as often as it probably should have been, especially considering all the classics the ABC filmed. It would have given them some point.

I will say this for Kerr’s 1958 version of An Enemy of the People, the idea behind it was solid – it just wasn’t well-executed.

Blue Murder

Blue Murder was a 1959 mystery thriller about a young man who kills his actress mother. I’ll offer a synopsis below, with spoilers.

A producer, Martin Johnson (Hugh Stewart), arrives in Sydney hoping to persuade theatre star Thelma Lane-Forest (Nancye Stewart) to appear in a play. Thelma has not acted since her last stage appearance received bad notices, particularly one by Australian theatre critic Philip Gage (Colin Croft). Thelma has also arranged for a journalist, Lundy (Richard Davies), to “ghost” her life story. She has a son, Ricky (Ric Hutton), who does interviews for television. Ricky is romantically involved with Jeanette Gage (Derani Scarr), the sister of Philip Gage who dislikes Ricky. Lundy arrives at Thelma’s house on Sydney’s north shore, where he is met by Ricky who explains he has murdered his mother and intends to blame this on Lundy. Ricky then kills Lundy. Jeanette and Philip arrive at the house to discover the dead bodies of Thelma and Lundy. Ricky says that Lundy murdered his mother. While Jeanette believes him, Philip interrogates Ricky’s story and eventually figures out the truth.

According to TV Times, Blue Murder had its origins as a stage play Kerr was working on which he decided to turn it into a television play. He set it in Australia stating, “I believe one should write about the place one lives in.” It doesn’t really read like it takes place in Sydney though: rather, it’s set in “Dial M for Murder land” where everyone talks in quips, dresses formally, drinks lots of cocktails, and there’s always someone planning on murdering a relative. (Other Australian TV plays in this vein include In Writing, Funnel Web, It’s the Geography That Counts, The Big Killing, Write Me a Murder, and Heart Attack.)

Apparently, Blue Murder originally ran for 90 minutes but was reduced to 60 after it had been cast at the behest of director Ray Menmuir [above]. The script probably could have been cut even more: the suspense is quite strong once Ricky kills his mother and Lundy turns up, but the early scenes feel like padding – Martin Johnson is a character introduced then doesn’t appear again, and the interrogation between Philip and Ricky went on too long. It feels like a stretch that Philip was an Australian theatre critic in London and is now in Sydney, and his sister loves Ricky.

Still, some of this was very entertaining and there is definite novelty in a theatre critic being the hero.

A contemporary review is here. More hostile critique came from Frank Thring who, in his capacity as a TV writer for TV Week opined “an anticipatory shiver of cold foreboding ran through me when I saw the name of George F. Kerr attached” to the play, calling Blue Murder a “monstrously amateur little playlet” adding “anyone who could become involved in such a shambles of their own free will deserves all they get.” Tell us what you really think, Frank.

Blue Murder isn’t bad. There are some good moments. I just wish Kerr had written it to be really set in Australia.
Heart Attack

Heart Attack is a script of Kerr’s that I have not read. I would normally be reluctant to discuss it but the story of its inception is too interesting for me to ignore.

The ABC had planned for its first TV drama production of 1960 to be an adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s novel Make Mine Executioner (you may recall the 1947 feature film with Burgess Meredith), directed by William Sterling in Melbourne. It was all cast and ready to go when a problem emerged locking down the rights – the ABC decided to get Kerr to whip up a quick play that could use the same cast and sets. What he came up with was Heart Attack.

Brian James, who was cast in the lead role of Mine Own Executioner, disliked the script so they replaced him with John Morgan instead; all the other cast returned. Morgan plays a doctor called Wynter, whose career is threatened by a blackmailer called Pearce (played by Edward Brayshaw) who has learned of Wynter’s affair with another woman (June Brunell). Pearce threatens to tell the doctor’s wife, Judith (Beverly Phillips), unless he is paid off. Dr Wynter does so but Pearce keeps asking for money, so Wynter decides the solution is murder.  It sounds very Dial M for Murder like and took place entirely in London.

Reviewing the production, “Janus” of The Age said Heart Attack “had one of the feeblest plots ever peddled on Melbourne TV… 65 minutes of incoherent mush” and suggested the ABC “stick to imported scripts” for a while. That critic later said it “set Australian TV playwriting back several years” and then at the end of the year called it the worst Australian drama of the year. It was probably the most vicious sustained critical attack I have read on any Australian television play.

Frank Thring of TV Week called Heart Attack a “turgid and interminable little essay in ennui… about which absolutely nothing was surprising except that it was directed by William Sterling who doesn’t usually waste his talents on the desert air and that during its treacly course Miss June Brunell gave a quite remarkable impersonation of Barry Humphries.”

The critic for the Sydney Morning Herald described it as a “routine medical-domestic drama… given a routine performance… the play had a kind of tired professional finish but no real originality in its plot or its techniques” in which the leads “all acted competency but without much real conviction.”

Like I said, I have not seen or read Heart Attack, and one has to be careful believing everything critics tell you. But maybe the ABC shouldn’t have done a play cranked out in a few days – although they liked it enough to adapt it on radio.

Oh, and Mine Own Executioner was filmed by the ABC in April 1960. Janus of The Age said the production was a “waste of time”. But then Janus argued that the ABC should make less Australian dramas, so stuff him. There was plenty of good material out there, it’s just that the ABC wasn’t filming it.
Jenny

Jenny had its antecedents in a stage play Kerr wrote called Hunger for a Girl. This was set in the Blue Mountains and concerned a 17-year-old girl who reacts badly when her mother, a romance novelist, falls for another man. It results in the girl accidentally killing the other man. The play was produced by the North Sydney-based Independent Theatre in September 1960 with Leonard Teale and Joan Winchester starring in the leads. A review is here. The production was sponsored by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, then under the artistic direction of Neil Hutchison who was head of ABC television and radio drama when Kerr arrived in Australia. (Hutchison gave a few of his former television cronies a gig at the Trust during his time there – for instance, Raymond Memnuir directed a production of Candida and, most famously, the Trust presented Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year).

Kerr rewrote Hunger for a Girl extensively for television as “Jenny”. It aired as part of a season of six Australian television plays in early 1962 (the others were Boy Round the Corner, The House of Mancello, Funnel Web, The Teeth of the Wind, and The Hobby Horse). Jenny was directed by Henri Safran, one of the ABC’s best drama directors in the 1960s, and the script assistant was Pat Hooker, who later wrote the classic A Season in Hell, among others.

The plot of Jenny focuses on, well, Jenny (played by Carolyn Keely), a 16 year old girl whose father Roger (James Condon), an actor, and mother Margaret (Joan Winchester), a television personality, have been separated for 15 months. Jenny has a boyfriend, Michael (David Yorston), a law student. Margaret tells Jenny she has met a Melbourne businessman, Rex Porter (Grant Taylor), who she wants to marry. This sends Jenny out looking for her father and boyfriend, and she winds up at a party at Kings Cross being held by beatniks (Lex Mitchell, Tony Carere, Joan Morrow and Kerry Collins). She gets a cab driver to take her to The Gap where she intends on committing suicide. However, the cab driver talks her out of it and takes Jenny home to her father. Roger and Margaret realise how troubled Jenny is and decide to try their marriage again for her sake.

There’s much to admire about Jenny. There was a lot of infidelity in early Oz TV drama but little of it focused on its impact on the kids, so that is refreshing. So too is the fact that the lead character is a teenager – that was incredibly rare. Even rarer is that Jenny depicts the Australian beatnik scene: Jenny goes to a coffee bar and everything, where a beatnik has dialogue like “Want to talk? Sit and exchange ideas for a couple of hours. Couple of days maybe? Tell you all about the H bomb, Cuba, Liz Taylor, White Australia?” I loved how Jenny’s dad Roger was a working actor (“the best actor in Australia”) who toured nine months of the year with “the Firm” and how he didn’t want to do radio.

Other things are less impressive. Kerr was a middle aged man and weighs the play far too much towards the middle aged father character over the mother and Jenny, and clearly admires the law student more than the beatniks. Everyone talks like they are in a play, and an English play at that, except for the beatnik, who is a caricature. There are lots of scenes of people describing things that we really should have seen, particularly the climax where Jenny decides to kill herself by jumping off the Gap and is talked out of it – this, the climax of the play, is all conveyed via exposition.

Still, Jenny was a decent attempt to make something different.

In 1962, George F. Kerr moved back to England where he resumed his TV career, but his credits seem to dry up after the early 1970s. I don’t know what happened to him, though according to IMBD he died in 1996. He wasn’t a very good writer, at least not in my opinion, based on the sample of his Australian works I have read. He was not terrible, just not very good, yet such was the power of his accent, the ABC gave him a heap of juicy appointments over a five year period, including writing Australia’s first anthology series (Killer in Close Up), and teaching Australia’s first TV drama workshop.

I don’t want to be mean with this piece, truly, I think it was marvellous that Kerr survived as a POW, he obviously had a strong work ethic, there are good things in all the plays I’ve discussed today, and I would’ve loved to have listened to a radio serial he wrote that was broadcast during the 1958-59 Ashes, LBW Smith.

But I do think that it’s good to be reminded not to be over-impressed by overseas experts on matter of culture especially when those experts don’t really understand the country they are in.

The author wishes to thank Graham Shirley for his help with this piece. All opinions are my own.