Australian TV Plays: Dark Corridor (6 Oct 1965) (Adelaide)

Original Australian theatre. By someone called Trevor Nielsen - a Brisbane author apparently.

Premise

The action takes place at a roadside cafe along a highway. A storm has cut off the main road, forcing passengers to take refuge in the cafe.

A married woman arrives, claiming she has lost her memory. The people in the cafe learn she has been in an accident and that her husband is in a car about to be engulfed in flood waters.

Then her husband arrives, claiming she is faking amnesia and that his wife tried to kill him.

A leather-jacketed youth appears and says the woman is a seductress.

Cast

Betty Lucas as Mrs Erlie, the wounded woman
Michael Thomas as motorcyclist
Judith Dick as Maria, daughter of the Italian couple who run the cafe
George Mallaby
Les Dayman

Production

This was shot in Adelaide.

Alan Burke directed. He had just returned to Australian from being in London for a year and been assigned to Macbeth. He told Graham Shirley in 2004:

They were trying to give the BAPH States, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart a crack at something, they were getting very impatient in the sticks about only getting news and weather. So they allocated me to do this half hour play in Adelaide and it worked out that the design and planning for Macbeth done in Melbourne and shooting a bit of OB, like the fight at the end and a few things we wanted, got those out of the way. Went to Adelaide, did the half hour play and came back to Melbourne to do the studio component of Macbeth, so it was a busy couple of months. But very good and enjoyed both of them...

[Dark Corridor].may have come from a radio play, I’m not familiar with it but a little melodrama and nine or ten characters in which again radio comes in with the top radio actors who were cast or suggested by the Adelaide hierarchy. They included the wonderful Betty Lucas who was marvellous and worked a lot with her in Sydney after that. And a couple of interesting not exactly debuts but early roles for people that I got to know later and who came quite big in Sydney, one of them was George Mallaby who went into the lead in one of the Crawfords and the other was Les Dayman who did I think much the same. They were both there and lovely, most expert actors, it was lovely to work with them. It was very tight as you can imagine, done very quickly.
GS How did you find working with the Adelaide crew?
AB Oh fine. There was great excitement of course as there always is, an extension of the demands made on them and they love it. I’m not sure but I think we had three cameras but we might have had two, I can’t remember. But we had two sets and the only way to do it was to have one set on day one of camera and then do all that and then strike it and build the other one and then come in the next day and do the second scene as it were. Luckily no editing between them, it was one set and then a second set and it worked out very well. Just apropros the BAPH States doing things like that. There was one in Perth, I forget the name of the play but I was technically exec producer of it, it was directed by a Perth director and he wanted to simulate a crane which you can’t do in the little BAPH studios and he brought in a cherry picker which I thought was very clever and did one shot that went up and down, I don’t think it did much more than that. I can’t think who the director was, anyway not to worry.

Broadcast

It aired 6 Oct 1965 in Melbourne.

Reception

The Canberra Time said "The essential idea of Dark Corridor is the substance of a splendid one act play... [a] play which Mr Nielsen has not yet succeeded in writing. The direction by Sydney producer Alan Burke added little in the way of credibility or moment by moment tolerability."