Enemy of the People (5 Nov 1958)

 An adaptation of the Ibsen play, relocating the action to Queensland. I've read the script for this one. The adaptation doesn't quite work, I think because George Kerr isn't much of a writer.

This play is really fascist.

Having said that I wish more of these old plays had been adapted to Australia. Why else put them on? 

Plot

A new resort is about to open in the Queensland coastal town of Jacaranda. A central feature of the resort is the fact the area has mineral waters which are beneficial to people's health. 

Dr Russ Stockman has sent away some samples to the CSIRO and has discovered that a local tannery is poisoning the water. This would be expensive to fix so the townspeople are opposed to him, including the mayor (his brother, Peter), the local newspaper editor and the owner of the tannery (his father-in-law, Kev O'Connor). 

Pressure is put on his wife Kate and daughter Jan.  Stockman writes an article about the pollution for the local paper but the editor, Howard, refuses to print it after pressure from his owner, Anderson.

Jan resigns from her teaching post. 

Stockman is fired. But he decides to stay in town, treat people, and run a school.

Other characters - Ted Billing, a reporter. Mike Forrest.

Cast

• James Condon as Dr. Russ Stockman
• Eleanor Elliott as Jan Stockman, his daughter - who is teaching an English class "for New Australians. Four Italians and a Dutchman."
  
• Aileen Britton as Kate Stockman, his wife
  
• Moray Powell
• Lou Vernon
• Edward Smith
  

Original play

Ibsen's play is a classic text, too well known for me to go into detail of it here. It's most interesting recent legacy is inspiring the subplot in Jaws.

It was first performed in 1882. A full copy is here.

Arthur Miller adapted it to America in a 1950 adaptation on Broadway which starred Frederick March and toned down the play's pro-eugenics approach.

Other adaptations

The play was performed on ABC radio in 1941 and  in 1954. A pompous review of the 1954 performance is here by Geoffrey Thomas. I became all too familiar with this clown when researching my book on Rod Taylor. There was a version on Australian radio in 1956.

The BBC filmed it in 1950 and 1961.  BBC radio did it in 1941 and 1960.

It was filmed for Canadian TV in 1952.

My thoughts on the play I recently listened to a copy of the play at LA Theatre Works. The central drama is so solid - person discovers factory is polluting springs. The opposition is well motivated: it's too expensive to fix, we need tourism, my factory is important. The drama is personalised - the factory is owned by the doctor's wife, his daughter has urst with a newspaper reporter, the doctor's brother is involved in tourism. This is all well structured. The doctor is a loony which is interesting... but they stack the deck so much in his favour that it seems like Ibsen is supporting him. And the doctor is a lunatic fascist... which you actually don't need for the drama. He rants about how the liberal majority is useless and how you should follow geniuses... which you don't need.

Production

George F. Kerr was an English writer who had moved to Australia. The most interesting thing about Kerr is that he was a POW. So was Australian writer Iain MacCormick.

In February 1958 Kerr said in an interview he had been asked to adapt the play to Australia and decided to set it in Queensland. 

Kerr said that the time he was also planning a series  of  TV portraits of Australians. “Not historical characters, but types I’ve met: The girl from Toorak whom I  encountered in   Melbourne, The Man on the Canberra plane, and so on."

Director Royston Morley had done a number of classical adaptations in England on TV.

It was broadcast in a series of "live" dramas on Sunday night on ABV-2 Melbourne. In order, they were The Governess, The Last Call, The Rose without a Thorn, The Lark, Citizen of Westminster, and Enemy of the People (the last of "the season").

Desmonde Dowling was the designer. 

It was shot in Sydney. It aired in Melbourne on 14 November. 

The NAA has photos (see here) a script (not online see here) and a copy of audio... maybe from a  radio play. See here. Maybe also some documentation. See here.

My thoughts on the script

 A great idea to adapt Ibsen to Australia. Kerr hadn't spent a lot of time here though - I think it shows in his command of the vernacular. The town is called Jacaranda - great name. But the dialogue is too uniform.

There is solid drama. Maybe a reality issue setting it on a coastal Queensland place. Inland, like Moree or Daylesford, would have been better. Moree is mentioned.

It's really fascist. I think that's Ibsen though. The doctor hero decrying the majority. Crikey.

Also reality stuff. It mentions the CSIRO and Hungarian immigrants so is clearly set in the present day.

Reception

The TV Listener In (Melbourne) said "for thoroughly hardened intellectuals, the Sydney ABC television studios presented pretty crook Ibsen in fair dinkum Aussie lingo on Sunday night."

 

Listened In Dec 20 1958

SMH 3 Nov 1958 p 10

The Age Supplement 12 Dec 1958 p 1

The Age Supplement 12 Dec 1958 p 2

SMH 3 Nov 1958 p 9

ABC Weekly 19 Feb 1958 p 9

 

SMH 5 Nov 1958 p 11

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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...

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.

 

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