The first collaboration between the ABC and BBC. A big deal in its day. Nothing remembered about it.
Premise
Brothers Kain and Rattler Sutherland live on a station in the Northern Territory. The unstable Kain clashes with the more laidback Rattler over several issues – money, treatment of local blacks, cattle, but most of all, their Aboriginal housemaid, Kaita, whom Kain is convinced Rattler has impregnated.
Kain winds up murdering
Rattler in a fit of fury, then is tormented by guilt, which comes to the
fore when he romances a white girl, Inala. Kain abandons Inala at their
wedding ceremony, confesses all, then takes off into the desert.
- Keith Michell as Kain Sutherland
- J D Devlin as Old Bill a desert wanderer
- Audine Leith as Inala
- Alan White as Rattler Sutherland
- Candy Devine as Kaita
- Roger Cox as Rev. Mr Ramsay
- Teddy Plummer as King Brumby
- Michael Williams as Jock Mosquito
- Aborigines of the Warrabri Government Settlement
Original play
It was based on a play by Alan Poolman. Poolman was an Australian actor (he had a part in Sons of Matthew) who moved to England. In 1957 it was reported he had studied for five years in Switzerland - a man of independent means, perhaps. In 1964 it was reported he had been in England for ten years.
In 1964 Michell returned to Australia after ten years to appear in The First 400 Years. He said "I have always wanted to act in a play by an Australian author out here." He hoped this play would be Kain which he called "a 'country modern' play, essentially Australian, and very rich in comedy - although it is a tragedy."
Original play production
- Keith Michell
- Alan White
- Joanna Anin
- June Brunell
- Redmond Phillips
Production
The production was announced in March 1966. The script was commissioned by the ABC and BBC and was inspired by the Biblical story of Cain and Abel as well as the painting of Russell Drysdale.
It was annoucned that five people would come out - Michell, Harris, Devlin, White and BBC play chief Michael Bakewell. (Bakewell was married to Joan who had a long affair with Harold Pinter that was dramatised in Betrayal).
JC Devlin was an Irish character actor who came out to appear in the production. Audine Leith was an Australian actor who had moved to London and came back to Australia to play the female lead.
It was filmed in Australia in March and April 1966: exteriors in the Northern Territory near Tennant Creek, at Warrabri and at Devil's Marbles, and interiors at the ABC's Gore Hill studios.
Lionel Harris, the director, Alan Poolman, the writer, and actors Michell, White and Devlin came from London; the rest of the cast were Australian.
Harris said of the ABC crew "I cannot conceive of any crew anywhere in the world who, often under the most gruelling conditions could work so well and with such unfailing good humour."
Props had to be brought in from Sydney. 'The days were long and hard," said Harris. "Devil's Marbles is 65miles from the hotel at Tennant Creek. This meant getting up at 4.30 am, having breakfast and driving in buses to walk."
Harris said the play's theme was "in not taking those closest to you for granted - not living entirely for self. Kain thinks he has no conscience but his discovery that he has provides the play's conflict."
Production design was by Douglas Smith. The budget was reportedly $65,000. Filming took ten days. Chief cameraman was Frank Parnell who later died in a helicopter crash filming a documentary.
Tom Jeffrey told me I see that I’m given the credit of Unit Manager, but I was much more than that. I remember when I was organising the shoot in the NT, after doing the location recce with Harris, Grimmond and Doug Smith (Cathy Garland was there too, but Harris refused to work with her and she was confined/reduced to being “Sydney liaison!”), I had to refer major things to Neil Hutchison in ABC’s Head Office, particularly when I recommended hiring a TAA Viscount to fly all the crew and equipment up to Tennant Creek in April 66.
Tom Jeffrey spoke about it at length in his oral history with the NFSA. He'd just come back from England, worked on The Prowler, then was offered production manager on Kain.
And I thought well oh I’ve never been to the Northern Territory, it might be a good gig. I said okay ah and they said well Lionel Harris will be out in a couple of weeks ah to do a location recce so um and it will be all on film. I said okay, thirty five mil film, which is which was quite unusual for the ABC or anybody but that’s what the BBC shot on, thirty five mil film. So this guy Lionel Harris arrives, a little sort of shortish guy with a funny sort of balding head and um quite nice, pukka sort of guy, and we jumped on this plane, he and I, and Bill Grimmond who is to be the D.O.P. and Cathy Garland who was nominated a Script Assistant.
And ah so off we went on this on this jaunt and ah planes in those days of course were just turbo prop planes so it took us all day to get to Darwin via places like Mount Isa and Brisbane, Townsville, Mount Isa I think is where we and then across to Darwin. We stayed there a night or two and met a couple of Government officials because we had to get permission to film on aboriginal reserves as they were then, Government kind of run areas and then we caught a small plane down to did a milk run down to Katherine and then Tennant Creek and ah Alice Springs I think. Oh we may have yeah we may have got off the plane at Tennant Creek, that’s right we did. And did a location recce to the Devil’s Marbles. Oh the other chap that was there was Douglas Smith, the Designer of course, he was the Senior Designer at the ABC. Anyway we did this jaunt and Lionel Harris was, loved the locations and we seemed to be getting on fine and Bill Grimmond was a bit grumpy.
Ah and then we returned to Sydney. And then the fun, and then Lionel Harris went back to England and ah but before he left he said I don’t want Cathy Garland anywhere near the shoot. Ah we’ve got to get a different continuity person so to save Cathy’s face she was made liaison back in Sydney and ah Jill Dempster as she then was, she became Jill Robb who had become a famous later, she was put on as Continuity ah hired in as Continuity and it was up to me to organise to get everybody up there. To cut to the chase a bit, we hired a plane from TAA as it then was, a Viscount, for all the gear and the stuff. Douglas Smith built the set back in the ABC Gore Hill studios, loaded it on a truck and two of the staging lads drove it across Australia via Broken Hill and Oodnadatta or somewhere up to the Devil’s Marbles and erected it up there.
Um ah we had a crew of I don’t know, about eighteen people, not many. There was no accommodation there, there was, we based ourselves in a in a place called, up there, [pronounced] ‘Walkup’ which is spelt like ‘Wauchope’ here [spells Wauchope] ‘Walkup’ and what it then was then was a local stone built bar/pub with these rooms out the back, about six of them, um filled with dust and very basic bedding and um ah it was like primitive. And there was an aboriginal camp, I mean they were called ‘blacks’ then, but aboriginal camp over the back and the women used to come in and do the washing and sweep the floors and things. And this barman and his wife um what was his name, golly, Joe I think his name was and anyway I remember the his wife was called Shirley and ah I went up about a week ahead to sort everything out. And the set was being built there and we we’d also had to hire, because it was very there were only these six rooms down at this little roadside inn, um at Wauchope which was about twelve miles from the, from the filming location in the Devil’s Marbles.
Um we had to book rooms at Tennant Creek. There was one motel there then and it had about four air conditioned rooms and so into one of them we had to put Lionel Harris because he was the Director and Producer and he insisted on having air conditioned accommodation. And the one thing, and he is now dead, but the one thing I remember about him was that he had a whole bag full, like a carry bag full of perfumes and pills and all sorts of things and he set them out on his table in the room and there were bottles and bottles and bottles of this stuff you know, pills for everything. And and all sorts of aftershave [laughs] lotion and deodorants and all sorts of things. We couldn’t believe it. And he insisted on having a fly veil because the flies might attack him and um anyway it was an exhausting time. I brought five vehicles up from the Department of Supply from Adelaide. They were put on the Ghan and then off loaded in Alice Springs and then I had to get um and one of them was a bus that seated about eighteen people and that was to do the run between Tennant Creek and Devil’s Marbles every morning and take everybody back in the evening.
And the driver of it came up from the Department of Supply in Adelaide. I don’t remember his name at all. But the story about that was that Lionel Harris, this guy was a stickler for the rules and it said in the rule book that this bus, this thing, must not be driven in excess of forty kilometres ah forty miles an hour um if it had any passengers in it. So this guy who must have been about fifty, this driver, drove at forty miles an hour from Tennant Creek to the Devil’s Marbles which is a distance of about seventy miles or something ah at forty miles an hour. It drove Lionel Harris absolutely furious and up the wall. After about four days of this he said to me, I’ve I’ve can’t you get the man to drive faster. And I said I’ll try. But he didn’t. And then Lionel said well, I’ve got to stay here. I’ve got to stay, I can’t cope with it. And I said well, and by that time I didn’t like Lionel Harris. So, for reasons which I might tell you, um I said well, there’s no room here, you wouldn’t enjoy it, it’s all dusty blah, blah, blah. No, you’ve got to stay in Tennant Creek. I’m sorry I can’t change it. He went off in real fury. ..
Getting, I went up a week ahead to make sure everything was kind of organised and um the plane, this TAA plane that I’d hired, a Viscount, to bring all the rest of the crew, so we had about four staging guys up there by this stage and me. And people to bring and props men and stuff and we brought the vehicles up from Alice Springs ah and the plane, I think it was due to arrive on Sunday, that’s right, Sunday evening. So it set off about, due to depart about nine or ten o’clock in the morning, it arrived about six up at Tennant Creek. What happened was everybody got loaded on and then they opened the bar as it took off and it did a, it had to go to Brisbane and then again Mount Isa and down across to Tennant Creek. And so the door opened, it landed at Tennant Creek and the door opened and out staggered about twenty guys who’d, and Jill Dempster, she hadn’t been drinking, but all the rest had been quaffing ale all the way from Sydney and they were…. And the first thing that Bill Grimmond said to me, he stormed across the tarmac and said okay, where do I put the gear. And I said well you know, you put it in the trucks. And he said no, it’s got to have lock up, I’ve got to lock the gear up. Well nobody locked anything up in Tennant Creek. It was just I mean, in those days it just wasn’t. I mean everybody it was everything was open and I said well, you could have let me know you wanted a lock up garage. No, well you find, now this is Sunday night. You find a lock up garage. So I went around, I knew one of the Department of Supply people up there and I said can you, have you got a lock up or lockable garage and they said no, no mate you know. And so I went back after spending an hour. Bill, they’d got all the gear out on the tarmac and Bill was just there standing there you know, furious. And I said listen mate, there’s no lock up space in. Well the gear, we’ll go back to Sydney. I said you can’t go back to Sydney blah, blah, blah. He said alright well, we’ll have to put it in our hotel rooms. I said alright, put it in your hotel rooms if you’ve that kind of concern. So off they trundled, we helped them move the gear and it went on for hours, getting the gear into everybody’s rooms and people sort of stumbling over it. It could have gone in the hallway I mean, anyway. So that was the start of what became a pretty tense time. I ah I refused to speak to Bill Grimmond after that in fact the, for the first few days the crew wouldn’t speak to anybody and it was really quite awful. Um and then the late Frank Parnell who died in a helicopter crash, he was the camera operator, lovely bloke. He and Johnny Heath who was on sound, ah they broke the ice and started talking to me and to the staging guys. At first you know, nothing was right. You’d get, you just, it didn’t matter what you did it was going to be wrong and um and not just with me but with everybody.
So that was pretty horrendous and it was exhausting because the food, I had to keep ordering fresh food for everybody and I was also the caterer who had to make sure that the food was there, um would come in at two or three o’clock in the morning in road trains. You know those big long trucks. And it would be off loaded at ‘Walkup’ at ah three o’clock in the morning. So I’d have to wait up for this stuff and whilst my room was supposedly at Tennant Creek I spent more time down at ‘Walkup’ on the bloody floor you know, sleeping. And I was getting two and three hours of sleep a night and ah I was pretty I was pretty exhausted. So it was hot during the day, oh it was about April, April nineteen sixty six we’re talking about and um it got hot during the daytime and very cold at night.
But in amongst that we had some pretty good experiences. He wanted, Lionel Harris wanted to use aborigines of course and there was kind of a story based on aborigines, the white settlers (…) haven’t mentioned the cast, Keith Michell um Alan White who played in oh what was that radio show that he did here, ‘Night Beat’, then he went to England a few years before and did a bit of acting and he played, it was Lionel Harris, and this Irishman (…) old fella, lovely bloke, can’t remember his name now, I’d have to look, I must get these papers out mustn’t I, ah and um and Audine Leith who’d been working in England and ah she came, she hailed from South Australia, nice lady very nice lady. And Lionel brought them over and um supported by a whole, by a few Australians, but all these aborigines. And there were two who had to, er two aboriginals that we had to find to actually play parts and um and then he wanted written into the scene into the story was was a that Alan Poolman wrote, was a corroboree and so he wanted to get you know, have about sixty, seventy aboriginal people doing a corroboree. And the aboriginal people used it as an excuse to bring all their people in from outlying areas and they had a bit sort of get together. Anyway he lined, and he was also, he also needed a couple of girls to play young parts around this house that we built in the, in the Devil’s Marbles and um he lined, one, it must have been, yeah one afternoon very very early on in the, we were only up there for about three, two and a half weeks or something, but very very early on he lined all these girls up on the. And they were sort of very very shy and giggly and things and I can’t remember now how it happened but Lionel turned on me and um said something like, you know, get rid of these you know, they’re no good, they’re not going to be any good. And I had to go and tell them you know that they weren’t any good, that they would have to go away. And I didn’t know where to find anybody else cause this, we were miles from anywhere. Anyway I’d had it and I just broke and went off into the bush and ah had a good cry and somebody, they must have seen me because a couple of days later um the Government Officer came up to me, his name was Jackson, and said oh look um, the aboriginal people would like to meet you, or something. And he said why don’t you come out next Sunday um you know and they will and I’ll introduce you to them. And I said oh that’s very nice of them. So anyway to follow this story he um picked me up on the, or I met him on the Sunday morning and he took me out through this Government Station, way out into the bush a few miles and there was just, I wondered where we were going. And there was this flat area of grass I mean ah probably half a kilometre by half a kilometre, nothing on it but one tree right in the middle and scrub around but just this flat sort of goldeny grassed area and this one tree. And he said oh they’re just over here. So he took me across through the grass and underneath this tree which was a pretty straggly sort of thing, was a patch of dirt and there were eight or so of aboriginal men sitting around. And er with a kerosene tin and introductions were made. They didn’t speak English or if they did they didn’t speak it to me. He conversed with them in their language which was Arunta and ah I was asked to sit down and sat down. And then they reached into the kerosene tin and got out two bits of hessian, things wrapped in hessian and they unwrapped it and there were two ‘toringa’ (sp?) stones and they proceeded to sing me the history, their history. And it went on for, for an hour and a half two hours and the sun was, oh, and I found it a very, very moving experience. I was privileged to have had that happen and I can only think that they were trying to say to me um you know, don’t worry, we’re with you sort of thing. And I’ll never forget that experience and it was one of the reasons why later when I was able to do something in terms of media training and video, that um that I did for indigenous people.
NG: So I imagine that would have been one of your first encounters with the indigenous people.
TJ: Very much so. Mmm. Mmm. It was wonderful and later, in later years oh thirty, twenty five years later, I happened to meet somebody and we were talking about it and ah he said well that’s pretty rare actually. So somebody picked it up. I don’t know who. I to this day I don’t know. I will never know of course but ah they obviously were witnessing quietly what was going on on the set and um yes so back to the story. There were a number of things that happened, I’m probably going on too long about it but it was, it was quite an experience for everybody involved on that shoot. Um as I said it was the first ABC/BBC co-production. It cost a lot of money. Um it went over budget because it just was trying to, trying to film in those areas, very very primitive. The only, the only means of communication was a party line phone from the hotel to ring back to Sydney to get advice and to advise them of what was happening. Um and when the aboriginal people came together towards the end of our time up there for the corroboree scene, ah they gathered, it took about three days for them to come in, and they gathered nearby in the hills nearby. And um a particular spot and they, they went out, they said yes, Lionel Harris asked them to paint themselves up you know with ochre and things and they said yes, yes, there are some ochre fields nearby, we know where to get them. And we were due to start filming this corroboree scene at something like eight in the morning you know when it was still moderately cool and they can only dance for a little while because the whole kind of method of their dancing is, where they’re stamping their feet it’s very tiring. And Lionel treated them like absolute cattle and they took time to get the ochre and by the time they were ready it was midday and that was too hot and he got into a fury and they just sort of looked at him with disdain. You know, who is this silly little man you know. And ah I’ve never spoken about it but he was, he was really quite the typical U.K. British um look down your nose at anything that’s different type of person and wouldn’t countenance, wouldn’t compromise at all with the environment or with the people or anything like that.
And because most of my learning, most of my training was on the job, I learnt a lot from that experience about how not to do things. And how not to be piggish. And when we came back to Sydney he was working, we had to do some interiors in the studio, some interior scenes, and ah all the interiors were done back in Sydney and ah I watched him direct, because I had little to do them, ah my job was virtually over, but um just tying up the loose ends administratively and finance wise. So I got into the studio and just watched him work with the actors and it was terrible and one scene in particular I remember where he used some knowledge he had, some personal knowledge about Ordene Leith (sp?) in order to get her emotional, raise her emotional state, and I thought that is unethical. And she broke down and I thought that is something that is just not professional. Um the um the end result of the film was moderately acceptable right at the beginning they put a shot it that they must have got out of the library in the BBC afterwards because he went back to England and cut it back in England. Um ah there was a shot of an African track with vultures on it and I thought how ridiculous. That’s so typical of Lionel Harris. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but that was a most amazing three months that I had working on that thing and um and often very little support back in Sydney from the hierarchy but I knew that the budget was going bust.
And I was supposed to negotiate with the aborigines for you know, a rate for them for dancers which was like a pittance. It was like one, equivalent of a packet of cigarettes to stand out in the sun all day and I thought that was despicable. Um you know, rates negotiated to and agreed to by the Union then and ah I don’t think they were too happy about it but the ABC can say well that’s what there is and that’s what they got.
Um the crew ended up happily at the end and we all sort of pulled our weight together and that was good. So we came together on that. Um ah but when I went on location later, under again extreme some extreme difficulties, because we used to like to get to remote areas. We tried to behave in an organised fashion and with ah a deal of professionalism in treating people around us fairly. So that was interesting. So when that was wrapped up um they actually had a job for me producing, [the series Crackerjack]
Crew
Lighting cameraman - Bill Grimmond. Camera operator - Frank Parnell. Sound recording - John Heath. Film editor - Howard Kennett. Dubbing mixer - Derek McColm.
Studio: Lighting - John Hicks, John Garton. Sound recording - John Bourn. Unit manager - Tom Jeffrey. Continuity - Jill Dempster. Make up - Joan Minor. Wardrobe - Rosalind Wood. Designer - Douglas Smith. Producer and director - Lionel Harris.
Broadcast
The broadcast ran for 90 minutes and aired in Australia on 17 April 1967 - a year after it was shot.
In the UK it was broadcast in the drama anthology series Theatre 625 as item 17 in series 4. It was thought lost, but survives as 16mm film.
Reception
The Sydney Morning Herald said it "grabbed and gripped with a force we too rarely see on the Box."
The Sunday Sydney Morning Herald TV critic called it "the event of the week" praising the "strong performances from" Michell, White and Devlin and the "superbly photographed outback scenery. The photography ran rings around most routine Hollywood westerns. In colour, it would be a masterpiece." He did say "I felt that author Alan Poolman over-wrote at times. But this is small stuff, weighed alongside the tremendous dramatic impact of the play as a whole".
The London Times said it had "great emotional power."
The Age thought it was "an essentially melodramatic play" but said "Michell's performance turned into something of breathtaking strength."
The Bulletin called it "awful... Save us from expatriate
playwrights such as Alan Poolman, who marry some childish
sense of what is Australian to a more thorough idea of
how to write bad drama" in which Michell "was less than
unimpressive, matched only by Alan White... What possessed
BBC-TV and ABC TV to film it? Well, television people
have some weird ideas about the Outback, there’s no
other explanation. Let’s hope the British viewers took it
all at face value—as only a bad joke." Hi, Frank Roberts!
The Sunday Sydney Morning Herald critic later reflected "I can't remember a TV show which has split the critics into two such violent camps" as Kain in Australia and England. "Did we all see the same thing or were there two of them?"
Repeat
The ABC repeated the production in 1969.
Alan Poolman
Poolman later wrote the stage plays The Legend of Ned Kelly (1969), The Net (1970), From the Hollow Shied (1972) and Dear Dad and Gossip (1978).
 |
| TV Times Vic 9 March 1966 p 1 |
 |
| TV Times Vic 29 March 1967 |
 |
| Canberra Times 11 Jan 1966 p 9 |
 |
| Canberra times 28 Jan 1966 p 13 |
 |
| SMH 28 June 1964 p 84 |
 |
| The Age 28 March 1964 p 5 |
 |
| The Age TV Guide 13 April 1967 |
 |
| The Age 17 April 1967 p 6 |
 |
| The Age 11 April 1967 p 24 |
 |
| The Age 3 March 1966 TV Guide p 3 |
 |
| The Age 13 April 1967 TVGuide p 3 |
 |
| Canberra Times 20 April 1967 p 5 |
 |
| SMH 18 April 1967 p 22 |
 |
| SMH 23 April 1967 p 93 |
 |
| SMH 20 April 1967 p 10 |
 |
| The Bulletin 29 April 1967 p 38 |
 |
| SMH 30 April 1967 p 95 |
 |
| Canberra times 17 April 1967 TV Guide p 1 |
 |
| The Age TV Guide 21 April 1967 p 3 |
 |
| The Guardian 18 April 1967 p 5 |
 |
| The Guardian 26 Jan 1966 p 8 |
 |
| The Age TV Guide 13 April 1967 p1 |
 |
| SMH 7 Jan 1966 p 6 |
 |
| SMH 27 Jan 1966 p 9 |
 |
| The Age 13 April 1966 p 14 |
 |
| the Age TV Guide 11 April 1966 |
 |
| The Age 22 June 1967 p 11 |
 |
| The Age 12 June 1969 TV Guide p 3 |
 |
| The Age TV Guide 12 June 1969 |
 |
| The Age 13 June 1969 p 15 |
 |
| Stage 2 April 1964 p 11 |
 |
| The Stage 30 Dec 1965 p 6 |
 |
| The Stage 13 Jan 1966 p 8 |
 |
| The Stage 13 Jan 1966 p 8 |
 |
| The stage 27 Jan 1966 p 15 |
 |
| The stage 3 Feb 1966 p 8 |
 |
| The Stage 31March 1966 p 13 |
 |
| Daily Mirror 18 April 1967 p 16 |
 |
| Liverpool Echo 18 April 1967 p 2 |
 |
| The Stage 20 April 1967 p 12 |
 |
| Sunday Times 28 April 1967 p 47 |
 |
| London Times 26 Jan 1966 p 15 |
 | |||||||||||||
| London times 18 April 1967 p 6 |
 |
| TV Times Qld 12 April 1967 p 9 |
Forgotten Australian TV plays: Kain
by Stephen Vagg
June 8, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at arguably the most expensive one made in the 1960s: Kain.
You don’t hear much about Kain these days. I fancy myself an Oz film and TV buff and I had no idea it even existed until last year. It’s surprising, in a way, because at one stage Kain was a very big deal. The first co-production between the ABC and BBC. The first television performance in Australia by not one but two local boys made good. An imported director of international renown. Location filming in the Northern Territory. Plenty of publicity during its production in 1966. Some superb reviews and some hostile ones, leading to more publicity. Repeated screenings.
And then… it dropped off the radar. Such is the ephemeral nature of TV, especially TV plays. Or was there more to it? What was Kain, exactly?
It was originally written for stage by Alan Poolman, an Australian actor and writer who had moved to England, like so many Oz artists of his generation. The story of Kain is loosely based on the Cain and Abel, and focuses on two brothers, Kain and Rattler, who live on a station in the Northern Territory. The unstable Kain clashes with the more laidback Rattler over several issues – money, treatment of local blacks, cattle, but most of all, their Aboriginal housemaid, Kaita, whom Kain is convinced Rattler has impregnated. Kain winds up (SPOILERS) murdering Rattler in a fit of fury, then is tormented by guilt, which comes to the fore when he romances a white girl, Inala. Kain abandons Inala at their wedding ceremony, confesses all, then takes off into the desert.
Poolman’s writing impressed a fellow Australian expat in England, Keith Michell, then one of the biggest names in British theatre (including long stints in Irma La Douce and at Stratford-Upon- Avon), as well as having enjoyed success in television (Wuthering Heights) and cinema (The Gentleman and the Gypsy). Michell had been acting professionally for almost twenty years but had rarely played Australian roles; he was excited by the part of Kain and his interest seems to have been the magic ingredient in getting it produced.
The stage play version of Kain premiered in January 1966 at Guildford, with another Australian expat, Alan White, cast in the part of Rattler, and Irish actor JC Devlin playing a friend of the brothers. The director was Lionel Harris, who had extensive credits on stage and TV (there’s an excellent piece on him here). Michell, Poolman, White, Devin and Harris would all take part in the television production of Kain, which leads me to surmise that it may have always been envisioned with a small screen version in mind.
The stage production received mixed reviews, but there was enough enthusiasm for the ABC and BBC to decide to pool their resources and make a TV version later that year. A healthy budget of $65,000 was allocated, which enabled key talent to be flown out to Australia and location filming to be done in the Northern Territory.
That is a big commitment for a small screen adaptation of a play that was not very well known, from a writer without much of a reputation, but the ABC and BBC probably took confidence from the prospect of pretty outback pictures, and from the presence of Michell in the lead; Alan White had a decent profile at the time too, from a regular role in the British TV series The Flying Doctor. In addition, the ABC had some prior experience with international co-productions, having made The Right Thing (1963) in collaboration with Associated-Rediffusion.
Keith Michell flew out to Australia in early 1966 along with White, Poolman, Devlin, Harris and Audine Leith (who played Inala); the rest of the cast and crew would be Australia-based.
Kain was filmed in March and April of that year: exteriors were shot in the Northern Territory near Tennant Creek, at Warrabri and at Devil’s Marbles, with interiors filmed at the ABC’s Gore Hill studios.
The unit manager was Tom Jeffrey who later became a noted feature film director (The Odd Angry Shot). The camera operator was Frank Parnell who, not long after filming on Kain completed, would die in a famous helicopter accident near Circular Quay in Sydney.
Kain did not air until April 1967. Some of the reviews were excellent, others harsh; Michell’s personal notices were generally superb. The play was repeated in 1969 and then appears to have vanished from the public eye: the stage version was/is rarely revived, and obituaries I’ve read of Keith Michell didn’t even mention it.
Kain is a truly unique, odd slice of television. It’s very theatrical, with long monologues, clearly delineated “acts”, and key characters and events which are referred to but never seen (such as Inala’s ex-boyfriend, who is the real father of Kaita’s baby). It’s a bold piece of drama to be sure, tackling all sorts of themes: sibling rivalry, treatment of blacks, lust, money, race, death. It does not quite “get there”, at least not in my opinion: there’s too many unresolved plot strands and characters, particularly Kaita; the drama feels too unfocused; it’s structurally wonky, suffering from the complete absence of Rattler in the second half, when the entire focus shifts to Inala, who we barely see in the first half; it’s problematic racially, with the leading Aboriginal character (Kaita) performed by an actor in blackface (not untypical of the era, unfortunately) and the Aboriginal characters allowed little screen time.
One can see the appeal of the piece to Keith Michell: the part of Kain involves fratricide, shouting, whispering, quoting Plato, getting slapped in the face, seduction, strutting around in a cowboy hat with a bare chest, being racist, joking, swearing, jilting your fiancée at the altar, and running off into the desert. It was thus perhaps unavoidable that Michell’s performance comes across as a little erratic: at times he looks and acts like a 1950s Rank company star in a meat pie Western (eg. Ronald Lewis in the 1957 Robbery Under Arms), on other occasions he seems to switch between playing Iago and Othello, in some scenes he underplays quite beautifully. Alan White is superb as the brother, and JC Devlin is good value as their friend. I liked Audine Leith as Inala, and Teddy Plummer and Michael Williams impress in their small roles. Candy Devine has some effective moments as Kaita but is hampered by her blackface make up and lack of character development.
The location work is impressive – it’s beautifully shot and it’s awesome to see the actors actually doing their scenes in the Northern Territory. I don’t think Kain gets there as drama – Alan Poolman needed to give his script a decent rewrite, and Lionel Harris needed to reign in Michell – but it has ambition, it makes you think, and it certainly swings for the fences. It definitely should be better known.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Grimsby Evening Tele 7 Apr 1967 |
 |
| Daily Mirror 18 April 1967 |
 |
| NAA Publicity |
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment