Some Jean Anoilh from the ABC. I think with Australian Playhouse the rest of the ABC were determined to keep things European.
Premise
Eurydice is the daughter of the leading actress in a second-rate acting troupe. The troupe is waiting in a train station. Orpheus is a guitar player at the station restaurant talking to his father, a violinist.
Eurydice and Orpheus meet and fall
in love instantly. Orpheus decides to stay in town with Eurydice.
Eurydice rejects the advances of a young man Matthias who is her lover and a fellow member of the troupe. Matthias goes and throws himself under a train.
Eurydice and Orpheus run away together and stay at a hotel. They are followed by both M. Henri, a mysterious figure, and Molac, the manager of the acting troupe.
While Orpheus is out of the room, Eurydice is visited by a hotel worker and given a mysterious letter. She reads it and leaves the hotel room when Orphus returns, claiming that she needs to run errands. After she exits, Molac enters the room and reveals to Orpheus that Eurydice is his mistress, too. Orpheus does not believe him, but before he can confirm the truth with Eurydice, the two men receive word that she has died in a car crash—and that the car was not going to the market, but on its way out of town.
M. Henri, the mysterious man, is moved to compassion for Orpheus and makes a bargain with him: If Orpheus wants his beloved back, it is possible; he simply has to wait at the train station beside her spirit until sunrise—but he cannot look into her eyes or she will die a second death.
Eurydice is brought back to life. As they sit and wait, Orpheus brings up the subject of Dulac. Eurydice insists that she never slept with him, but Orpheus cannot know for sure without looking into her eyes. Driven crazy with uncertainty, he does so and she admits that she was in fact Dulac's lover. However, Molac had blackmailed her into doing it every time, threatening to fire a young, orphaned stage manager working in the troupe.
The police officer who found Eurydice's body enters, reading a letter that she wrote in the taxi to Orpheus. It reveals that she planned to leave town because she was so in love with Orpheus, and knew that her promiscuous past was something he could never overcome—despite the fact that her love for him had made her pure again.
She dies once more, leaving Orpheus miserable and alone with his mess of a father. Distraught, he talks with M. Henri, who convinces him that the perfect relationship he envisioned having with Eurydice is still possible...but only in death. In fact, if she hadn't died, M. Henri says, the relationship would have eventually disappointed him.
Reassured that he will be with his true love in death, Orpheus kills himself offstage. As ghosts, the couple reunites on stage, happy and in love forever more.
Cast- Ross Thompson as Orpheus
- Liza Goddard as Eurydice
- Raymond Westwell as father
- Tom Oliver as Henri
- James Condon as Molac
- Frank Lloyd as hotel waiter
- Diana Davidson as mother
- John V. Trevor as Vincent
- Nigel Lovell as clerk
- Reg Evans as Mathias
- Roberta Grant as girl
- Ossie Wenban as manager
- John Huson as station waiter
- Patricia Hill as cashier
Original play
Jean Anouilh's original play Eurydice debuted in 1941.
As Point of Departure, a translation by Kitty Black, it was performed a number of times. There was a 1950 stage version with Dirk Bogarde and Mai Zetterling (Peter Finch took over briefly during the run). Some Australian performances are listed here.
The play was on Broadway in 1951 with Richard Burton and Dorothy Maguire.
Other versions
It was done on ABC radio in 1959 with Amber Mae Cecil.
There was a 1964 BBC version on TV for Thursday Theatre. John Hurt played Orpheus.
There had been a Canadian TV version in 1960. Although this was cancelled at one stage see here.
Production
Ross Thompson had previously been in The Pigeon for Australian Playhouse, his first television role. He had Goddard had acted in a scene together in They're a Weird Mob. Thompson was appearing in Blue Hills, the radio serial, at the time and had to be written out to appear in this (as specified in TV Times).
Point of Departure had a cast of fifteen.
Martin McGee was originally csat in the male lead. Safran felt he wasn't up to it and fired him, replacing him with Thompson.
One week into rehearsal Reg Cannon died and had to be replaced by Nigel Lovell. Raymond Westwell had to be imported from Melbourne. The production went $353 over budget.
Crew
Translation - Kitty Black. Adagio in G by Albinoni, played by Don Andrews. Designer - Geoffrey Wedlock. Lighting - Fred Haynes, Peter Tkachenko. Producer and director - Henri Safran.
Reception
The Sydney Morning Herald write that Ross Thompson's "sensitive and convincing acting made the best of the obvious weaknesses in the plot itself."
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| SMH 20 June 1966TV Guide p 1 |
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| Canberra Times 17June 1966 p 13 |
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| The Age TV Guide 23 June 1966 |
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| The Age TV Guide 23 June 1966 p 3 |
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| SMH 20 June 1966 TVGuide |
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| TV Times |
by Stephen Vagg
October 4, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian television plays looks at two locally-shot works based on plays by foreign writers: Jean Anouilh’s Point of Departure (1966) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man of Destiny (1967).
The first decade of Australian television drama mostly consisted of locally-shot versions of foreign scripts. That changed around the middle of the 1960s with the success of Homicide and The Mavis Bramston Show, and by the end of the decade, almost all Australian drama was actually written by Australians. It didn’t happen overnight though, and this article looks at two later foreign adaptations: Point of Departure (1966) and Man of Destiny (1967).
Point of Departure (1966)
This was one of three TV plays put on by the ABC to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of Greek Theatre (I think they approximated the date). It’s based on a 1950 British stage play by Kitty Black, which in turn was a translation of a 1941 French play, Eurydice, by Jean Anouilh, which in turn was based on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, which in turn I admit I had to google… it’s the one about a man retrieving his dead wife from the underworld – it’s been ripped off a bunch of times (eg. What Dreams May Come).
Anouilh doesn’t seem to be much performed these days, at least not in English-speaking countries, but he had a huge vogue in the post-war period: for instance, the Peter Sellers movie Waltz of the Toreadors (1962) and the Peter O’Toole-Richard Burton starrer Becket (1964) were both based on Anouilh plays. ABC TV versions of his offerings included The Lark (1958), Dinner with the Family (1959), The Fighting Cock (1963), and Point of Departure (1966). That’s a lot of French theatre dramatised by the Australian taxpayer in those pre-submarine-dispute days.
Point of Departure revolves around a romance between two young kids who meet at a railway station, musician Orpheus (Ross Thompson), and strolling player Eurydice (Liza Goddard). They fall in love straight away, but are challenged by Orpheus’ inability to handle the fact that (gasp) Eurydice slept around a bit; her list of old shags include fellow actor Matthias (a young Reg Evans, if you can imagine such a thing) and the head of Eurydice’s acting troupe (James Condon).
The first half of this, focusing on the kids and their parents, is beautifully effective and sensitive. The action falters a little with the introduction of characters played by Tom Oliver (as a sort of emissary of the angel of death), and James Condon – no knock on the actors, it just felt different tonally; maybe this is the sort of play that works best on stage, with its slightly fantastical nature and hopping around in time and place.
It’s quite racy for its day – Orpheus and Eurydice go up to a hotel room and Liza Goddard (who was only 17 at the time) flips off a bra strap before they bonk (off screen). The story is problematic by today’s standards, with its slut-shaming and glamourisation of suicide, but director Henri Safran clearly engages with the material and he does a very good job of creating a gloomy melancholic doomed romance vibe over the two hour running time.
I particularly liked that Point of Departure was a rare Australian TV play to focus on young people. Both leads are excellent. Ross Thompson had just graduated from NIDA and scored a personal success in “The Pigeon”, the first episode of Australian Playhouse; cult Oz movie fans will recognise him as the creepy scientist in the 1980 film The Chain Reaction. The achingly pretty Liza Goddard is perhaps best-remembered in Australia for her roles in Skippy and Bergerac, although, like Thompson, she’s done heaps of things; when Point of Departure was made, Goddard had only just moved to Australia from England (her father David was a BBC man who’d been appointed head of ABC TV drama). The lead roles are real star parts for younger actors, incidentally: Dirk Bogarde and Mai Zetterling were in the original 1950 London stage production of Point of Departure, while Richard Burton and Dorothy Maguire starred in the 1951 Broadway version. I wish this TV version had been adapted to be set in Australia, but there you go.
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