Rusty Bugles (23 June 1965)

 Adaptation of a classic Australian play.

Premise

Soldiers serve time at a base in the Northern Territory.

Cast

• Graham Rouse as Vic
• Stuart Finch as Gig Ape (Des Nolan)
  
• Kerry Francis as Rod
• Robert McDarra as Sgt Brooks
• John Armstrong as Andy ("The Little Corporal")
  
• Michael Thomas as Ot (Otford)
  
• Jack Allan as Mac
• Rod Moore as Keghead
• Guy le Claire as Darky
• Reg Gorman as Ollie
• Mark Edwards as Chris
  
• Charles Little as "Dean Maitland" (Ken Falcon)
  
• Roger Cox as Bill Henry
• David Yorston as Sigs Corporal (Jack Turner)
  
• Mike Barnacoat, Tony Bonner, John Saltzer,Robert Taylor
  

Original play

It was written by Sumner Locke Elliot based on his war experiences. He wrote it after the war "as a release" while still in the army. An interview where he discusses it is here.

It premiered in 1948 in Sydney at the Independent and received strong reviews.  "It was a sensation". Elliot never saw it... he returned to Australia three weeks after it closed.

There was a famous attempt to ban the play but the play persevered.

Many of Elliot's early plays were imitation Broadway pieces which found little favour. This was plotless ramblings set in the Territory and it was a huge hit.

The introduction to the play's published edition is here.

It has been produced a number of times. Ausstage has some here.

My thoughts on the play

 I read this because the ABC filmed it in 1965.

This is a quasi-classic of Australian theatre. Its reputation slightly went into eclipse after Summer of the Seventeenth Doll but it came first, as Doris Fitton points out in her introduction. Sumner Locke Elliott admits it is not really a play but a documentary - there's no real plot, just a collection of scenes. Veronica Kelly described it as Waiting for Godot in the Australian army.

Soldiers talk about leave, and movies and the Wet; they fight, discover their wives have been unfaithful, deal with an annoying sergeant, consider they aren't at Lae. Elliott's surrogate, Rod the writer, has a bromance with Vic (or is it more - when Vic leaves he asks Rod to keep his bed for him.)

It has tremendous authenticity and audiences gobbled it down. Elliott did countless slick Broadway imitations but his one big theatre hit was a plotless slice of autobiography - people responded to its honesty. It was with his novels that he combined his radio/TV plotting and autobiographical elements to create his masterpieces.

I love the verisimilitude, the dialogue and the fact it shines a light on perhaps the most obscure theatre of war in Australia. I love its success. I do admit I've never loved this play: there were a lot of characters and it was hard to tell them apart at times. Also I did long for some story. 

I wonder how it would come across on screen. I haven't seen an adaptation yet.

 Other adaptations

It was adapted for radio in April 1965. It played again in 1966.

The same director as this, Alan Burke, filmed it again in 1981. (Though he was only producer that time.)

The Independent Theatre revived it in 1964.

Production

It was Alan Burke's first production for the ABC since he returned from England where he had directed a TV production of The Harp in the South. Alan Burke directed the play on stage in Adelaide in 1949.

It was shot at the ABC's studios in Sydney.  Philip Pearson produced.

John Warwick did the adaptation. Some of the language of the play was toned down for the adaptation. Burke told the TV Times "I'm very excited about the play and I feel sure viewers will react the same way after they see it on tv."

It was designed by Kevin Brooks.

It was made with the assistance of HQ Eastern Command. Major John Bennett was the technical adviser.

Philip Pearson was the technical producer. 

Burke later did a 2006 NIDA oral interview. He the 1965 they were a "bit fraught about the language". He said the 1981 version was a "disaster" because of the director. Burke knew Elliot who came out to make Water Under the Bridge and refused to show it to him because it was "appalling". He refused to let it be seen overseas and repeated because it was so bad.

"Not an easy play. The all male cast is  a bit tricky. You have to work in areas of sentimentality that sit unhappily upon an actor." The Vic Ron scene is "known as the love scene in the trade". He remembers having to explain to the actor they were two toughs sitting over a fire and it mean nothing."

In a 2004 interview for the NFSA he said

Well the language was so mild we wouldn’t bother or even think of it now but one took out a few of the, they didn’t ever go excessively but they would say ‘friggin’ which was not considered ‘nice’ and I can’t remember what else. But we managed to trim those without emasculating the thing. It would have defeated the whole point of doing the play. But it was very good to do. I found it very interesting. It’s the sense of inactivity which is the Rusty of the Bugles... Waiting for something, nothing happening. You know they were living in a staging camp at Mataranka or somewhere and this is Sumner’s own experiences. Not being really a part of the war. That sort of feeling, just being on the edge of it. Lovely character studies that Sumner’s very good at. What else can I say about it. We didn’t use any OB on that production but I think another time when we repeated the production later, a totally different production and we used some OB. But studio bound and very good.
GS Who was among your cast?
AB Well the two as you call it leads, they aren’t really but Graham Rouse and Kerry Francis and a wonderful performance from Jack Allen a jazz pianist who did the odd thing for me. A lovely man. Big, fat build and he played ‘Mac’ and Mac is the lovely dry character whose mate is the little, sort of shortish guy who is there, they are inseparatables. And there’s a wonderful scene in which Mac gets a letter from home and screams out to the boys ‘I’m going to have a baby’ which of course is an enormous laugh line. And then they work out that in fact he hasn’t been home for a year and there’s that awful, slow realisation and coming from a comic character, it’s twice as sad. And Jack was heartbreaking, absolutely marvellous in it and I loved him. And we had Red Moore who had been around in the Kiwis. There was Keghead (sp?) a wonderful, dry, boring man and he was very funny, really very, very good...  he was a moderately good actor which was very handy. You could use him either as a jazz pianist or as a performer and he filled both of those at various times for me. And when we came to do the remake, if we can call it that, in later days, couldn’t better Jack and he came back and played Mac a second time.
GS Did he.
AB Yes. The only casting we doubled between the two productions, good man.

Crew credits

Adapter - John Warwick. script assistant - Cathie garland. Floor manager - Bill Munro. Designer - Kevin Brooks. Technical prdocuer - Philp Pearson.

Thoughts on the script

 A strong adaptation of the play. It condenses it but captures the flavour - as well as you can. I don't think this is for screen, actually. It needs the intensity of being live, with swearing, the flesh and blood characters. Would Waiting for Godot work on film?

But I am glad it was done.

Reception

The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald thought the adaptation blundered by not establishing where and when the play was set, saying the director "wasted speculation while a huge cast of strange characters passed before him — too many, in fact, to be accommodated comfortably in such short playing lime." He also felt the word "flamin' " was overused.

Another reviewer for the same paper noted the high use of the word "flamin" ("it got a flamin' good workout") while "the other word, which the wowsers took such exception to when the play was first staged in Sydney some 15 years ago, hardly got a look-in." However he thought "Alan Burke's production was a good, smooth job" and did "draw the pathos from the story."

The TV critic for The Age said it "came through as a worthwhile piece of Australiana which one should have seen."

The Bulletin said "most of the flavour" of the play came through in the adaptation.

TV Times called it a  "lifeless, colorless affair".

The production was repeated in March 1966.

The Age TV Guide 17 June 1965

SMH TV Guide 21 June 1965 p 1

Canberra Times 18 March 1966 p 13

 

The Bulletin 3 July 1965 p 50

The Age TV Guide 1 July 1965 p 5

SMH 27 June 1965 p 83

SMH 25 June 1965 p 9

 

Canberra Times 25 June 1965 p 17

SMH 15 March 1966 p 15

The Age 15 March 1966 p 16

the Age 23 June 1965 p 14

SMH 23 June 1965 p 14

SMH TV Guide 21 June 1965

SMH 20 June 1965 p 85

The Age TV Guide 17 June 1965

TV Times 28 July 1965 p 9

 

 

 

 

 

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Rusty Bugles
by Stephen Vagg
June 11, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at the 1965 adaptation of the stage classic, Rusty Bugles.

If you asked an average Australian of 1965 if they’d heard of an Australian stage play, the most likely answer (well, apart from “no”) would have been “Summer of the Seventeenth Doll”. The second would probably have been “Rusty Bugles”, aka “the play that preceded the Doll but was then overshadowed by it”.

Rusty Bugles had its stage premiere at the Independent Theatre, Sydney, in 1948. It was written by Sumner Locke Elliot, a then-young but already-highly-experienced radio actor and writer who would go on to become a top TV scriptwriter in America (The Grey Nurse Said Nothing) and best -selling novelist (Careful He Might Hear You). Elliot had long dreamed of writing a hit play – he was a fixture for many years at the Independent Theatre – and prior to Rusty Bugles had turned out a number of slick, Broadway-inspired tales for the stage, none of which particularly hit the public’s fancy.

Rusty Bugles was completely different to other things he had written: a plotless account about Australian soldiers stuck in an isolated supply base in the Northern Territory during the war. They squabble, moan, joke, deal with a petty sergeant, call home, play cards; nothing really much happens – some soldiers go, others stay, two men become friends (perhaps more), another has a breakdown, some are cuckolded back home but can’t do anything about it. The play definitely doesn’t fall into the tradition of the “well made play” like The Doll does (which is perhaps why it isn’t revived as much these days). Still, the public responded to Rusty Bugles in enormous numbers (well, enormous for an Australian stage piece); at a time when the war was fresh in everyone’s minds, audiences appreciated its honesty, accuracy, humour and heart. Plot doesn’t always matter.

Rusty Bugles would have seemed a natural for television adaptation by the ABC (culturally significant, self-contained, high profile source material, etc etc), but this did not happen until 1965. Maybe, there was trouble securing the rights. There could have been apprehension about the lack of story (which matters more on screen than stage, where the energy of live performance can get you by). Concerns about the language were possibly an issue: Rusty Bugles was famously banned for obscenity by the NSW Chief Secretary, days after it opened in Sydney, and was only allowed back on stage once a few discrete trims were made; that sort of controversy can scare network executives.

Whatever difficulties were involved were eventually sorted out and Rusty Bugles was filmed at ABC’s Gore Hill studios in 1965. The director was Alan Burke, who had recently returned from a stint in Britain (where he helmed a production of Ruth Park’s Harp in the South for British TV). Burke was an ideal person to work on a TV version of Rusty Bugles, having directed a stage production of the play in 1949. The script adaption was written by John Warwick, who was fairly faithful to the source material, apart from toning down the language.

The TV version of Rusty Bugles captures the essence of the play – the camaraderie, humour, bickering. The lack of story does make it drag occasionally, especially over 75 minutes, and there are a lot of characters to keep track of. At times, I wondered if the production would not have benefited from a less faithful adaptation, which merged together some of the characters. But then that would not be Rusty Bugles.

The cast includes the heavyset comedian and musician Jack Allan, who plays the cuckolded Mac; Kerry Francis as the city slicker Rod (the Sumner Locke Elliot surrogate – Francis is probably too old for the part); Guy Le Claire as the trouble-making Darky (the role played by Lloyd Berrell in the original stage production); Robert McDarra, who was so good in the feature film 27A (1974) and who died relatively young from alcoholism, as the bossy sergeant; Graham Rouse, whose face will be familiar from years of guest spots, as Vic, who is keen to see action, and has a bromance with Ron; and Mark Edwards, who later had a stint as a leading man in British films like Blood from Mummy’s Tomb, as a soldier. The most effective performance comes from Charles Little, who plays Ken Falcon, a soldier who never talks (they call him “Dean Maitland”, as in “The Silence of Dean Maitland”) and has a nervous breakdown.

There are some beautiful moments of silence and reflection – Charles Little leaning his head against books in the library, Kerry Francis standing in the rain at the end. More of these would have worked wonders; ditto more close ups to emphasise key emotional moments and dramatisations of events described that would’ve been good to actually see (eg. why not show Ken’s nervous breakdown?).

Rusty Bugles was never turned into a feature film – apparently Tim Burstall considered doing it in the 1970s when he wanted to make a “male bonding film” but he elected to adapt The Last of the Knucklemen instead. The play was filmed by the ABC again in 1980, with Alan Burke producing and Graham Rouse once more in the cast. The colour photography in the latter does not seem to suit the story as much as the black and white photography for the 1965 version; certainly, reviews for the earlier adaptation were superior.

The 1965 Rusty Bugles isn’t the definitive version of the play, but it’s an effective adaptation, a worthy record of a play that is vitally important to our nation’s theatre history.

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