Australian TV Plays: Swamp Creatures (13 July 1960)

Swamp Creatures (13 July 1960)

Another Australian play! An Alan Seymour work - before he did The One Day of the Year.

Plot

Two sisters live together in a house in a swamp in the Australian bush, the dominant , overbearing, bitter Constance and the frail, younger Amy. They live near a housekeeper, Mr Fall.

The sisters are awaiting the arrival of Amy's son Christian, who is returning home after ten years, having left when he was fifteen. While Mr Fall goes to pick up Christian, Constance and Amy imagine giving a party to the locals. Amy wants to leave the house but Constance wants to stay. Constance is traumatised by memories of their overbearing and cruel father. It is clear she and Amy are both mad.

Christian arrives the next day. He tells Amy he has a girlfriend in Sydney. He wants Amy to join him in the city. He tells Constance that he got a lift and Mr Fall did not pick him up.

Mr Fall apologises to Connie for missing Christian. It is clear Fall and Constance are up to something.

Christian asks Constance about his mother's mental health. She tells Charlie that Amy is dying.

Christian watches Amy and Constance reminisce about their past. Constance reveals she tried to seduce Amy's lover (and Christian's father) Victor.

Christian thinks her mother has gone to die.

Cast

Jacqueline Knott as Constance
Lynne Murphy as Amy
Graham Hill as Christian
Marion Johns as Mrs Fall
Frank Walters as Mr Fall

Background to play

The play was based on a true story about an old woman who lived near a swamp and disappeared. This was a "nine-day wonder in the newspapers" according to Seymour who used the story as a jumping off point.

Seymour said:

“I’d read a newspaper story about two elderly sisters in an old residence up Bacchus Marsh way, in Victoria. One of them had disappeared. And it was also mentioned at the end that a pet dog had recently disappeared in the swamp nearby. 1 was interested in all the atom bomb talk at that time, and the suggestions that radio-activity would produce curious mutations. I set out, from the ideas these things gave me to write a play which would give audiences an exciting theatrical experience even if they didn’t get any deeper message.” “

The play was written in 1955–56.

In 1956 it was highly commended in a play competition held by the Journalists' Club and judged by the Playwrights' Advisory Board. This was the one where The Shifting Heart came first and Multi Coloured Umbrella came second. Others highly commended were Royal Tour by Oriel Gray, and a Kiss and a Promise by Ric Throssell.

In 1957 it was one of the twenty-five finalists in the play competition held by the London Observer (out of 2000 entries).

Original stage production

It was first performed by the Canberra Repertory Society in 1957. It was presented in association with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. This was done in "an indication of its appreciation of the merits of this unusual and arresting play."

Seymour in letter about Sumner and Hunt - "I have a theory that the ultra-elevated gentlemen conscious of their position cannot see basic things and are frightened by incidentals they happen to dislike." He said the "average person accepted it all."

The Canberra Times called it "a triumph... a fine play that held the audience in constant tension for the entire three acts... It is a story of love and frustration in which awful fan-tasy mingles with even more horrible reality, in which tenderness and arrogance, the desire to be loved and the desire to dominate come together in an effect at once bizarre and utterly convincing. Seymour’s play is not a probing play—it does not reveal for us new depths of human psychology or new subleties of human rela- tionships. Largely for that reason it is not a great play. What it does instead is to erect, on the basis of fairly obvious and conventional human frustrations and desires, an edifice ter- rifying by its very air of patent reality. The tension and terror of that reality is maintained extremely well."

The SMH reviewed it and said it "packs more horrible fancies into four scenes than any other horror show in recent memory - and yet it is not so much appalling as palling" and was "certainly original" but "a disappointment.

The Age also reviewed it saying "tension was not always enough to carry Mr Seymour's words which were sometimes off key and more often too numerous."

It won first prize at the 1959 Tamworth Festival.

My thoughts on the play: Quite dense. Atmospheric. I will have to read it again. You can imagine it working well on stage. Not naturalistic. A challenge to adapt. The animal experimentation stuff is brief.

Other adaptations

The play was adapted for radio by the ABC in 1958 and in 1960. (I think the latter was a repeat.)

It was adapted for Canadian radio in 1962.

The play was intended to be adapted as a feature film by Kevin Powell and Anthony Buckley Productions but no film resulted.

Production

In September 1959 it was announced that the ABC had created a TV Writers Pool, with the aim of teaching local writers the techniques of learning for the screen. There were ten initial members: Alan Seymour, Jeff Underhill, Richard Lane, Barbara Vernon, D'arcy Niland and Ruth Park, Gwen Meredith, Kay Keaveny, Peter Kenna and Coral Lansbury.

Not all would get TV credits.

Swamp Creatures was one of a series of ten Australian scripts made by the ABC in 1960.

It was directed by Ray Menmuir.

Floor assistant David Twiby recalled that during the making of Swamp Creatures, the smoke machine caused a stage hand to nearly die during the broadcast.

David Twilby later recalled:

In "Swamp Creatures", the opening scene was a tracking shot through a swamp. The studio set looked convincing, but mist and creepy sound effects were needed to complete the picture. At rehearsal, producer Raymond Menmuir was not happy with either. The gram op went off for better sound effects and staging asked channel 7 to help out with a more effective smoke machine. This duly arrived, but too late for rehearsals. The basic idea was to heat the machine up with boiling water and then at the appointed time drop in dry ice. The resulting steam was then fed along a hose, under grass mats, to a studio hand, also hidden under grass mats, who lay in the middle of the set spraying the steam around. He used his hand to partially block the mouth of the hose, thus forcing the steam out at a faster rate and it consequently went further. The result looked great. This then was the opening shot, a steamy swamp with eerie noises. In the control room the producer congratulated the sound op for the frightening sounds. In fact the screams were coming from the ‘swamp’ where the studio hand had been forced by the heat of the steam to drop the hose and was now breathing in the carbon dioxide as he lay hidden under the mats. The camera started moving forward, and suddenly, just behind the camera, the grass parted and the figure of the studio hand rose to his full height, let out one last almighty scream, and fell flat on his face. In the control room the producer who could not see what was happening was very impressed with the frightening noises. While high up on scaffolding, waiting to make her dramatic entrance down a flight of stairs, leading lady Jacqueline Kott saw the whole thing and was convinced the studio hand was dead. The studio hand was quickly carried from the studio and an ambulance called. Meanwhile a shaken Jacqueline made her entrance and carried on as if nothing had happened. Except she was playing to a nearly empty studio. The cameramen, the sound man and myself as prompt were the only people in the studio. Everyone else was helping the stricken studio hand. Eventually he was taken to hospital and the remaining crew returned to the studio. On air the play continued faultlessly, the viewers unaware of the drama taking place behind the cameras. The studio hand made a full recovery, but left shortly after to take up a career in literature.

Lynn Murphy told Susan Lever:

I did a lot of plays for the ABC. That occurred with school broadcasts. That was done live and that was really hairy because there was no rehearsal time and they forget that you had to move from set to set and so the camera was chasing you trying not to shoot off and it was really hairy, but the plays were very well rehearsed, always, and had to be when they’re live...

Strange things can happen. I know I was in one, Alan Seymour wrote Swamp Creatures with Jacqueline Kott and it was a very eerie thing, it had all sorts of strange noises and she was the scientific sister and I was the put-upon downtrodden one that had a very interesting past and I had wonderful made scenes in it, but Jacqui had most of the dialogue, which is the hard part, and she had opened the thing and I was waiting on the staircase to float down and she was waiting outside and we heard this very strange noise and we thought, that’s interesting, Raymond Menmuir must have put in a new sound, it was a sort of choking sound, and then suddenly I saw Sammy Chung, who was on camera one, rush off the set and there was no one on camera one and Jacqui could see no one on camera one and there was this pause and what Sammy could see was one of the props guys were all in black underneath a velvet thing pumping dry ice and this poor boy was choking so Sammy saw him and grabbed him and just threw him out to Gavin and said, “Revive him,” and rushed back. Only missed one shot... It was amazing, but that’s live television.

My thoughts on the script: Felt like a play. It was trimmed from the stage play but it's basically a couple of people hanging around the house. The villain is a woman who wants to be rogered. It's ambitious. Maybe not 100% suited for TV. I wonder if TV adaptations of plays and novels were too faithful when some more rigorous re-imagining could've worked better eg like Gore Vidal's work on Henry James. Maybe that was too bold. Risky material. I would love to see it.

It's sort of Grey Gardens in a swamp. Two sisters live in a swamp. The son of one returns to get his mother away. There are weird experiments being done but the play doesn't spill into horror territory.

It is atmospheric and creepy. I hope a copy survives, I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Broadcast

It was shown in Melbourne on 19 October. It was repeated in 1962.

Reception

The Sunday Sydney Morning Herald TV critic called it "one of the finest drama efforts I have seen done here. Both from a technical and acting point of view, it couldn't be faulted... it gripped the interest from the first sequence. A scene where the two demented sisters stage a dream party in the near empty house was a brilliant piece of work."

Another Herald critic said the production "was at least successful in showing how a handful of characters can be marshalled to produce gripping theatre" but thought "the central issues are somewhat cloudily expressed. It is as if Seymour, having bunched these characters in a relatively surreal situation, is content to pile shock on shock at the expense of fully developing the main thread: that humanism rather than science is the answer"

TV Times called it "ambitious... but it left me cold... It should have been a chiller with its ingredients" but said Seymour "provided so much shock that there was no horror at all... the acting seemed hammy... there was no light and shade."