Australian TV Plays: The Prisoner (14 Nov 1962)

Based on a 1954 play which had been filmed in 1955 with Alec Guiness.

Premise

In an unnamed East European country where communist tyranny has recently replaced Nazi tyranny, a Cardinal is falsely accused of treason. The Cardinal had withstood torture when he opposed the Nazis, so the regime knows it will not be able to use force to get him to make a false confession.

The Interrogator an old associate of the Cardinal's but now a Communist, is given the task of persuading him to make a public confession. He intends to do it by undermining the Cardinal's certainty in the righteousness of his resistance to the state.

At first the Interrogator makes no progress. This leads the state authorities to grow impatient and try to trick the Cardinal with fake evidence. The Cardinal is easily able to deal with these clumsy attempts, which leave the state prosecutors humiliated.

The Interrogator uses sleep deprivation, relentless questioning, and the deliberate upsetting of the Cardinal’s eating and sleep/wake patterns to weaken him. He eventually breaks the Cardinal's will by showing him he became a priest out of selfishness and vanity and to escape his childhood poverty, not out of goodness, virtue or benevolence, which everyone (including the Cardinal himself) has always believed. To purge his sin, in the show trial that follows the Cardinal confesses to every lie of which he is accused, and is released to face a silent, bewildered crowd.

Cast

Christopher Hill as the interrogator
Michael Duffield as the prisoner
John Gray as the cell warden
Barbara Brandon
Campbell Copelin
Roland Redshaw
Hugh Stewart
Kenric Hudson as off screen voice

Original play

The author of the original play was Bridget Boland. The play debuted in London in 1954.

The Cardinal was based on Croatian cardinal Aloysius Stepinac (1898–1960), who was a defendant in a show trial in Croatia (as a result of the similarities, the film couldn't be shown in Yugoslavia until the fall of the communist government) and on Hungarian cardinal József Mindszenty (1892–1975), who was charged in Hungary.

Other adaptations

The play was turned into a 1955 film with Alec Guiness.

Frank Thring appeared in a Melbourne production of the play on stage in 1955. There was a Sydney stage production the same year at the Genesian.

Other adaptations

It was adapted for Australian radio by the ABC, announced in 1961 (as part of a series of arty plays) but not broadcast I think until 1962.

It was adapted for Canadian TV in 1962 and by the BBC for British TV in 1963 (with Patrick McGoohan who later had a famous show called The Prisoner). So we did it before British TV I think (unless there's another version).

Production

It was filmed in Melbourne under the direction of William Sterling who also did the adaptation.

Sterling aimed to recreate prison through the mind of a prisoner. The only scenery was physical objects within the immediate visual awareness of the prisoner. "The camera will present his mental world," said Sterling. "For example doors will not be seen - only heard."

Broadcast

In November 1962 TCN-9 broadcast the Alec Guiness/Jack Hawkins film in Sydney. This might be why the Sydney broadcast was delayed until the following year.

Reception

The critic from the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that, "no thumb-screw or rack could have seemed more incredible than did the weapons in the verbal armoury of the interrogator, played so as to be fairly obviously diabolical by Christopher Hill... The camera circled and shifted as ominously as the dialogue; the shadows and lights of William Sterling's production accentuated the probing nightmare; but in the end one was not quite sure how it all had happened."

Frank Roberts of The Bulletin thought it was "stronger than the motion picture in many ways... first rate television drama." No doubt they were pleased it was not an Australian script. He went on to add "ABC Television can be proud of this production. So can Australians. It was, at last, fair evidence that we can do things well, that we don’t have to accept half-baked efforts just because local boys are involved, and you can’t be too hard on the poor blokes, they’re doing their best, and have to learn, and all the rest of that jazz. This year capable television actors, designers, producers and technicians in general have sprung full bodied from wherever they had been lurking and in some instances it is a suitable word for their previous efforts. But writers now, where are the writers? They can’t all be occupied with revue scripts; and madly, wildly satirical interviews for “Oz.” "