Australian TV Plays: The Skin of Our Teeth (25 Feb 1959)

Adaptation of the classical play. Directed by Alan Burke who regarded it as his big breakthrough in terms of television direction... even though it sounds like it was filmed theatre.

Premise

The story of life on Earth as lived by Mr and Mrs Antrobus, and their two children - and their maid, Sabina.

Cast

John Ewart as Henry
Leonard Teale as Mr Antrobus/Mr Everyman
Aileen Britton as Mrs Antrobus/Mrs Everyman
Diana Davidson as Sabina the maid
Beryl Marshall as Gladys
Robert Hunt as the fortune teller
Nick Tate as the telegraph boy

Original play

The play by Thornton Wilder is a classic. It premiered in 1942 and won the Pulitzer.

You can borrow a copy here.

The play was very popular on stage in Australia. There were productions in 1959 in Sydney and Melbourne.

Royston Morley directed it in England on stage in 1956.

Other versions

ITV filmed it in 1959. US TV did it in 1951 and 1955.

Production

The film was directed by Alan Burke who had directed a production of Skin of Our Teeth on stage in Canberra in 1953 (Ric Throssell was in it.) A review of the production in The Bulletin is here.

Burke had also spent a day talking to Wilder in the US at the latter's New Haven home. Burke had met him through a letter of introduction while on a UNESCO scholarship. Burke considered the meeting with Wilder one of the most important of his life. (This quote is from an oral history he did which you can access.) In another 2004 oral history he said he told Wilder that he felt the play was the best of the 20th century.

"He is the most knowledgeable man I've ever met," said Burke. "He is a great humanist and has great faith in mankind."

Burke said usually the producers got to pick the plays. So I assumed he picked this.

In 2004 he told Graham Shirley:

I’d done it in Canberra on stage, I did it on television and that was a bit of a rocket in its day. Skin of our Teeth, television? People were doing J.M. Barrie and little plays with one set but my taste ran to that and it still does. The slightly fantastic, the comic so that I know that I have a better sense of humour than I have a sense of drama and the essence of music. I find it so easy to direct with music.

He later elaborated in the same interview:

When we did Skin of our Teeth which was very early in my television career, a couple of things. We had the weather signal which tells the end of the world and they look at it, at Atlantic City and they say ‘one disc means rains, two means something, three means bad storm, four means the end of the world’. And we had this to the frame of television ......................... (unclear) and at various points they would look up and we shot through it and you’d see one disc go up and the action ........ (unclear), things like that, that I hadn’t seen done. But I had visions in my mind and please remember that I was much, much more influenced by cinema than by stage. You could imagine that in a film and you’d say ‘oh why not, you’ve only got to put the camera there and the actor there and that in between’.

Similarly the canted cameras. In the third act of Skin of our Teeth after the War, in the stage play the same interior of the house is there but the walls in, they all collapsed. At one stage, Mrs Antrovis (sounds like) was restoring peace to the family, pulls a rope from the ceiling and the flats come vertical. Very pretty image in the theatre and so I though hello, what can we do with this. So we kept one central camera which we hardly used and the other two canted right and canted left and the actors walked around in this at the angle of that and then when Madam pulled the rope, we uncanted on vision. That had never been done.

At one stage Sabina is talking to the audience about some embarrassment about ‘some idiotic thing and why can’t she play this scene because a friend of mine lost her husband to this and really she’d be too ........ (unclear)’. But it’s confidential exchange with the audience and so we had Diana Davidson, the loveliest lady as Sabina on a sort of looseish mid close up and in those days we had turret cameras. So we had her look at the camera and go [interviewee probably making some gesture], and the boy on vision, changed round to a close up lens and she nodded and went on with confidential conversation. That had never been done. So much so that on the night of the performance we did the thing on vision and the tech producer apparently hadn’t noticed sort of said ‘what are you doing?’ I said ‘it’s alright, it’s all been rehearsed’.

I had one other effect in that which went absolutely bum. Tom Jeffery will tell you about this, he was the Floor Manager on Skin of our Teeth, the flood. At the end of Act II takes over the world and the world is flooded and I thought alright. So he said ‘we’ll have a fish tank right on the camera so you can’t see its perimeter and out of vision we’ll pour water from both sides from buckets and the level will rise and that will cover our vision of the actors at the back and it will go ‘bubble bubble’ on sound track and you’ve got the end of the world by drowning’. And don’t ask me why but on the take I took camera X and there they were wheeling in the fish tank. I thought Dear God, live of course, couldn’t do anything about it, but that was going to be the other big trick... We only did the take live, there was nothing we could do. I tried to snip it out for the tele recording for other States. I don’t know how successful it was. ..

I think Skin of our Teeth was the big crash through. By then I’d done enough, well things like the Children’s Session and the News and all those things but I’d progressed to working with three cameras instead of two which was quite a major step, funny looking back on it now. But it was three cameras live which is rather harder I think probably than one camera and edit. Anyway oh from the beginning of ’59 I’d say I was away and very happy and confident.
GS In what way was Skin of our Teeth the big crash through?
AB Oh because of technical difficulties that I had plotted and that came off. That one didn’t of the rising waters but the others did and were slightly innovative, it’s a play I understood very well and liked and to this day think is probably the best play of the 20th Century. It was fun. Had a beautiful cast... Lovely stuff, good stuff to direct and stunning cast and a little bit of free wheeling that I had felt I could do as distinct from the naturalistic television that I’ve spoken of.

The adaptation was by Philip Albright, who would die in July 1959.

Philip Dickie did the design.

Two sets were used, one for the Antrobus house the other for Atlantic City boardwalk.

It was completely live. Burke said the production was "full of technical tricks."

Reception

Burke said although the play had "tiny ratings... it represented the big break-through in the production of television plays."

In Melbourne it rated a 12% share going down to 7%.

Listener In called it the "most controversial dramatic offering of the week" adding "whether or not you liked the television version depended, I think, upon whether you like the play itself. I'm biased because the Oliviers sold me its virtues with their brilliant stage presentation in Melbourne years ago. Out of its amusing and confusing jumble of human beings, time and circumstance emerges an enduring wisdom which gives validity to all this nonsense. The nonsense was even more bewildering in television than on the broad stage where it is able to move, inconsequentially. But why carp? The Skin of Our Teeth is the class of play we expect to see occasionally on the national channel. The cast... paid it the respect is deserves"