Australian TV Plays: The Tempest (16 Oct 1963)

A Shakespeare adaptation. The annual Shakespeare that year.

Premise

You know it, right? Prospero and Miranda on the island. Visited by others.

Cast

Max Oldaker as Prospero
Joan Morrow as Miranda
Reg Livermore as Ariel
Owen Weingott as Caliban
Walter Sullivan as Antonio
Ron Haddrick as Alonso
Walter Pym as Sebastian
Edmund Pegge as Ferdinand
Gordon Glenwright as Stephano
John Armstrong as Trinculo
David Bradbury as Gonzalo
Joy Parkin, Beverly Bohan and Valentine Price as the singers in "The Masque"

Other adaptations

The BBC filmed a ballet version in 1939. They did it again in 1956.

Production

The play was a set text for the NSW leaving certificate that year. So, a guaranteed audience!

Max Oldaker was an actor who had been in retirement in Launceston, Tasmania. He travelled from there to Sydney especially for the play. Reg Livermore says on the first day of rehearsal Oldaker was word perfect.

"Max was apprehensive about Shakespeare I guessed," wrote Livermore in his memoirs, adding the actor "had been much more at home in the world of musical comedy."

Ariel has two songs. John Antil wrote the music for this which Livermore described as "extremely contemporary but awkward".Livermore rehearsed the songs with Antil and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Keith Bain did choreography for the six dancers.

Livermore wore tight shorts and his body was covered in silver paint. His character had to "fly" during the production so he had to perform his scenes off to one side while superimposed on the action. "I had to get my line of sight correct when it came to addressing the other characters of course," wrote Livermore, "which meant I ended up talking to the floor; it was quite tricky and not much fun."

Burke told Graham Shirley in 2004 about it:

Third of the four Shakespeare’s I did and at the suggestion of Neil Hutchinson, maybe he was back in the chair at the time I can’t remember, he suggested that Max Oldaker might be a good thought for Prospero. So I met Max which I’d not done and he played Prospero very nicely and sweetly. He was of course from musical comedy and Gladys Moncrieff’s leading man in The Maid of the Mountains and all those things and one wasn’t sure whether he was going to cope with the Shakespeare but he did very nicely, very well. Reg Livermore played Ariel, Doug Smith designed very nicely and we superimposed Reg as Ariel by covering all over himself and putting him on a black velvet table and he flew through the sets and round the thing and settled on tree branches and things like that. It was quite fun.
John Antill wrote some music for us, original music, including some songs for Ariel which were so difficult that Reg couldn’t sing them and had to come in and ask for coaching on them. Nobody else I can recall of much importance in it. It was quite nice. It was an extraordinary .......... (unclear) studio bookings, I don’t know why this happened but we were shooting on the day in which was to go to air that night. Now this is not doing it live. It was pre thing with no chance to edit because we’d finish shooting at 5 and it was on air at 8.30.

Sadly one terrible thing happened that the boy on the music, the sound effects whatever you call him, Graham’s operator. The end music which Antill had written for the end titles, he put on at the wrong speed. Antill of course died as you could imagine, it was hideous and I thought ‘I can do nothing about it, it’s 5 o’clock and this show’s got to go on air tonight’, so we had to let it go. Anyway that was that.

Reception

The Sydney Morning Herald said the trick photography used had "mixed results" but praised the acting.

I'm not sure if this was ever shown in Melbourne. If it wasn't that is odd.