Based on a well-ish known Australian play by Hal Porter.
Premise
In 1850s Hobart Sir Rodney Haviland builds a tower. He lives with his sister Hester and ex convict, Knight. Amy Armstrong is Sir Rodney's step daughter and resents his new 19 year old wife Selina. So too does Rodney's 14-year-old son Edwin.
Amy is having an affair with the convict Marcus Knight. Sir Rodney is trying to arrange a marriage for Amy that will advance his prospects in London. Amy has learned that his 14 year old adopted son Edwin is really the son of Knight. Sir Rodney winds up throwing Amy off the top of the tower.
Cast
- Andrew Guild as Edwin Haviland
- Judith Arthy as Selina, Lady Haviland
- Keith Lee as Sir Rodney Haviland
- Mary Ward as Hester Fortescue
- Rex Holdsworth as Tom Perry
- Jim Lynch as Marcus Knight
- Fay Kelton as Megan
- Anne Charleston as Amy Armstrong
Original play
It had won the Sydney Journalists
Club Prize in 1962. The Elizabethan Theatre Trust had an option on the
play but did not exercise it. (Neil Hutchison's influence? He was at the Trust then.)
The play was published in a collection of Australian plays in 1963 (others included Douglas Stewart's Ned Kelly and Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year)
before it had even been performed. Kippax wrote approvingly of the play in his introduction, extract below.
It was first produced in London in February 1964.
The fact the play had its world premiere in England not Australia was much commented on at the time.
Other productions are listed here.
My thoughts on the play: I had mixed feelings about Hal Porter before reading this. He wrote a
book about Australian theatre which I had read that was useful but full
of these little mean, bitchy asides. I remember a judgement about the
Mercury Theatre performing in factories - "Uplift-for-the-Moron-Masses
activity.” That sort of thing turned me off him.
But this is a first-rate gothic melodrama. You could absolutely see it being filmed by Hammer in the 1960s by Freddie Francis or Seth Holt, or by Universal Pictures in the 1940s by Robert Siodmak.
It's set in colonial Hobart, which is inherently creepy (sorry, Tasmanians!), in an old dark house with a big tower covered in scaffolding, inhabited by a family full of Secrets. There is Amy, pregnant to a former convict, Knight, who also fathered Edwin, a creepy 14 year old who is the adopted son of patriarch Sir Rodney. There's a spinster aunt and Sir Rodney's inappropriately young wife. Amy falls off the tower. Was it suicide? Was she pushed?
If Porter doesn't quite nail the ending he keeps you reading with his messed up family, scary Edwin especially, It's a shame this wasn't filmed in the 1970s revival (from memory Tim Burstal directed a Hal Porter story in Libido). It's only one location (the creepy house) so isn't inherently expensive and would make a good old fashioned shocker.
Other adaptations
The play was performed for Australian radio in 1964.
It made its Australian stage debut in June 1964 in Melbourne.
Production
In February 1964 The Age reported that the play was being adapted for television.
Noel Robinson did the adaptation. Chris Muir directed it in Melbourne.
The play started rehearsing in Melbourne in October 1964.
"It's a wonderful part," said Guild, best known for playing the Artful Dodger on stage in the Australian production of Oliver!. "At least the Dodger is a loveable sort of young crook but Edwin is really awful. He has no warmth or softness at all.I shocked myself sometimes when doing the part."
ABC designer Alan Clark and scenic artist Len Lauva collaborated on a 20 ft x 12 ft authentic backdrop of the Derwent River, Constitution Dock and the scattered houses of early colonial Hobart. They used old prints to recreate what the view from Sir Rodney's balcony and tower would be like.
Trivia - when the play aired Porter was suing a critical for libel. He won.
Technical supervisor - Robert Forster. Designer - Alan Clarke. Producer (director) - Christopher Muir.
Thoughts on the script
Very faithful adaptation. Captures the strength of the play. One feels it could have been more visual, perhaps.
Reception
The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the play was:
Notable as a rare instance of an Australian playwright's attempting to represent the tension between good manners and bad intentions. Porter has taken advantage of the colonial time lag in 19th century Tasmania to allow his characters to clothe their generally poisonous motives in an 18th century decorum, and to make use of an unusually hemstitched and hand-sewn type of language. The easy and tempting criticism to make of this play is that it is stagey and derivative (with a "Rebecca"-like storm and an Ibsenesque tower of a most clumsily symbolic kind) and that it is as fniitily stocked with curtain lines as anything George Miller might present at the Neutral Bay Music Hall... Much depended in this televised version on its tactfulness in making the most of the play's richly theatrical srrokes without emphasising their potential absurdities. In this Porter was well served.
The Canberra Times said the play's "weakness is in its over stylisation, overstatement and melodrama. It is a splendidly theatrical play of its type, and it ought to have made rather better television than it did in Christopher Muir's production."
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| TV Times 30 Dec1964 |
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| The Age TV Guide 26 Nov 1964 |
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| The Age 28 April 1965 p 12 |
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| SMH TV Guide 26 April 1965 |
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| Canberra Times 28 April 1965 p 21 |
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| Canberra Times 30 April 1965 p 21 |
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| SMH 29 April 1965 p 15 |
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| The Age24 Oct 1964 p 6 |
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| Smh 29 Feb 1964 p 2 |
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| SMH 28 Feb 1964 p 2 |
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| The Age 21 Feb 1964 p 1 |
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| sMH 23 Feb 1964 p 102 |
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| SMH 21 Feb 1964 p 3 |
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| The Guardian 20 Feb 1964 p 9 |
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| The Age 28 Nov 1964 p 7 |
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Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Tower
by Stephen Vagg
June 22, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays looks at a slice of Tasmanian gothic, The Tower.
One of the most pleasing developments in the Australian film and TV industry over the past decade-and-a-bit has been the increasing number of productions emitting from Tasmania: Rosehaven, The Gloaming, Lambs of God, Lion, The Nightingale, The Kettering Incident, The Hunter, the three versions of the Alexander Pearce story that came out within 12 months, etc. Because, for a long time, our southern most state was (mostly) ignored. Geographical isolation and a small population played a part in this, of course, but I think, also the whole concept of Tasmania is a little intimidating for northerners: the history is too problematic, the locals too foreign, there are too many trees and rivers, etc.
The Apple Isle was not completely absent from our screens however. In addition to sporadic films over the years (Manganinne, The Tale of Ruby Rose, They Found a Cave, various versions of For the Term of His Natural Life), the ABC filmed several TV plays in Hobart in the 1960s including The Happy Journey (1963), Drive a Hard Bargain (1964), Double Jeopardy (1965) and The Finder (1966). There was also the Hobart-set-but-Melbourne-shot The Tower (1964), which I’m talking about today.
The Tower was based on a 1962 play by Hal Porter (1911-84), a writer who I heard a bit about growing up but who doesn’t seem to register as much these days (I could be wrong). Porter wrote all sorts of things – plays, novels, poems, short stories, essays, but probably best known for his autobiography The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony (1963). The only thing of his that I had read before The Tower was his non-fiction work Stars of Australian Stage and Screen (1965), which was mean-spirited, snobby and full of errors, so I went into The Tower without optimism. I was pleasantly surprised and discovered, on the page, a first-rate piece of gothic melodrama which should have made a fantastic TV play.
The Tower takes place in 1850s Hobart, in the mansion of wealthy Sir Rodney de Havilland. Members of Sir Rodney’s household include his spinster sister Hester, his wheelchair-bound step-daughter Amy, his new 19 year-old-wife Selina, and creepy 14 year old son Edwin. Amy falls off the new tower being built on top of the house and signs point to it not being an accident. Was it suicide? Was she pushed? There are lots of twists and memorable characters (including a hunky ex-convict and dodgy maid), and the house is a wonderfully creepy setting in the style of Thornfield Hall or Manderley. If Porter doesn’t quite nail the ending, he keeps you reading about this messed up family, scary Edwin especially. You could absolutely see it being filmed by Hammer in the 1960s by Seth Holt from a Jimmy Sangster script, or by Universal Pictures in the 1940s by Robert Siodmak.
The play won the Sydney Journalists Club Prize in 1962 and was published in a collection of Australian plays the following year (others in the collection were Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly and Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, both of which were also filmed for Australian TV). It was first produced on stage in London in February 1964; later that year the play was staged in Melbourne, as well as being adapted for ABC radio and television.
The Tower should have made great television. The source material had rich parts, a memorable setting and a highly entertaining melodramatic plot. I was really looking forward to seeing the TV adaptation.
But it isn’t very good. Mostly because it is badly directed.
I don’t want to get into grave stomping here, truly I don’t, so I’m not going to name the person responsible, but on the page, The Tower is a gift for any filmmaker – it’s got a creepy old mansion, dysfunctional family, plenty of murder, secrets, sex and insanity… Directors would normally eat that stuff up with a spoon, but the TV version is devoid of atmosphere and feeling. Moments that should be powerful are skimmed (such as Amy falling off a tower, I mean, come on, how do you stuff that up?), camerawork is unimaginative, blocking is perfunctory, and close ups minimal. (Lack of close ups was a notable feature of early Australian TV plays – in his memoirs, actor Gordon Chater called it “the usual ‘feet, knees and in the distance pictures’. People watching TV are interested in people and close ups in Australia were hard to come by in the early days of Australian television.”)
It does not help that the adaptation was so faithful to the original play – people, events and situations are constantly described instead of being seen, which doesn’t matter so much on stage but damages something like The Tower where part of the pleasure of watching it should be in the creation of mood. One of the striking features of early Australian TV plays was how much fidelity adapting screenwriters had to the original source material; while in theory this was admirable, it often led to an under-utilisation of the potential advantages of the new medium (editing, quicker transitions, a moving camera, the power of the close up, etc). Far too often stage plays that were filmed for Australian TV were merely trimmed for time and censorship as opposed to being properly adapted for the new medium; The Tower was a case in point.
It’s also not very well acted – the cast carry on like they’re in amateur dramatics complete with unconvincing wigs. But they are not helped by awkward blocking and handling, and I’ve seen most of them be better in other productions, so I’m inclined to put most of the blame on the director.
I don’t mean to be cruel here, truly – the whole point of this series of articles is to celebrate the existence of a little known art form. But I get frustrated; so many contemporary reports from this period would routinely criticise the quality of Australian writing, and here was a good story that was stuffed up by the director.
The ABC later adapted another of Porter’s plays for the small screen: Eden House in 1970. I haven’t seen it and have no idea how it turned out, but I hope it was a happy experience. The definitive screen version of The Tower remains to be filmed – and it would still make a good movie, BTW, as gothic melodrama does not date (just look at Jane Eyre). Anyway, over to you Screen Tasmania…
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