Australian TV Plays: Til Death Do Us Part (22 April 1959)

An Italian play. Not only did the ABC show preference for British plays over Australian material, they preferred Italian and French plays.

Shot in Melbourne. Shown in Sydney in 6 My 1959.

Premise

In Italy, a man called Roberto is on his way to meet Grazia. A stranger warns him that the woman will murder him for his money, but if he stays away, the woman will come running. Grazia is the wife of a gangster.

He then discovers that the gangster wants to kill him.

Cast

Edward Brayshaw as Roberto
Maree Tomasetti as Grazia
Frank Gatliff as the stranger
Syd Conabere as the gangster husband
Ken Goodlet
Edward Howell
Keith Hudson
Georgina Batterham
Kurt Ludescher
Robin Ramsay

Original Play

It was based on a play by Paolo Levi. The translation was done by Robert Rietti, who had also translated If It's a Rose.

Other Adaptations

The play had was filmed for British TV as "Strange Meeting", a 1959 episode of Armchair Theatre in the UK.

It had also been performed on Australian radio in 1958 and again in 1959.

Production

Edward Brayshaw's acting was announced in February 1959.

Maree had won the 1958 Erik award for acting on the Melbourne stage. She left overseas soon after (see Hutchison note).

It was decided not to require the actors to use Italian accents. Director Chris Muir said the play was of particular interest because "of the flashbacks, the movements in time and space and the exciting visual possibilities provided by the settings."

It was the first contemporary European drama made by the ABC.

Part of the play was shot at Sandringham Beach in April 1959. This scene involved Edward Brayshaw and Maree Tomasetti.

It was an early Australian TV appearance from Kurt Ledescher, who was an Austrian actor-producer who had recently been appointed part-time drama lecturer at Melbourne University.

Reception

Around this time the Fairfax papers started to review TV plays.

Frank Thring of TV Week called it "drivel".

The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald said that:

A neat little idea for suspense, with a wry ironic twist, faltered, through common place writing and unsubtle acting...better writing, direction and acting could have pointed up this dilemma more grippingly, as the story moved forward through its half-dozen episodes—what might happen, what has happened, what does happen; all of it while the young man and the sardonic old scoffer wrangle quarrelsomely in a dingy street.

Edward Brayshaw, as the young man, was the production's main weakness. The immaturity of the schoolboyish sarcasm in his anger was matched by the discomfort by which he approached the lyrically flowery love-talk allotted to him by the script: "From now on my life will write only your name," and other such nosegays of verbiage.

Marie Tomasetti performed competently as the mystery woman, without suggesting (hat there could be depth and aches and necessities even in such a gangland woman. Frank Gatliff, using a rather big Shakespearean style with a Claude Rains bias, was the sardonic scoffer, but too monotonously in the one mood to be always appreciated as much as he Was at first.

The dressing and the 'sets, so cramped in space that the characters could be allowed hardly any significant movement about the scene, were shoddy.

The Listener In called it "exceptional television material".

Ratings

In Sydney it rated a 13% share.