Australian TV Plays: Village Wooing (18 July 1962)

George Bernard Shaw on ABC. The first Australian TV production of Shaw. It also featured two imported stars, Michael Denison and Dulcie Grey.

Plot

In the 1930s a young woman, "Z", an assistant in a village shop, determines to marry a man, "A". she meets on an ocean liner. She fails, but the two meet again when the writer is on a walking tour going through the woman's village on Wiltshire Downs. He fails to recognise her but she suggests he buy an annuity for an elderly shop owner and take over the business. He says if he did that she could stay on as an assistant but that she could make her own matrimonial arrangements.

He buys the business. She then tries to convince him she has wifely qualities.

Cast

Michael Denison as A
Dulcie Gray as Z

Original play

The play was first performed in 1934. A complete copy is here.

Other adaptations

It's not a Shaw classic but was popular, due in part to being a two hander.

It was performed on BBC radio in 1934, 1938, 1942, 1948.

It was filmed for BBC TV in 1946, 1950, 1952 and 1953.

A whole book has been written about George Shaw and the BBC. Bernard Shaw and the BBC by L.W. Conolly University of Toronto 2009

It was adapted for Australian radio in 1950.

It was filmed for Canadian TV in 1961.

Production

In June 1962 it was announced the ABC would broadcast an adaptation of the play with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.Denison was touring Australia at the time in a production of My Fair Lady; his wife Gray flew out to Australia at the end of June to meet him and to appear in the play (she was not in the production of My Fair Lady; her last visit to Australia had been in 1956 when she appeared in a touring production of Tea and Sympathy).

It was the first production at the ABC of a play by Shaw. It was produced in the ABC's Melbourne studios.

Trevor Ling designed the set.

Denison recalled:

Through contacts I had made at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I suggested that before I left Australia I should do a TV play for them. They were happy to cash in on the presence of ‘Boyd’ in Australia, and I was emboldened to suggest that the play should be Village Wooing and that Dulcie should play the other part. They jumped at the idea but couldn’t afford her fare from England. However, we worked out that the joint performance fees would finance her round trip - tourist. I rang her again, but this time really with something to say. Was she still free? She was. Would she like to do Village Wooing with me in Australia? She would. ‘Then come as soon as you can, my darling.’

Dulcie’s landing at Melbourne airport provided comedy as well as emotion. The press, there in force for my reunion with ‘my fair lady’, gathered round the first-class ladder; I, hugging to myself my shameful knowledge of Dulcie’s economy status, positioned myself strategically under the wing. To my astonishment she emerged from the first-class door. The explanation was that, exhausted by the long haul from London to Sydney (thirty-six hours in those days), she had been befriended on the final short hop to Melbourne by a charming young air hostess, who had installed her in the virtually empty first-class compartment...

After recording Wooing in Australia (where it broke the existing appreciation figures for a play in Victoria), we flew off for my first sight of Singapore,...

Reception

The TV critic of The Sydney Morning Herald thought Denison "gave his part fluency and charm, bringing more poetry to the closing moments than one might have hoped for from the astringent Shaw" but thought Gray "was less suited to her role; she is the kind of English actress who cannot she! her trim upper-class charm, and her rural accent was unconvincing" and said Sterling's production was "quietly appropriate".

The TV Times criticised Gray's accent but said he "enjoyed Mr William Sterlin's production very much".

Listener In liked it, saying they thought the stars were better than any local actors could have been. "I don't belong to the school which holds than anything the rest of the world can do Australia can do better. I know of no available local performers who could have treated Village Wooing with as much understanding and surety as Michael Denison and his wife. whatever large sum the costing man allowed for hiring them and adequately producing them in a live show was justifiable expense. One part of the duty of a national televsion organisation is to do exactly this thing - to accustom its local teams to dealing with classic playwrights like Shaw, and if necessary to but them expert overseas help so that mass audiences are given a fair opportunity of appreciating the classics"