Volpone (17 April 1968)

 Adaptation of the play by Ben Johnson.

Premise 

Volpone pretends to be on his deathbed after a long illness  in order to dupe Voltore , Corbaccio and Corvino , three men who aspire to inherit his fortune. In their turns, each man arrives to Volpone's house bearing a luxurious gift, intent upon having his name inscribed to the will of Volpone, as his heir. 

Mosca, Volpone's parasite servant, encourages each man, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, to believe that he has been named heir to Volpone's fortune; in the course of which, Mosca persuades Corbaccio to disinherit his own son in favour of Volpone

Cast

• Peter O'Shaughnesy as Volpone
• Max Meldrum as Mosca
• Edward Ogden as Voltore
• Peter Collingwood as Corvino, the merchant
  
• Tom Farley as Corbaccio
• Alan Edwards and Frank Lloyd as advocates
  
• Pat Bishop as Celia, Corvino's wife
  
• Peter McPhie as Bonario, Corbaccio's handsome son
  
• Laurier Lange as notary
• Ray Hartley as Nano 
• Norman Hodges and Gerard Maguire as officers
  

Original play

The play first debuted in 1606.

Here is the complete text.

 Other adaptations

 It was adapted for ABC radio in 1947 and 1954.

It was filmed for Canadian TV in 1969.

Production

It was filmed in Sydney. John Croyston directed. It was the first of three ABC plays broadcast in a row.

Croyston talked about it with Graham Shirley in a 2004 oral history. He says there was an English designer Ron Harrison who designed the whole production in perspective.

Production assistant - David Hurst. Script assistant - Brenda Levy. Camera - Carl Schultz, Jeff Brown, John Eastway, Peter Knevitt. Lighting - John Wharton. Audio - John Bourn. Vision mixer - Bruce Wilson. Wadrobe supervision - Rosalind Wood. Make up supervision - Daphne Harris. Technical production - Dick Cohen. Design - Richard Harrison. Producer and director - John Croyston.

 

Canberra Times 15 aug 1968 p 13

SMH 15 April 1968 TV Guide

SMH 18 April 1968 p 32

The Age TV Guide 11 April 1968

SMH 17 April 1968 p 20

TV Times Vic 17 April 1968

Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Othello and Volpone
January 20, 2022
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays gets a bit STC/MTC-season-subscriber, looking at two different adaptations of Elizabethan classics: Othello (1964) and Volpone (1968).
Warning: this article contains racist imagery.

The ABC’s traditional attitude towards “good theatre” on television was summed up by its then-head of drama Neil Hutchison in 1963 at his appearance in front of the Senate Select Committee on the Encouragement of Australian Productions for Television. During his testimony, Hutchison took time out from criticising the quality of Australian acting, directing, and writing, with a sideswipe at Whiplash! thrown in for good measure, to talk about the importance of classics on television. He said “it must be borne in mind that the great works of classical literature should never be excluded from our programmes. There should always be [a] certain amount of Shakespeare, for instance, and the great recognised playwrights of antiquity, in the English language particularly, as our own schools study Shakespeare. It is essential that Shakespeare should be seen on television because in remote areas the likelihood of securing full scale stage productions is remote.”

Hutchison didn’t explain why the ABC had to produce local television versions of the classics when it could simply show BBC ones, but anyway, that was the attitude of the time, and today I’d like to discuss two famous plays filmed by the ABC: Othello and Volpone.

Othello

Othello was the ABC’s annual Shakespeare television production for 1964 (although it did not air in Sydney until the following year). Unlike some of their earlier productions like, say, Antony and Cleopatra and Richard II there was no doubting Othello’s place in the Shakespeare canon – it’s always listed among the Bard’s masterworks and Othello and Iago are two of the greatest parts in theatre.

I’m guessing you all know the plot, right? For those who need a quick summary, the elevator pitch is this: Othello is a black army general married to white Desdemona, who has his mind poisoned with jealousy by Othello’s frenemy Iago. There’s more to it than that – the full text is here – but that’s the gist. It involves a LOT of toxic masculinity.

The play is a capital “C” Classic – I think there’s a law in western theatre that it has to be produced somewhere in the world at every given moment – and accordingly had been performed on stage countless times in Australia, including a turn by John Alden at the Elizabethan Theatre Trust. The BBC had done TV adaptations in 1937 (with Ralph Richardson in the title role), 1950 and 1955.

The ABC version was shot in Melbourne and went for over two hours. The title role was played by Raymond Westwell, a super experienced theatre actor who portrayed the part in blackface, which was, unfortunately, still accepted at the time as a way to do it: Laurence Olivier had just used this method at the National Theatre in London. It didn’t have to be that way: in the 1955 BBC television production, for instance, an actual black actor, Gordon Heath, had played Othello. And there were professional black actors in Australia – Joe Jenkins had starred in The Emperor Jones for the ABC in 1960, Robert Tudawali had done Burst of Summer. But the ABC decided to go with Westwell and boot polish (blackface in Australian drama didn’t die off until the uproar over James Laurenson’s casting in Boney in 1971… it lingered on in Australian comedy for another forty years.)

Westwell (who did the adaptation along with David Bradley) had played generals in the Australian TV plays The Angry General and Romanoff and Juliet as well as on stage in a production of Terence Rattigan’s Ross. “But Othello the Moor is perhaps the stage’s greatest general and a part I have been conceited enough to want to have a go at for years,” Westwell told the TV Times. The actor had appeared in various productions of the play overseas – and toured with it in Australia in 1953 with Tony Quayle and Leo McKern – but this was the first time he had played the title character.  Westwell and Barton decided to play Othello as an Arab rather than as a black man, but there is still an awful lot of make up on the actor’s face.

Joan MacArthur, Westwell’s wife, appeared in the play as Emilia – which she had played opposite Anthony Quayle on stage. Other key roles are played by Keith Eden (Iago), Frances McDonald (Desdemona), Judith Arthy (Bianca), John Gregg (Cassio) and Terry Norris (Rodrigo). Keith Eden is particularly excellent.

The production is very well directed by Patrick Barton – I think it’s one of his best efforts behind the camera and the lighting is superb. Reviews were deservedly strong. It’s one of the ABC’s best Shakespeare productions, though the blackface is unsettling. One just wishes that if the ABC wanted to do an Australian Othello that they did a, well, Australian Othello – cast a POC actor and/or adapt it to Australia.

Volpone

1968 was a memorable year for many reasons: riots in Paris, Bill Lawry’s team retained the Ashes, assassinations across the world, the Tet offensive, etc. It was also the last big push by the ABC to do locally filmed version of foreign dramas. Over three weeks, it produced versions of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Chekov’s The Proposal/The Bear. I have written pieces about the latter two – I recently just saw Volpone to round off the trilogy.

I actually don’t have much to say about this production. I mean, it’s Volpone, a non-Shakespeare Elizabethan play (well, technically it premiered during the reign of King James I) that still gets performed quite a lot: if you subscribe to a theatre company you will run into a revival or adaptation at some stage, and the actors who play the leads will get good reviews because they invariably do. You can read a copy here.

In the ABC version, directed by John Croyston, Peter O’Shaugnessy plays Volpone and Pat Bishop has the female lead. It looks like a filmed stage play. This could have been adapted to Australia, the way Larry Gelbart set it in San Francisco for his musical version Sly Fox but it wasn’t. The actors are solid, the handling is fine, the make-up looks theatrical… It’s fine but there wasn’t any point in the ABC doing it – they could have shown one of the BBC TV versions from 1948, 1959 or 1965. We did have our own classics they could have been filming.