Australian TV Plays: Wind from the Icy Country (19 August 1964)

A Kafka-esque tale set in China! Written by an Australian, Robert Amos... actually an Austrian who emigrated. But based on an Aussie radio play.

Premise

A German engineer, Ehrbar, who worked in China during the war encounters a Jewish doctor in an isolated Chinese mountain village in Paoshan, in the northwest.

Ehrbar breaks down in a car with his companion, Ella, who is fleeing an unhappy marriage. He is towed by a friendly army officer into Paoshan.

At the outbreak of war, Ehrbar was seconded to the Japanese and at the time of German surrender was working on a nitric acid factory in Manchuria. Now with a false Norwegian passport is is terrified of falling into the hands of an American Military Mission in China and having to stand trial as a war criminal.

At Paochan, the chief army officer is Dr Rachmann, a Jew who was at college with Ehrbar in Germany. Rachmann believes "bystanders" like Ehrbar are culpable for war crimes and refuses to sign. When Rachman gets drunk however, Ehrbar manages to persuade the doctor to sign.

When Ehrbar is leaving, he commits suicide.

Cast

Brian James as Rachmann
Norman Kaye as Ehrbar
Patsy King as Ella
Kurt Ludescher as Captain Kang
Neil Curnow as lt Mah
Dawn Klinberg
Roly Barlee
Ray Angel
Joseph Szabo
Douglas Kelly
Clen Farmer
Blaise Anthony

Original radio play

It was originally a 1963 radio play. (Its world debut in Aug 1963). This was repeated in 1966.

Robert Amos was a chemist turned writer whose play When the Gravediggers Come won an award in 1961 (equal first with Hal Porter's The Tower). It was the Journalists Club award - 500 pounds award! (this play was produced in 1963). Review of it is here. Another review is here.

Amos was born in Austria. He was Jewish and left in 1938 when the Germans came in and moved to Shanghai where he studied at University in the French concession (a biography of him is here). He was interned there by the Japanese in WW2. He came to Australia in 1949 and went to work for CSIRO as a research chemist. He later became a member of its editorial staff. He says he was inspired to write in the 1950s after watching television. "I watched some particularly trite shows and said to myself surely it must be possible to write better dialogue than that," he said.

His radio plays include A Country for Proud People (Feb 1963) A Game of Numbers and Survival in the Service. He opened an art exhibit in May 1963 - see here.

Wind from the Icy Country was the second of play Amos wrote set in China the first was Gravediggers.

Amos was reluctant to write TV he said "If there are good scriptwriters about, they are just not being tempted to write for TV." He said he would get 100 pounds for a radio script but only 200 for a TV script which is more work. "ABC'TV's production costs must be kept on a low budget. They might spend 6000 poinds on my play and it would end up in competiton with polished productions from overseas upon which ten times the amount had been spent. On radio I rather suspect that the present standard of drama production in Australia is the best in the world.l So neither in a literary nor financial sense is the extra work necessary to adapt a play for TV worth it." But Amos had a full time job as a chemist.

Amos believes that a play should be "a battering ram against the gate of indifference" and called his play a drama of torn consciences that questions the moral responsibilities of bystanders.

Production

Robert Amos adapted his radio play. Brian James plahyed Ehrbar on radio but Rachmann in this one.

Amos described the story as a drama on conscience in the style of Kafka.

It was shot in Melbourne. Patrick Barton directed.

Reception

The TV critic for The Sydney Morning Herald thought that it proved that "when a play is completely focused on the working out of intense human conflicts at close range, television proves to be an excellent medium... Brian James made the doctor into a tragic and moving figure consumed by the torture of past experience."

The Canberra Times thought "the merit of the play lies more in its conception than execution".