Australian TV Plays: Alan Seymour

Showing posts with label Alan Seymour. Show all posts

Frank Harvey 1965 letter about Oz play writing

Defends Hugh Hunt at the Trust - refers to developing writers like Barbara Vernon, etc

SMH 2 July 1965

SMH 16 July 1965

SMH 30 June 1965

Script Competitions

*May 1940 Melbourne New Theatre Competition - won by Leslie Rees for play about Peter Lalor

*May 1945 PAB 1st Competition - won by 'Son of the Morning' by Catherine Duncan

*Apr 1946 Playwrights Advisory Board 2nd Competition - equal first ‘Ha Ha Among the Trumpets,’ by George Landen Dann and ‘And the Moon Will Shine’ by Miss Lynn Foster

*Nov 1946 Wagga Play Competition (with PAB) - My Life is My Affair by Oriel Gray see here

*Dec1947 Playwrights Advisory Board 3rd Competition - won by 'The First Joanna' by Dorothy Blewett

* Dec 1951 Commonwealth Jubilee Play Competition - won by 'Tether a Dragon’ by Kylie Tennan

*Sept 1955 Playwrights Advisory Board 4th Comp - won by The Doll and The Torrents see here

*Jan 1957 - 1957 First Annual Award by Journalist Club for works of Australian creative art - won by The Shifting Heart

*Aug 1957 London Observor Play Competition - The Shifting Heart came third - and Swamp Creatures in top 25.

*Oct 1957 Ballarat competition won by Oriel Gray Drive a Hard Bargain see here

*Dec 1958 General Motors-Holden Theatre Award - first prize Slaughter of St Teresa's Day see here

*March 1959 - Shell Australian TV Drama Prize - won by The Day Called Black by Robin Corfield

*Oct 1959 Melbourne Little Theatre Guild Competition (in association with JC Williamson) - won by Burst of Summer by Oriel Gray

*April 1960 - Journalist Club TV Play Prize - won by The Sergeant of Burralee and J Warner's World Without End.

*April 1960 - General Motors Holden Theatre Award - Wal Cherry for a View from the Bridge (see here - I think just for direction)

*Feb 1961 - General Motors Holden theatre comp see here - no winner but four prizes, 'Donny Johnson' by Alan Seymour 'Zelda Trio' by Laurence Collinson, 'Hateful Face in the Mirror' by John Pinkney, 'Wish No More' by Marien Dreyer

*June 1961 - ATV Play Competition - won by No Decision

*March 1962 - Adelaide Comp won by Wall to Wall

*April 1962 - Journalist Club Prize - won by When the Gravediggers Come and The Tower - see here

*Jan 1963 - General Motors Holden Musical Theatre award given see here - first prize Lesley Patching and C Phillips, 'The Captain's Ladies',

*May 1964 - Journalist Club Prize - won by Bandicoot on Burnt Ridge by Marian Dreyer,

Associated Rediffusion Co Pro

See also entries on The Right Thing, Stella, Concord of Sweet Sounds.

Unproducer Alan Seymour play set in Japan.

NAA Associated Rediffusion


NAA Associated RediffusionNAA Associated Rediffusion

NAA Associated Rediffusion

Australian Plays on Canadian TV

*The Tichborne Claimant (1959)

*Shadow of a Pale Horse (1960) by Bruce Stewart

*Whiplash (1960) (Tv series)

*The One Day of the Year (1964)

* Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1965)

Alan Seymour (1927-2015)

A radio interview from 2000 is here (Radio National)

Seymour was born in Fremantle, Western Australia.

His father was killed in a wharf accident when Alan was nine, and his mother died a few months later. After that he was brought up by his sister May and her husband, Alfred Chester Cruthers. He was educated at Perth Modern School, leaving at 15 after failing to complete the Junior Certificate.

He found work as a radio announcer in a commercial radio station 6PM. During his two years there he wrote a number of short radio plays that were broadcast live.

In 1945 he moved to Sydney, New South Wales, where he worked as an advertising copy-writer with 2UE.He returned to Perth after the war where he worked as a free-lance writer for ABC Radio. Seymour became ABC Radio’s film critic. He joined a commercial radio station 6KY as an announcer and copy-writer and after six months was offered an announcing post at the ABC. In 1949 he met Ron Baddeley, a RAAF veteran, and they were to become life partners.

In November 1949, Seymour returned to Sydney where he became an educational and freelance drama writer for ABC Radio and later television.

Was doing The Father on stage in Perth... did Blood Wedding on stage in Sydney.

Quality Street - Macabre (1950), Melba (1951), Matinee in Athens (1951), Little Moron (1951), To Live in Peace - based on opera (1951), The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1952), Teenage Club (1953), The Telephone - opera - director (1954), The Bluff (1954), Beppo the Clown (1955), Treasure Island (1956)

From 1953 to 1957 he was theatrical director for the Sydney Opera Group. 1954 article on that here.

1957 - Swamp Creatures places well in Journalists Club competition and Observer Competition

1957-1961 - wrote a lot for the ABC esp for Ray Menmuir inc Swamp Creatures radio (1958), Strange Bargaining radio (1958)

Sept 1959 - part of ABC writers pool (Swamp Creatures may have come out of this)

1960 One Day of the Year Opens

Play Don Johnson places in GMH competiton

Seymour left Australia in 1961 and worked in London as a television writer, producer and commissioning editor with the BBC, and as a theatre critic for The London Magazine.

He later said in a 1973 interview that "“To a degree you could live a personal life satisfactorily here [in Australia] now. But writing? The public will accept you but not certain folk connected with theatres and television who still have a Victorian puritanical attitude. lt is frustrating. 1 have to write what 1 feel inside me. That’s the way I felt when I left to go to London.”

He moved there permanently in 1962.

Here is a Variety article about Seymour.

From 1966 to 1971 he lived in İzmir, Turkey, where Ron Baddeley had gained employment as an English teacher. There Seymour wrote a novelisation of The One Day of the Year, and another novel The Coming Self-Destruction of the United States of America, as well as stage plays and magazine articles.

He came to Sydney for a visit in 1973 see here.

From 1974 to 1981, he was a script editor and occasional producer with BBC Television, after which he returned to freelance writing.

1979 came back to Oz briefly to do a three month consultant at AFTRS see here. He said "I've been saying it for years and obviously I'll go on saying it until I die: there is a lack of imaginative patriotism in Australian businessmen, entrepreneus and commercial television operators. They want to make a quick buck; they always have since the beginning in the mid fifties. And they're still doing it. They will buy any cheapo cheapo stuff from the States rather than develop their own talent. They don't care what type of cultural colony they turn us in to. They're somehow killing a lot of the talent that's here and by doing that are quenching something of the Australian style of things, the Australian way of living. People are passively watching stuff that's made elsewhere and about somewhere else and it's not reflecting their own lives. Now that's got to have some sort of effect on your general population."

Seymour and Baddeley returned to Australia in 1995 and lived in Darlinghurst, Sydney.

Seymour on Hunt - Letter 13 Feb 1959 "He's so typical of the species at large in this country that it hurts. It infuriates me, apart from obviously egotisitc reasons because they are so gently, firmly, conscientiously and high mindedly strangling any signs of a vulture here that shows signs of deaparting too much from what they knwo and value. English culture may be all right in its own place but that place is not any more in this neck of the woods. I honestly can't believe that a theatre made up of Salad Days and Rattigan has any value to us.And that it what they still attempt to foist. Time and again any attempt at a piece of freshness has had to be accomplished at the expense of Hunt and his establishment. He didn't like the Doll and didn't wnat to do it; he was terrified of The Shifint g Heart which was one of the theatre's few artisti and financial successes; and his only rememedies for financial trouble s has been to throw on rubbish and then blame Austrlian audiences for not supporting it."

TV Play Credits

* Swamp Creatures (Nov 1957) - play ' "I don't think it would survive being revived"

* Tomorrow’s Child (Apr 1957) – TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

* Murder Story (May 1958) - TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

* Citizen of Westminster (Oct 1958) - TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

* Three Decades of Life (21 Oct 1958) - TV experiment a live production combing spoken word, dance and mime- directed by Peter Page

* The Lark (Nov 1958) – TV play

*Bodgie (Aug 1959) - TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

* One Bright Day (Oct 1959) – TV play

*Swamp Creatures (July 1960) - TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

* The Life and Death of King Richard II (Oct 1960) – TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

*The One Day of the Year (1960) - play

*Venus Observed (Nov 1960) - TV play

*The Two Headed Eagle (Dec 1960) - TV play

*Lean Liberty (June 1962) - ITV TV play - directed by Ray Menmuir

*The One Day of the Year (July 1962) - GTV-9 version

* The Runner (Oct 1962) – TV play for ATN-7 - had been filmed by early 1961 - "they stole a march on the ABC the first original television plays did not go out on the ABC but the commercial channels"

*The One Day of the Year (Dec 1962) - BBC version

*31 Backyards (May 1963) - in UK - directed by Ray Menmuir - shown on ABC Jan 1965

*The One Day of the Year (June 1964) - Canadian TV

*Auto Stop (1965) - couple hitchhike around

Radio National intervie

6.50 - 8.00 "We did Richard II... We needed two studios in Gore Hill to accomodate. There were two armies in that play. An actor called Ric Hutton who's left us played Richard and I have no idea whether it was good, bad or indifferent. You had no idea what a monument you were challening. Bit declasse of a new medium? I think it was a bit of each. I loved it. I always loved the movies and still do".

talks about doing adaptations of stage plays here including Richard II says "I have no idea what it was like... You had no idea what a monument you were tackling."