The Tower (1965 film)

The Tower is a 1964 TV play broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It aired as a stand alone in Melbourne and as part of Wednesday Theatre in Sydney. It was based on a play by Hal Porter[5] and directed by Christopher Muir in the ABC's studios in Melbourne.[6]

"The Tower"
Wednesday Theatre episode
Episode no.Season 1
Episode 17
Directed byChristopher Muir
Teleplay byNoel Robinson
Based ona play by Hal Porter
Original air date2 December 1964 (Melbourne)[1]
28 April 1965 (Sydney)[2][3]
Running time75 mins[4]

Australian TV drama was relatively rare at the time.[7]

Premise

In 1850s Hobart Sir Rodney Haviland builds a tower. He lives with his sister Hester and ex convict, Knight. Amy Armstrong is Sir Rodney's step daughter and resents his new wife Selina. Amy is having an affair with the convict Marcus Knight. Sir Rodney is trying to arrange a marriage for Amy that will advance his prospects in London. Amy has learned that his 14 year old adopted son Edwin is really the son of Knight. Sir Rodney winds up throwing Amy off the top of the tower.[8]

Cast
  • Andrew Guild as Edwin
  • Judith Arthy as Selina
  • Keith Lee as Sir Rodney
  • Mary Ward
  • Rex Holdsworth
  • Jim Lynch
  • Anne Charleston as Ann

Original Play

The play was published in a collection of Australian plays in 1963 (others included Douglas Stewart's Ned Kelly and Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year) before it had even been performed. It had won the Sydney Journalists Club Prize in 1962. It was first produced in London in February 1964.[9][10]

Production

The play started rehearsing in Melbourne in October 1964.[11]

Reception

The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the play was:

Notable as a rare instance of an Australian playwright's attempting to represent the tension between good manners and bad intentions. Porter has taken advantage of the colonial time lag in 19th century Tasmania to allow his characters to clothe their generally poisonous motives in an 18th century decorum, and to make use of an unusually hemstitched and hand-sewn type of language. The easy and tempting criticism to make of this play is that it is stagey and derivative (with a "Rebecca"-like storm and an Ibsenesque tower of a most clumsily symbolic kind) and that it is as fniitily stocked with curtain lines as anything George Miller might present at the Neutral Bay Music Hall... Much depended in this televised version on its tactfulness in making the most of the play's richly theatrical srrokes without emphasising their potential absurdities. In this Porter was well served.[12]

The Canberra Times said the play's "weakness is in its over slylisalion, overstatement and melodrama. It is a splendidly theatrical play of its type, and it ought to have made rather better television than it did in Christopher Muir's production." [13]

See also
  • List of television plays broadcast on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1960s)

References
  1. "TV Guide". The Age. 26 November 1964. p. 26.
  2. "Music and Drama". Sydney Morning Herald. 28 April 1965. p. 12.
  3. "TV Guide". Sydney Morning Herald. 26 April 1965. p. 17.
  4. "WEDNESDAY". The Canberra Times. 39 (11, 139). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 26 April 1965. p. 17. Retrieved 20 March 2017 – via National Library of Australia.
  5. Hal Porter, the Watcher. Southerly. 24. June 1964.
  6. "Hal Porter's The Tower". The Canberra Times. 39 (11, 141). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 28 April 1965. p. 21. Retrieved 8 December 2016 – via National Library of Australia.
  7. Vagg, Stephen (18 February 2019). "60 Australian TV Plays of the 1950s & '60s". Filmink.
  8. Armstrong, Madeleine (6 April 1953). "THE RED PAGE THE NEW DRAMATISTS Or, Goodbye to All That identifier". The Bulletin. p. 40.
  9. "Three Australian Plans". Sydney Morning Herald. 23 March 1963. p. 12.
  10. Rolfe, Patricia (14 December 1963). "OUT AND ABOUT The Middle Age of Innocence "The past is so permanent"". The Bulletin. p. 35.
  11. "Jottings". The Age. 24 October 1964. p. 6.
  12. "Australian Play on Channel 2". Sydney Morning Herald. 29 April 1965. p. 15.
  13. "Actors towered over production". The Canberra Times. 39 (11, 143). Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 30 April 1965. p. 21. Retrieved 8 December 2016 – via National Library of Australia.

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