by Stephen Vagg
During the early years of television drama in Australia, there was a constant assumption that the Americans and Poms knew how to do it better than we did. I mean, there was some logic to this – those countries had television first and thus had people who knew how make it. It didn’t necessarily follow that they could do it well, which is a thought I had while watching the 1959 Australian television play Ruth, written by and starring the not-particularly-experienced American John Glennon.
Glennon is one of a number of people who came down under in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s to help “instruct” Australians how to make television drama – names like Royston Morley, George F. Kerr, and Peter Cotes. This was very much in the long tradition of Australian cultural institutions being impressed by a foreign accent, particularly one from England or America (in fact, only from those countries… I think if you were German, Canadian or Italian you would’ve struggled, and if you were POC they probably wouldn’t have allowed you through customs).
Anyway, Glennon was an American actor and writer. He’d appeared in a few plays on Broadway, normally classy stuff like St Joan, and had started to write as a side hustle. Glennon struggled to sell anything in his home country but sold some television plays to Canadian and British television in the late 1950s, and based himself in London. He was young, only in his late twenties and didn’t have much of a track record, but something he did/said impressed someone and he came out to Australia in August 1959 to write and appear in two television plays. Both were for Shell Presents, the anthology series made by GTV-9 in Melbourne and ATN-7 in Sydney. Glennon’s plays, both filmed in Melbourne and directed by Rod Kinnear, consisted of an original (Ruth), and an adaptation (Rope). The one that I’m talking about today is Ruth because I recently saw it – or, rather, 50 minutes of it, the ending was missing – via the National Film and Sound Archive.
Ruth is a drama about Cal, a shy man (played by Glennon, too old for a part that really needed to be played by a teenager), who lives at home with his widowed mother, and dreams of being a (trigger warning) guitar player. Cal forms a friendship with his eccentric neighbour, Ruth (Lyndall Barbour), a bohemian type (I think) who has a husband (Edward Howell) and teenage daughter, and dreams of playing Cleopatra for her local drama club. Ruth encourages Cal to follow his guitar dreams, Cal does something with Ruth’s hair, and everyone thinks they’re shagging, which causes Cal’s mother to get upset. Ruth white fangs Cal, who comes back years later to discover what happened to his old mentor.
Glennon’s script contains a lot of tropes used in 1950s American drama – the eccentric older female, who lives life on her own terms and inspires a lonely boy protagonist to break free of an overprotective mother and follow his dreams. Auntie Mame is the best-known example, only that’s a comic take, while Ruth is more serious. The title role is a big fat star part for an older female, who wants to act all over the place – and Lyndall Barbour (one of Australia’s leading radio actors at the time) steps up to the plate.
It’s not bad. It’s very familiar and scripts about sensitive boys who secretly dream of playing the guitar automatically deserve some sort of fine, but it has integrity, the two leads combine well together, and after a while I got into the play’s rhythms. Reviews were mixed. One critic called it “Beatnik Bellowdrama” which was mean, but at least clever. Everyone liked the acting. Advertising claimed Ruth had been “produced with great success in both America and England”, which was a flat out lie – the script would subsequently be produced in those countries, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, this Australian production was its world debut.
Glennon announced that he was working on a script about Australia but his second play was an adaptation: Rope, based on Patrick Hamilton’s Leopold and Loeb-inspired stage play, which had already been filmed by the ABC in 1957. Reviews for Rope were generally better than for Ruth. Glennon said there were other scripts of his that he wanted to film in Australia including The Bird, The Bear and the Actress (which had been done on British television), The Duchess Treatment, and a story about Australians in London. None happened and Glennon returned to London in late 1959 where he resumed his screenwriting career.
Glennon’s script for Ruth had “legs”, in part, I think, because anyone who played the title role would get critical raves. It was filmed for television in the US in 1960 as The Dirtiest Word in the English Language (starring Uta Hagen), and in the UK in 1962 as Ruth (with Constance Cummings). Those actors got raves.
Glennon moved back to the US in 1963 and focused more on acting, stage managing and directing. A stage version of The Bird the Bear and the Actress was put on with Franchot Tone in 1966. I have no idea what happened to Glennon after 1968. I hope that he’s well and happy. It’s quite remarkable that with such a limited CV, he managed to sweettalk Australian executives into producing two of his plays, but such is the power of the American accent to insecure Aussies. In the long run, Glennon didn’t do that much for the cause of Australian television drama but then neither did Peter Cotes, who HSV-7 brought out for six months in 1961, and Cotes had a superior resume (Cotes made four television plays, all based on overseas scripts and starring his British wife and/or British expatriate actors, then went home – but that’s another story for another article).
Lyndall Barbour did a fair bit of television and was always worth watching – she’s superb in The Grey Nurse Said Nothing – but mostly remained a radio actor. Apparently, she loved her beer and her cricket; she died in 1986.
Ruth is no classic, but it’s interesting and it gave Lyndall Barbour a terrific part, so Glennon is to be commended for that. And it’s worth watching the copy at the NFSA, if you can, because it includes ads from the Shell Motor Company, which talk a lot about how to shut up your annoying boomer children when on holiday.
