by Stephen Vagg
The fame of writer Alan Seymour primarily rests on one work, The One Day of the Year. And that’s not super surprising, because none of his other pieces had quite the same impact. Yet he still produced a rich body of non-One Day of the Year work, not the least of which was his first stage play, Swamp Creatures, which was filmed in 1960 by the ABC, mostly out of guilt, but still filmed.
Let us explain.
In the mid 1950s, Seymour was a radio writer and opera director with playwright aspirations when he came up with Swamp Creatures. It was the story of two unmarried sisters, Constance and Amy, who live in a house by a swamp; they are visited by Amy’s son Christian, who ran away from the house years ago, and it soon becomes apparent that the sisters are both what used to be known in less sensitive times as “a little ga-ga”. There’s a subplot about Constance and her housekeeper Fall doing weird experiments on animals.
Seymour’s play was based on a newspaper article he read that concerned two old sisters living in Bacchus Marsh, and was infused by 1950s (justifiable) fears of the atomic bomb.
Professional Australian theatre managements weren’t really interested in putting on local plays, so Seymour submitted Swamp Creatures to various competitions. The play was highly commended in a 1956 Journalists Club playwriting competition (in which Richard Beynon’s Shifting Heart came first, and Barbara Vernon’s The Multi Coloured Umbrella came second). In 1957, Swamp Creatures was one of the twenty-five finalists out of 200 entries in a play competition held by the London Observer (there were three other Australian plays among the finalists – The Shifting Heart, Anthony Coburn’s The Bastard Country, and Ray Mathews’ The Life of the Party).
The play was performed by the Canberra Repertory Society in 1957. Because it was a new Australian work, this production was attended by out-of-town Australian cultural gatekeepers, so they could criticise it: the Union theatre’s John Sumner, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust’s Hugh Hunt, and the Sydney Morning Herald’s drama critic Lindsey Browne. The Age kindly made a point of publishing a negative review, even though the production was in Canberra.
Alan Seymour’s papers at the National Library or Australia include a letter from the author to friend Sheila Geddes which discusses the Canberra run. He wrote “LB [Lindsey Browne] flew down to cover it and gave it a beautiful and condescending wipe off in the Herald after attending our first night party and rolling around the floor with the local bells until 4am and inviting everyone to call him ‘Lyn’.”
(In fairness to Browne – a very average critic – he later wrote a 1961 profile about Seymour for The Bulletin where the critic said he was wrong about the play and author… by which time Seymour had moved to England, so it was kind of a useless mea culpa, whereas a strong Herald review in 1957 would have really helped the play’s commercial prospects.)
Seymour knew Swamp Creatures wasn’t perfect but, as he told Geddes, “no matter what is right or wrong with it [the play], it does get an audience in on the most elementary of levels: suspense and emotion.” However, as he also wrote, “Sumner came for the opening night, liked the production, hates the play. Mr Hunt is even more fastidious about it. (“is it entertainment? Will people come to such a thing? It’s so unpleasant.)… I have a theory that the ultra-elevated gentlemen conscious of their position cannot see basic things and are frightened by incidentals they happen to dislike.”
Hunt decided against producing Swamp Creatures for the Trust even though, as Seymour said in another letter to Geddes, it had “one set, a small cast, fitted in with the rest, would certainly provide contrast, had good acting parts, food for controversy. But there came a point when Mr Hunt just said No. He would not, he could not, associate himself with that play. Finish.”
This killed any chance the play had in Australia of being professionally produced, as Seymour knew. For good measure, Hunt also rejected a stage adaptation of Nino Culotta’s book They’re a Weird Mob (the bestselling Australian novel of all time) that had been done by Seymour and Cedric Flower. Seymour launched a blistering private attack on Hunt:
“He’s so typical of the species at large in this country that it hurts… They are so gently, firmly, conscientiously and high mindedly strangling any signs of a culture here that shows signs of departing too much from what they know 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 [British revue] Salad Days and [British playwright Terence] Rattigan has any value to us. And that it is what they still attempt to foist… [Hunt] didn’t like The Doll and didn’t want to do it; he was terrified of The Shifting Heart which was one of the theatre’s few artistic and financial successes; and his only remedies for financial trouble has been to throw on rubbish and then blame Australian audiences for not supporting it… the fact that if one wants to get anywhere in this part of the world it has to be through that organisation [the Trust] means one can do nothing about this situation except bear it.”
We reproduce this in full to show the difficulties even our best playwrights faced in the culture of Menzies’ Australia (not that it was much better for them under Chifley and Curtin).
Anyway, Swamp Creatures received sporadic productions over the years but has never been published (odd, since a collection of Seymour’s writings would seem to be a natural). We read a copy of the play among Seymour’s papers at the NLA. It’s a decent, atmospheric work, with some flashy roles that offers a great scope for an imaginative director.
The play was adapted for radio by the ABC (several times) and the CBC in Canada. Friend of this column Barry Creyton played the son, Christian, in an ABC Brisbane production. The ABC filmed it in 1960, thus it slots into this series.
The background to the ABC’s television production was this… In 1959, the Commission created a writers’ workshop where it invited the best scribes in the country (including Seymour but also Jeff Underhill, Richard Lane, Barbara Vernon, D’arcy Niland and Ruth Park, Gwen Meredith, Kay Keaveny, Peter Kenna and Coral Lansbury) to come up with ideas for TV plays. This was actually a great initiative– so it didn’t last long at the ABC – but it did result in Seymour coming up with script called Lean Liberty. (We will get to Swamp Creatures eventually, we promise.) Lean Liberty was based on a newspaper article Seymour had read about an engineer who got in job trouble when it was revealed he was a former Communist. The script was enthusiastically received by the ABC’s drama editor, Rex Rienits, and its intended director, Ray Menmuir, but was rejected for production by the acting head of drama, Paul O’Loughlin with “only the flimsiest of excuses” according to Seymour (he later said he heard the play was considered too sympathetic to Communists). To rub it in, the ABC didn’t pay Seymour for his script which annoyed him – “What do I do?” he wrote to a friend. “Sue them and get their backs up for every other bit of work I offer them from now on? Or suffer? Or what?”. In an attempt to placate the writer, the ABC offered to film Swamp Creatures. Thus, the production mostly came about due to guilt.
We haven’t seen the ABC’s 1960 TV production of Swamp Creatures – to our knowledge no audio visual copy exists, but the script does. It’s faithful, a lot tighter than the original – an interesting read, full of atmosphere. You can imagine a really good director having a lot of fun with it – and from reviews, it seems Ray Menmuir did just that.
Apparently, during the live broadcast of the play, someone on the crew choked on the dry ice/smoke being used to simulate fog, made all these coughing sounds and collapsed. Most people on the production couldn’t see and thought the coughing crew member was a sound effect; luckily someone realised what was going on, the crew member was rescued and carted off to hospital, and the show kept filming. Due to the professionalism of the cast and crew, only one shot was missed.
(These things happened in live television drama from time to time – on The Astronauts the sound people accidentally broadcast some technicians gossiping about Princess Margaret in the next studio; while in Britain, the actor Gareth Johnes died of a heart attack while starring in the television play Underground).
Reviews for Swamp Creatures were very strong, far more so than usual for Australian drama. A.N. Finlay, the ABC’s Assistant General Manager, sent a congratulatory memo to the Drama Department about Swamp Creatures effusing, “I have been impressed by the number of people who have commented favourably” on the broadcast, adding “it is very pleasing to see that this Australian play has been so well received.”
It was the last Alan Seymour stage play that the ABC would film, although he wrote plenty of others – The One Day of the Year, Donny Johnson, A Break in the Music; the ABC also didn’t film any of his original radio plays (Winter Passion) or television plays he wrote in Britain (Auto Stop, And It Wasn’t Just the Feathers, 31 Backyards), although it did broadcast some of the British versions. Commercial television did broadcast The One Day of the Year and a Seymour original, The Runner. Seymour went to Britain for the London premiere of The One Day of the Year; while there, executives asked him if he had any TV scripts, he gave them Lean Liberty, it was filmed for British television, launching Seymour on a three decade career in London (with some time out in Turkey). So basically, the ABC helped Seymour grow as an artist and learn his craft, then when he was hitting his creative peak, it stopped filming his work.
Incidentally, producer Tony Buckley attempted to get up a film version of Swamp Creatures, originally with director Ian Coughlan attached. It never happened. C’est la vie.
Swamp Creatures. A television – and stage play – that should be better known.
