Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Lady in Danger

by Stephen Vagg

The work that kicked off my interest in forgotten Australian television plays was a stage play, Max Afford’s Lady in Danger. I’d always been interested in this because it was a (very) rare Australian-written show to have a run on Broadway, back in 1945. I was doing casual research and came across an item in Leslie Rees’ book The Making of Australian Drama, which mentioned that the play was filmed for Australian television in 1959. I had no idea that we produced any TV drama back then, so did some further research, and that kicked off this whole series.

Afford (1906-1954) was a South Australian journalist who emerged in the 1930s as one of Australia’s leading writers of radio scripts and detective novels. He was predominantly a radio man but like all jobbing writers Afford dabbled in a variety of mediums, such as film scripts – he worked on the screenplay for Ken G Hall’s Smithy (1946) – and stage plays.

Lady in Danger is no serious drama like, say, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll or The Shifting Heart. It’s an unpretentious comedy-mystery-thriller set in London about married couple Bill and Monica Sefton; Bill is a journalist who has recently been fired from his job while Monica is an aspiring mystery writer with what seems to be an overactive imagination, until they stumble upon a genuine spy plot.

There are decent gags, neat twists, and some fresh comedy with a cat; Afford writes with a lot of affection for the leads – he had a happy marriage (to costume designer Thelma), you sense this from reading Lady in Danger. The play is a fun variation on the sort of movies Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard used to star in – light shenanigans involving a likeable lead couple swapping quips, encountering shady characters and red herrings before they face life-and-death peril in the third act. (Aside: Why do they not keep making such films these days? Audiences like them – look at the success of that recent Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston Netflix film Murder Mystery (2019)).

The play had its world premiere at the semi-amateur Independent Theatre in Sydney in 1942, with Gwen Plumb starring as Monica. Response was so positive that Lady in Danger was not only adapted for ABC radio that year, it was also picked up by JC Williamsons for a professional run – a very rare honour for an Australian-written play at the time. Even rarer was the fact that the play wound up on Broadway in 1945. This was a very big deal. There had been Broadway plays written by Australians before – most recently, Alec Coppel’s I Killed the Count had a short run in 1942. But those plays tended to come via London; Lady in Danger went to Broadway from Sydney.

The play did, admittedly, arrive in New York in a very different shape. Its American producers felt that German baddies had been “done”, so it was decided to relocate the action to Melbourne, make Bill an American war correspondent stationed in Australia and turn the villains into agents working for the Japanese. Since international travel was tough for civilians during the war, American actor-manager-writer Alexander Kirkland did the rewrite job.

Just to recap all that – one of the first plays written by an Australian to be produced on Broadway was originally set in England but was rewritten by an American to be set in Australia. Reviews of the Broadway production were poor, and the play only ran twelve performances before being cancelled.

Regardless of this reception, it’s a shame that Lady in Danger was never turned into a film, either in Hollywood or Britain – it would have made perfect ‘40s screwball fodder, and you can easily imagine someone like George Sherman directing, and a madcap specialist like Betty Hutton, Lucille Ball or Googie Withers as Monica. According to Max Afford’s papers at the Fryer Library in Brisbane, in 1951 Kirkland suggested reworking the play for The Philco Television Playhouse on American television but no version appears to have been made. As mentioned, I assumed Lady in Danger was never filmed at all until I read The Making of Australian Drama which referred to an ABC TV version.

Most early Australian television plays were adaptations of overseas scripts, with the odd exception such as The Multi Coloured Umbrella. In late 1959 however, the ABC made a concerted effort to increase its genuinely local content… which coincided with the arrival of Rex Rienits as drama editor. And so, the national broadcaster put on locally written stories such as Bodgie, Ned Kelly, Outpost, and Lady in Danger.

It was broadcast from ABC’s Gore Hill studios in Sydney on 9 September 1959. The cast included James Condon (Bill Sefton), Madi Hedd (Monica Sefton), Queenie Ashton, Richard Parry, Alastair Duncan, and John Bluthal. Oh, and a specially trained cat. The director was Colin Dean, who had extensive documentary and radio experience, but this was his first attempt at television drama. “It was a ‘try-out’ to see if I can do it,” said Dean later. “It wasn’t a substantial play.”

Dean later became famous for his historical mini series starting with Stormy Petrel. It’s interesting that he did not regard Lady in Danger as “substantial” – it was a light comedy thriller after all (there’s not much other comedy on his CV), and possibly Dean was unaware of the play’s landmark status.

No copy of the production exists, at least not to my knowledge, but I have read the TV script. The adaptation was done by Philip Albright, an American actor-writer who came out to Australia in 1949 to appear in a stage play and wound up staying. Albright did a bit of TV adapting for the ABC in the 1950s, including versions of Sorry Wrong Number (1958), The Skin of Our Teeth (1959) and Dinner with the Family (1959); he died in July 1959, before Lady in Danger was broadcast (some random trivia: Albright’s stage play The Break was posthumously presented by the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1962.) It’s a decent adaptation, by the way, which captures the life and flavour of the original play even if the running time had to be condensed to under an hour. The story was updated from World War Two to the Cold War, so Bill and Monica deal with commie spies rather than German or Japanese ones, which actually works fine. (This was also done in the ABC’s 1955 radio adaptation and in the version of the stage play that you can read online.)

The Age said the show “provided an interesting hour’s entertainment… outstanding feature was the fine sustained acting from Madi Hedd… James Condon… was not quite as convincing.” The Sydney Morning Herald called it a “nearly tailored thriller” which set “out to do nothing more ambitious than pass an entertaining hour” and “did just that and nothing more in a very competent live television production… [the cast] all played as though they had been doing this kind of thing for most of their working lives. Colin Dean’s production aptly matched their efficiency and craftsmanship.”

I would have loved to have seen this production, but at least one can read the script via the National Archives of Australia. Remarkably, this was the only play of Afford’s ever filmed by ABC television. I don’t know why. The national broadcaster had hundreds of his radio scripts to choose from, not to mention a number of his other stage plays that would have made great television: the comedy Mischief in the Air, the historical drama Awake My Love (about Colonel Light), the thriller Dark Enchantment.

Afford was a really good writer, and what’s more, one very known to the ABC. I can only assume their lack of enthusiasm to film his work was a combination of the fact that it tended to be populist, and the author was not around to press his case – he died in 1954, aged only 48 years of age.

For me, early Australian television drama had three big “if onlys”… if only (a) we’d had a quota for local drama (b) Leslie Rees had permanently moved from radio to television and (c) Max Afford had lived at least another ten years. Unlike Rees, Afford really wanted to get into television – he regularly wrote about it, and went to Britain in 1950 to study the new medium in preparation for its arrival in Australia. Someone with Afford’s prestige surely would have ensured far more locally written stuff got on air in Australia ten years earlier than it did.

Based on the career trajectories of fellow radio writers Sumner Locke Elliott, Morris West, Rex Rienits, and Peter Yeldham, I’m guessing Afford’s career also would have involved long stints overseas and penning best-selling novels.

Incidentally, Afford’s wife Thelma – who outlived him by more than forty years – worked as costume designer on some of the earliest Australian TV dramas, including The Twelve Pound Look (1956) and The Importance of Being Ernest (1957). She set up an award in her late husband’s name for young playwrights which is still going and donated their papers to the Fryer Library at UQ.

It’s a shame that the ABC did not film more Max Afford, but at least they did one, and what’s more, perhaps his most culturally significant work: Lady in Danger, which made it all the way from Sydney to Broadway. Give it a read, it’s fun.

The author would like to thank Graham Shirley and the staff of the Fryer Library for their assistance with researching this article. All opinions are my own.