Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Point of Departure and Man of Destiny

by Stephen Vagg

The first decade of Australian television drama mostly consisted of locally-shot versions of foreign scripts. That changed around the middle of the 1960s with the success of Homicide and The Mavis Bramston Show, and by the end of the decade, almost all Australian drama was actually written by Australians. It didn’t happen overnight though, and this article looks at two later foreign adaptations: Point of Departure (1966) and Man of Destiny (1967).

Point of Departure (1966)

This was one of three TV plays put on by the ABC to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of Greek Theatre (I think they approximated the date). It’s based on a 1950 British stage play by Kitty Black, which in turn was a translation of a 1941 French play, Eurydice, by Jean Anouilh, which in turn was based on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, which in turn I admit I had to google… it’s the one about a man retrieving his dead wife from the underworld – it’s been ripped off a bunch of times (eg. What Dreams May Come).

Anouilh doesn’t seem to be much performed these days, at least not in English-speaking countries, but he had a huge vogue in the post-war period: for instance, the Peter Sellers movie Waltz of the Toreadors (1962) and the Peter O’Toole-Richard Burton starrer Becket (1964) were both based on Anouilh plays. ABC TV versions of his offerings included The Lark (1958), Dinner with the Family (1959), The Fighting Cock (1963), and Point of Departure (1966). That’s a lot of French theatre dramatised by the Australian taxpayer in those pre-submarine-dispute days.

Point of Departure revolves around a romance between two young kids who meet at a railway station, musician Orpheus (Ross Thompson), and strolling player Eurydice (Liza Goddard). They fall in love straight away, but are challenged by Orpheus’ inability to handle the fact that (gasp) Eurydice slept around a bit; her list of old shags include fellow actor Matthias (a young Reg Evans, if you can imagine such a thing) and the head of Eurydice’s acting troupe (James Condon).

The first half of this, focusing on the kids and their parents, is beautifully effective and sensitive. The action falters a little with the introduction of characters played by Tom Oliver (as a sort of emissary of the angel of death), and James Condon – no knock on the actors, it just felt different tonally; maybe this is the sort of play that works best on stage, with its slightly fantastical nature and hopping around in time and place.

It’s quite racy for its day – Orpheus and Eurydice go up to a hotel room and Liza Goddard (who was only 17 at the time) flips off a bra strap before they bonk (off screen). The story is problematic by today’s standards, with its slut-shaming and glamourisation of suicide, but director Henri Safran clearly engages with the material and he does a very good job of creating a gloomy melancholic doomed romance vibe over the two hour running time.

I particularly liked that Point of Departure was a rare Australian TV play to focus on young people. Both leads are excellent. Ross Thompson had just graduated from NIDA and scored a personal success in “The Pigeon”, the first episode of Australian Playhouse; cult Oz movie fans will recognise him as the creepy scientist in the 1980 film The Chain Reaction. The achingly pretty Liza Goddard is perhaps best-remembered in Australia for her roles in Skippy and Bergerac, although, like Thompson, she’s done heaps of things; when Point of Departure was made, Goddard had only just moved to Australia from England (her father David was a BBC man who’d been appointed head of ABC TV drama). The lead roles are real star parts for younger actors, incidentally: Dirk Bogarde and Mai Zetterling were in the original 1950 London stage production of Point of Departure, while Richard Burton and Dorothy Maguire starred in the 1951 Broadway version. I wish this TV version had been adapted to be set in Australia, but there you go.

The Man of Destiny (1967)

Australian television executives back in the day were almost as fond of George Bernard Shaw as they were of Jean Anouilh – there were locals productions of Village Wooing (1962, starring a visiting Michael Dennison and Dulcie Gray), Candida (1962, starring a visiting Joan Miller), O’Flaherty VC (1967), and not one but two versions of Man of Destiny (1963 and 1967). I’ve recently seen the latter, which was filmed as part of the Love and War anthology series (along with other plays I’ve written about, such as Intersection and Romeo and Juliet).

The Man of Destiny is a comedy set in a north Italian tavern in the year of 1796. It concerns a young Napoleon Bonaparte (Brian Hannan) bantering with a woman (Ann Charleston), who may or may not be a spy for the English. You can read the original play here.

The cast also includes Dennis Miller, as an officer colleague of Napoleon’s, and Stanley Walsh, who later produced Neighbours, as an innkeeper. Speaking of Neighbours, Ann Charleston does a scene in male drag, which is something I don’t think she ever got to do on Ramsay Street.

Shaw’s dialogue is always entertaining, and Patrick Barton directs well, but I admit that all the way through watching this, I was wondering why the hell the ABC were making it – especially as they’d already filmed it four years previously. I mean, seriously, only four years – and it wasn’t very well known Shaw either.

Was there any point in the ABC doing The Man of Destiny, or Point of Departure, when there were BBC productions the ABC could have just shown instead? I guess the actors, directors and crew liked working on something classy. Eventually, Australian television drama grew out of it, though the cultural cringe continues to burn brightly in our major theatre companies today. Still, at least both productions were well done.

For more articles like this, read:

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