Forgotten Australian TV Plays: Treason

by Stephen Vagg

When people talk of the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, I’m guessing most non-history buffs think of the 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, the actor’s first collaboration with Chris McQuarrie. However, the story has been filmed a bunch of times, notably in the 1950s when the concept of “the Good German” came into vogue for war stories. The Germans themselves made movies like Canaris (1954), Jackboot Mutiny (1955), and The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (1955); Hollywood produced The Desert Fox (1953); and British TV did Treason, based on a play by Saunders Lewis.

Lewis was a Welsh nationalist, author, critic and playwright. He originally wrote Treason in Welsh as a stage play under the title Brad; it was a commissioned work for the 1958 National Eistedfodd at Ebbw Vale. The play was translated into English by Elwyn Jones for performing on BBC radio and television (Richard Burton was in the radio version). You can read an English version of the play via internet archive. I don’t know why Lewis picked such a German story for a Welsh festival, but I guess it was a time of cultural fluidity.

In that spirt, the ABC filmed Treason live in Melbourne on 16 December 1959. They had already broadcast a 1958 radio play (or “feature” rather) about Count von Stauffenberg (aka the guy Tom Cruise played) but that character isn’t seen in Treason. Rather, that version focuses on German officers in France who have organised the plot and are waiting for news about how it’s gone. At first, they hear Hitler has been killed and start high fiving – then it becomes apparent the former painter has survived and they all need to figure out what to do next. Spoilers: it does not end well.

The story is ideal for television dramatisation – there’s a lot of people standing around in rooms talking tensely, a ticking clock, great stakes, we know what happened (or, rather, didn’t) but not how. Lewis was roughly faithful to historical truth but added some fictitious characters, moved some events around and inserted a love story.

The cast includes Brian James (as Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, a leader of the plot), Edward Brayshaw (as Field-Marshal Günther von Kluge) and June Brunnel (the one female in the cast, a fictitious character, Hofacker’s secretary who is in love with him) plus other familiar faces like Wyn Roberts and Edward Brayshaw in blonde hair. The show is stolen by Frank Thring, who plays the Gestapo officer who tracks down the assassins (a composite character of real-life Gestapo officers) and engages in a bit of old school melodrama, telling Brunnell he’ll let Brian James escape if she sleeps with Thring. Cad! That plot is all made up, and feels like it.

This was Thring’s first dramatic performance for Australian television, but he was probably one of the most famous actors in the country at the time, thanks to his appearances in films like The Vikings and Ben Hur – though he only gets fourth billing in Treason. Despite Thring’s international success – which also included turns in El Cid and King of Kings – he would settle in Melbourne at the peak of his career, more of a home-town boy than one would assume, and became a local institution.

Thring is best remembered for his work in theatre, film and mini series, but he also appeared in a number of television plays, which were oddly not even mentioned in Peter Fitzpatrick’s otherwise excellent biography of Thing and his father. They included Light Me a Lucifer (1962) from a script by John (They’re a Weird Mob) O’Grady, with Thring as the devil visiting Sydney; Photo Finish (1965) from a play by Peter Ustinov; The Heat’s On (1967); and Salome (1968). Interestingly, the ABC filmed a number of plays staged at Thring’s Arrow Theatre in Melbourne in the 1950s, including Salome, Venus Observed, The Square Ring, A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Importance of Being Earnest, Othello, Volpone, and Rope (they also shot a number of plays that Thring had performed on stage elsewhere such as Black Chiffon and Moby Dick Rehearsed)… I think Thring was in tune with ABC taste.

Thring is everything you want in a Nazi villain in Treason – intense, shrewd, lecherous, smart. He doesn’t overplay, he adjusts for the camera, he has charisma. It’s very good work. Brian James is also excellent.

The ABC had a fondness for making TV plays about historical events: they dramatised murder trials (Killer in Close Up), the French Revolution (The Public Prosecutor), Henry VIII (Rose without a Thorn), Joan of Arc (The Lark), the expulsion of the Jesuits from South America (The Strong Are Lonely), and the 1956 Soviet Invasion of Hungary (Shadow of Heroes). Every now and then, they even did some Aussie history (Stormy Petrel). I would have preferred the ABC had spent the money on a local story, but Treason is an entertaining watch with a memorable performance from one of our acting legends.

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