The Tower (1965 film)


The Tower is a 1964 TV play broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It aired as a stand alone in Melbourne and as part of Wednesday Theatre in Sydney. It was based on a play by Hal Porter and directed by Christopher Muir in the ABC's studios in Melbourne.
Australian TV drama was relatively rare at the time.

Premise

In 1850s Hobart Sir Rodney Haviland builds a tower. He lives with his sister Hester and ex convict, Knight. Amy Armstrong is Sir Rodney's step daughter and resents his new wife Selina. Amy is having an affair with the convict Marcus Knight. Sir Rodney is trying to arrange a marriage for Amy that will advance his prospects in London. Amy has learned that his 14 year old adopted son Edwin is really the son of Knight. Sir Rodney winds up throwing Amy off the top of the tower.

Cast

The play was published in a collection of Australian plays in 1963 before it had even been performed. It had won the Sydney Journalists Club Prize in 1962. It was first produced in London in February 1964.

Production

The play started rehearsing in Melbourne in October 1964.

Reception

The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the play was:
Notable as a rare instance of an Australian playwright's attempting to represent the tension between good manners and bad intentions. Porter has taken advantage of the colonial time lag in 19th century Tasmania to allow his characters to clothe their generally poisonous motives in an 18th century decorum, and to make use of an unusually hemstitched and hand-sewn type of language. The easy and tempting criticism to make of this play is that it is stagey and derivative and that it is as fniitily stocked with curtain lines as anything George Miller might present at the Neutral Bay Music Hall... Much depended in this televised version on its tactfulness in making the most of the play's richly theatrical srrokes without emphasising their potential absurdities. In this Porter was well served.

The Canberra Times said the play's "weakness is in its over slylisalion, overstatement and melodrama. It is a splendidly theatrical play of its type, and it ought to have made rather better television than it did in Christopher Muir's production."