Betty Roland
| Betty Roland | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mary Isabel Maclean 22 July 1903 Kaniva, Victoria |
| Died | 12 February 1996 (aged 92) Sydney, New South Wales |
| Occupation | Writer, dramatist, radio plays |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genre | Drama, children's fiction |
Betty Roland (22 July 1903 – 12 February 1996) was an Australian writer of plays, screenplays, novels, children's books and comics.
Betty Roland was born Mary Isobel Maclean at Kaniva, Victoria, the daughter of Roland and Matilda Maclean. She left school at sixteen to work as a journalist for Table Talk and the Sun News-Pictorial, and married Ellis Harvey Davies in 1923.
Roland wrote plays from the mid-1920s. Her best known play, The Touch of Silk, was first performed in 1928 by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre company, and hailed as "The first Australian play written by a real dramatist". A moving study of the alienation felt by a young French woman who marries an Australian soldier who she meets during World War One and moves with him to a narrow-minded country town. The play was performed in amateur theatres regularly between 1928 and the 1940s and on radio. Roland revised it in 1955. It received its first professional production in 1976 at the Independent Theatre, Sydney produced by John Tasker and starring Fay Kelton).Currency Press published it in 1974, and again in 1986 with another of Roland's plays Granite Peak. Most recently, A Touch of Silk was broadcast on Australia's ABC Radio National on Sunday 2 January 2011 as part of the Playing the 20th Century series.
Other plays of the 1920s included Feet of Clay, a modern take on the Pygmalion myth, and the Gates of Bronze: a fantasy in four scenes.
Roland's early writing for theatre is mostly romantic drama or comedy. Her later work was agit prop and highly political.
She also wrote the screenplay for what is claimed as the first Australian "talkie", Spur of the Moment, in 1932, credited as Betty M. Davies.
Roland met the wealthy Marxist intellectual Guido Baracchi, one of the founders of the Australian Communist Party, in the late 1920s. Having left her husband, she booked a passage to the UK in 1933 and discovered Baracchi, also recently separated, was a passenger on the same voyage. They began a relationship, and travelled together to the USSR, where Baracchi was to deliver documents to the Kremlin. While there, Roland worked on the Moscow Daily News, shared a room with Katharine Susannah Prichard, and smuggled literature into Nazi Germany. The first volume of her autobiography, Caviar For Breakfast (1979), was based on her diaries from this period. On their return to Australia, they moved to Sydney, building a house in Castlecrag. Their daughter, Gilda, was born in 1937. In the late 1930s she wrote short, left-wing, agitprop plays, which she regarded as akin to political cartoons, for the New Theatre League in Sydney. The scripts were regularly published in Communist Review, a magazine published by the Communist Party of Australia and edited by Baracchi.
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