The Tower (TV play)

The Tower is a 1965 TV play broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as part of Wednesday Theatre. It was written by Hal Porter and directed by Christopher Muir in the ABC's studios in Melbourne.

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.

The critic for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that:

Even if it had no other virtues, Hal Porter's "The Tower,"... would be 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 gencratiy poisonous motives in an 18th century decorum, and to make use of an unusually hemstitched and hand-sewn type of language. The easy and templing criticism to make of this play is that it is stagey and derivative (with a "Rebecca"-like storm and an Ibsenesque tower of a most clumsily symbolic kind) and that it is as fniitily stocked with curtain lines as anything George Miller might present at the Neutral Bay Music Hall. It would be difficult to resist, for example, wry pleasure at the complications of plot implied in the climactic line with which the persecuted Amy (played with convincing anguish by Ann Charlston) defied her ambitiously hollow father (Keith Lee): "'Am I to niarry the father of my 'Stepfather 's son?" But when all this is said the very contrivances of the play guarantee it a taut effectiveness which is by no means as easy to achieve as might appear. And Porter' s depiction of carefully phrased nastincss encourages his audiences lo enjoy hating his more thorough-going villains with a relish that recent plays rarely allow. Much depended in this televised version on its tactfulness in making the most of the play's richly theatrical slrokes without emphasising their potential absurdities. In ihis Porter was well served by the adaptor, Noel Robinson, and by Christopher Muir' s carefully starched and stylish Melbourne production. Andrew Guild as the adopted boy was much less chillingly polished in manner than the script seemed lo demand, and neither the boy's melodramatically revealed father nor the household aunt fitted the author's description as well as they should have ' done, but Judith Aithy as the new young wife was wholly plausible in her pretty malice.