form y separately published work icon Kain single work   film/TV  
Issue Details: First known date: 1967... 1967 Kain
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Contemporary drama loosely based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel.

The Times gives the following description:

Keith Mitchell [sic] and, more subdued, Alan White were enthralling as the two brothers trying, as the cattle died on them, to keep their remote ranch solvent–the one restless and sex-starved in his awareness of the big cities, the other gentler and wise in the way of books.

Kain, suspecting his brother of bedding with the black servant girl, but more likely from jealousy, killed him in a fevered frenzy, only to learn that a police officer was the father of the girl's child, put to death as a half-cast [sic] at a tribal ritual.

The rest, in almost poetic terms at times, depicted Kain torn by remorse and his love for Inala, who helped run the store at the nearest settlement with her main eye on marriage, a part played with a perceptive range of feeling by Audine Leith. She would not let go when Kain left her at the altar, a delightful scene of a mission chapel, with little black children singing hymns; not even when he told her that he had killed his brother, a crime accepted by the authorities as an accident.

Kain's great fear was that he might harm her, a problem left unresolved as he walked into a dust storm, with Inala's voice calling his name in the background.'

Source:

'Drama of the Outback', The Times, 18 April 1967, p.6.

Notes

  • Television play.
  • Widely described in contemporary newspapers in both Australia and the UK as the first collaboration between the BBC and the ABC.
  • 'The BBC acknowledges the assistance of the Australian Department of Territories and the Northern Territory Administration' (Radio Times, 13 April 1967, p.23).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Extent: 90min.p.
      Series: form y separately published work icon Theatre 625 BBC TV (publisher), London : BBC TV , 1964-1968 Z1651534 1964 series - publisher film/TV

      Theatre 625 was a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) drama anthology series transmitted on BBC2 between 1964 and 1968. In all, 114 ninety-minute plays were produced. Some of the best-known productions were a 1965 production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (using Nigel Kneale's 1954 theatrical adaptation); John Hopkins's four-part drama Talking to a Stranger (1966), which told the same story from four different viewpoints; and the 1968 science-fiction allegory The Year of the Sex Olympics. Among the screenplays known to have been written by an Australian or Australian resident is The Swallow's Nest by Robert Wales (1968).

      Number in series: 4.17

Works about this Work

Forgotten Australian TV Plays : Kain Stephen Vagg , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: FilmInk , 8 June 2021;
Forgotten Australian TV Plays : Kain Stephen Vagg , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: FilmInk , 8 June 2021;
Last amended 30 Aug 2021 11:28:43
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