Cirrus@Austlit

'When bestselling but elusive romance author Orlando Ricard is found murdered in a sleepy Cornish village, Superintendent Penney of Scotland Yard arrives on the scene to investigate. He’s joined by Ricard’s publisher and his entourage from London, who insist they have no knowledge of Ricard’s true identity.

'As Penney navigates the guarded reticence of Cornish villagers and the delicate egos of publishing intellectuals, he uncovers a web of crime and lies. Bound by sheer cliffs and a picturesque ocean, the group’s secrets begin to unravel over a weekend that will change all of their lives forever.

'Death of a Nom De Plume is a previously unpublished gem written in 1958 by Australian novelist and playwright Dorothy Blewett. A story of false appearances, mystery and romance, this classic cosy crime tale will enrapture with its twists and turns and leave you asking—what happens when the lie you are living dies?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Syliva and Henry Baring are expected to attend an evening party together. When Henry refuses to go at the last minute, Sylvia must yet again attend a social event alone. Feeling upset, she accuses her husband of loving his work and the law more than he loves her. Her complaint is interrupted by the appearance of a local spinster, Sarah Seedon. She claims to have pressing information about a case Henry is currently working on, but her evidence is laughable. She says that she has taken an astral journey, and witnessed a hit-and-run, insisting that the man on trial is not guilty. Henry at first dismisses her, but further revelations convince him that there might be something to her story. Sylvia, meanwhile, lingers in the background, still pondering the question of just how much her husband cares for her. 

Characters

HENRY BARING Crown Prosecutor  

SYLVIA BARING His Wife

DR. ALEX CURTIS 

MADGE CURTIS His Wife  

SARAH SEEDON A middle-aged spinster

Jean Marie Roche dreams of being an artist, but she is unsure of her talent. Not convinced by the enthusiastic admiration of her fiancé and parents, she seeks out the opinion of reputable local artist, Peter Raid. The play centres around this encounter. Jean Marie learns that being an artist would mean separation from her fiancé—an unbearable ultimatum her mother knows all too well. Peter's severity evokes a hidden anger in the well-mannered girl—a passion with equal potential to end her dream, or reveal an unexpected opportunity. 

Characters

JEAN MARIE ROCHE Just twenty-two. She is a rather pretty girl who looks and is capable. She is sure of herself and of

ROB DRURY Jean Marie's fiancé. Rob is in his late twenties, is moody and sensitive. Both Rob and Jean Marie are in tennis clothes.

MR.  ROCHE    

MRS. ROCHE  Having produced Jean Marie, they rest on their laurels. They are ordinary small-town business people.

DR. KINCAID An ordinary small-town general practitioner. Probably the most popular man in the town. He is snort and tubby and he feels the heat.

PETER RAID A middle-aged artist who wears good clothes carelessly and has a ravaged, intense face.

A live television production of Dorothy Blewett's play Quiet Night, broadcast on Melbourne's ABV (ABC) station. Adapted for television by Wal Cherry.

Charles and Miranda Harcourt are entertaining Miranda's sister and her husband, Felicity and Walter Cockburn. Walter has great news—he's secured a new job in Africa. Felicity is all too eager to move. Charles is considered a shoo-in for Walter's old position at the company. The four open a special bottle of champagne to celebrate the occasion. Charles' daughter, Susan, is expected to join them for dinner. However, an unexpected guest also arrives. Andrew Ferris is an old friend of Miranda and Felicity, who disappeared without explanation during the war. HIs sudden reappearance is met with a mixture of warm welcome and cold hostility from the sisters. Miranda is thrilled to see her old friend, but Felicity is determined to make him feel unwelcome. The tension rises as the party spends more time together. Suspicions are aroused, relationships formed, arguments and accusations fly, and ultimately, a long-hidden secret threatens to disrupt them all. 

Characters                        

CHARLES HARCOURT A City Business man (about 45)

MIRANDA HARCOURT His wife (late 30's)

FELICITY COCKBURN Miranda's sister (33)

SIR WALTER COCKBURN Felicity's husband, also in the City (about 47)

ANDREW FERRIS An Australian: ex R.A.A.F.  (35)

SUSAN HARCOURT Daughter of Charles by a former marriage. (22)

ANTHONY HARCOURT Adopted son of Miranda and Charles Aged 12

MRS. HUGHES A neighbour (Fiftyish)

Alleyne Manning has won the lottery. After decades of hard office work, she can finally afford a tasteful apartment filled with furnishings, which are as dear to her as her new financial security. She plans to spend her days relaxing, playing bridge, and indulging in her comfortable life. However, she is already beginning to feel a little bored. Alleyne’s curt friends barely have a chance to criticise her situation before Lise Farra, an English ballerina, appears on Alleyne’s sundeck—stranded and seeking a way home.

The two fall immediately into sympathy with one another, and many months pass while they enjoy time together. Their relationship is marked by ongoing arguments—Lise is intense and tenacious, and often dissatisfied. Alleyne believes women ought to find companionship in men, and urges Lise to follow suit. Throughout the ensuing drama the two women find themselves drawn back to one another, time after time. Alleyne must eventually decide between the life and the man she had hoped for, and the gripping appeal of a life with Lise.

Characters

ALLEYNE MANNING An unmarried woman of 45

ISABEL BROWN

CONNIE PERCEVAL Friends of Alleyne’s and about the same age

ROBERT PERCEVAL Connie’s husband

Members of a touring European ballet company:

LISE FARRA Aged 18

GABRIEL MAURICE 30

NATASHA

VERA OBELESKA

SERGE Vera's husband

'There was girl came to our boarding school whose home was in Java. Her name was Josepha - Josepha de Vries. She was small with delicate wrists and ankles; her eyes, soft and dark, were mostly downcast above high cheekbones and her full mouth drooped pathetically. The bloom on her skin was neither gold nor olive, but something approaching both, and her hair was black with mahogany lights in its deep waves.' (Introduction)

From dust jacket: “High Street, Chinaman’s Flat, might have been exchanged for any other High Street in North Gippsland, and no one have known the difference,” writes Miss Blewett in this absorbing story of life in one of Victoria’s small country towns. A West Australian gum, glorious with bright red bloom, a feathery jacaranda tree, pepper trees, and those tall, stark pines that so often flank the playground of a small-town schoolhouse are all here to lend authentic background to a tale of human joys and sorrows, triumphs and despairs that will not easily be forgotten. You will recognise in Caleb Williamson the school-master, in Arthur Marshall the town’s solicitor and in Bill Crotty, the bank manager, types that you not only have heard of, but known. In the young doctor and his wife, in Claude Clancy and in Lars Hansen and Catherine Treganowan you will meet a group of young people that might be met to-day in any of our more prosperous country districts. Jenny David, the central figure in the drama, you will not meet. But you will learn to know her intimately. She lives and breathes in every page of this extraordinarily satisfying story."

In The First Joanna Dorothy Blewett explores Australia's acceptance of its convict heritage, tracing the fictional history of the Deverons, owners of a leading South Australian vineyard. The property, situated near the Onkaparinga River, was established in the early years of the colony by settler Stephen Deveron. The central characters of the play are the Joanna Millay, a young convict woman who becomes the matriarch of the Deverons, and Joanna Deveron, the wife of the second Stephen Deveron - the grandson of the first Joanna and the first Stephen Deveron.

The narrative begins on Joanna's birthday in 1945 and introduces the Deveron family. Joanna has only recently arrived at the vineyard and is still suffering from the effects of several years spent as a prisoner of war in Poland. Joanna and Stephen had married in England shortly before the outbreak of war but were forced apart after she became trapped behind enemy lines. Having led a peripatetic upbringing in Europe Joanna finds the dull monotony of life on the vineyard unbearable and is thinking of returning to Europe. Her love of Stephen is making the decision all the more painful.

When Stephen's maiden aunts give her a chair belonging to their mother, Joanna is at first horrifed by the thought of its staid existence. She at first can't bear think about it, but after discovering within the chair a set of diaries written by the first Joanna she becomes fascinated. The diaries reveal a life of trauma, loss, murder, illegitimacy, and eventually, triumph through love. Through her reading of the diaries the play's dramatic action segues into "interpolated scenes" depicting key moments in the lives of Stephen's forebears during the nineteenth century - 1837, 1849, 1862, 1871, and 1885. The diaries ultimately allow the contemporary Joanna the capacity to imagine a future at the vineyard with the man she truly loves.

In an interview with Coralie Clarke Rees on Sydney ABC radio on 8 March, 1948, Blewett described the play as:

"It's the story of a modern English girl called Joanna who marries an Australian wine-grower and comes to live in his family home in South Australia. There she finds the narrow insistence on family respectability stifling, and she is about to leave to place when she discovers the diary of the first Joanna who built the home and pioneered the vineyard. In it she reads that the woman who established this respectable successful family had been a convict girl from Tasmania. The first Joanna was a vivid courageous person who had lived dangerously. She appeals tat once to the imagination and the loyalty of the second Joanna who had been repelled by the smug legends about the old pioneer: and the young Joanna Becomes proud to belong to a family with such an honourably shady past." 

"A very different play of Dorothy Blewett's was "It Has Happened Before", written for the ABC's verse play competition. It is now apparent that this competition has brought forth results eminently worthwhile. It has indeed contributed considerable dramatic and poetic richness to the stock of Australian play literature. Dorothy Blewett's radio play tells with a degree of adult intellectuality and yet sensitive feeling the love story of a German Jew scientist and an Australian girl in Europe. The scientist has been persecuted and exiled by Hitler; he returns to Germany to save an even more distinguished scientific worker and willingly gives his life.

Beginning with apparent uncertainty, as Lenora unreservedly tells of her experiences to a women's club in Australia, the story and verse gather strength and dramatic momentum until the narrative becomes genuinely moving. The final plea for distinguished refugees, Jewish though they be, is truly compassionate. There is scalding satire in the closing return to the women's club where prejudice and intolerance appear as strongly, even as crudely, as in Germany. Lenora tells that a great foreign thinker has suicided in Australia for lack of a welcome. That this news falls on deaf ears at the women's meeting cannot but make its challenge to the responsible listener. For undoubtedly this play mirrors fact. There are numbers of European professional men of highest intellectual calibre in Australia today, debarred from anything but labouring work.It is ordinarily decent or sensible to treat them thus, is how one's on thought runs on, though Miss Blewett's play mainly pleads that Jews should be regarded as being of the same common flesh and blood as ourselves."

(Source: 'Drama in Sydney, The Australian Quarterly, September, 1943.)

Characters

First Part – At the Meeting 

THE SECRETARY She is middle-aged, fluttery and spinsterish, but with an unexpected obstinacy in her voice.

MISS BLACK Middle-aged. Inclined to be carping.

THE PRESIDENT Efficient, well-spoken – a typical president.

LADY WITH THE EAR TRUMPET She is elderly, speaks in the flat high-pitched tone of the deaf.

LENORA VALENTINE In her early thirties. Her voice is clear and colourful.

MRS. DEAN Very ordinary.

Second Part – At Oxford 

LANSELL Just twenty, cultured, consciously un-Oxford.

LENORA                                                        

MARIANNA About twenty, voice about two tones higher than Lenora’s; very English.

LEON SCHONENBERG His voice is deep and full, with plenty of overtone. He is in his late thirties. He has a very slight accent.

ANOTHER MAN

ANOTHER GIRL

Third Part – In London 

LENORA

LEON

Fourth Part – In Germany 

KURT MARTIN Very deep, tired voice. Distinct accent.

ELSA MARTIN About fifty. Also has a distinct accent.

LENORA

LEON

Fifth Part – At the Meeting again 

The same persons as in the first part.

'Setting her action in a large hospital, Miss Blewett has undertaken no simple task in dealing with nursing from both its practical and psychological aspects, complicated in two cases by individual emotional strains. The play covers the hours of one hectic night in the hospital, in which the emotional preoccupations of several of the staff intrude on their professional duties' ('Australian Play' Argus 10 March 1941, 6).

Characters

SISTER MURPHY of the day staff at St. Agnes’

PROBATIONER

SISTER RANKIN (FRANCES)

NURSE RUTH SINCLAIR 3^rd Year

NURSE JEAN SPARROW 1^st Year

NURSE WILLIAMS 1^st Year

NURSE PATSY CURTIN Junior

NURSE SMITH

NURSE ROBERTS

RUSSEL KEANE A Patient

DR. ANGUS MACREADY Resident Doctor at the Hospital

MRS. LEILA CLAYTON A patient

THE MATRON

DR. RICHARD CLAYTON

Con sordini means "with the mutes". A mute is a device fitted to a musical instrument to alter the sound produced: by affecting the timbre (or "tone"), reducing the volume, or most commonly both. 

Beatrice Carford is spending the evening with her family and friends rehearsing a musical performance for the upcoming show week concert. The rehearsal is interrupted, however, when her niece June declares that she longs to leave their provincial town and see the world, just like her older cousin Harriet. The group begin to reminisce about their childhood memories of Harriet, who has become a successful and worldly travel writer. Suddenly, Harriet herself arrives at the house to pay a quick visit in between flights. She doesn't have much time to spend with her old friends, but it might be just enough to uncover a long-concealed secret that could turn Beatrice's life upside down. 

(From the review, Argus, October, 1939)

Office Setting for Business Woman's Play

Miss Dorothy Blewett whose first three-act play, "Working Back," will be presented by the Dramatist Club of Australia at St Peter's, Eastern Hill, on Tuesday is a business woman, and she has given her play an office setting. She has already written several one-act plays. This play, which is a light comedy thriller, was specially written at the request of the producer, Mrs. Marjorie McLeod, for a cast of girls, and it has 18 characters. Because she does not act herself Miss Blewett finds her greatest difficulty is getting her characters on and off the stage expeditiously. She writes her plays in the evenings, after she has prepared dinner and washed up the dishes in the flat in East Melbourne, where she is living at present. Miss Blewett has published several short stories under the pen-name of Anne Praize, and in 1932 she published a book, "Vision," under this name.

From dust jacket: Vision is the story of an Australian girl, of middle-class family, who to share in a fortune, marries an Englishman who is the owner of large impoverished estates in England. They hate each other cordially at the opening of the story, but six months’ enforced companionship on a lonely station in Eastern Gippsland transforms their hatred into love. They discover a beautiful valley back in the hills which fires the imagination of Valmai who sees in it an ideal place for a settlement. Then Richard’s mother arrives from England accompanied by Cynthia to whom Dick has been practically engaged. Valmai forestalls the inevitable result by running away from the man and the home she loves ; but Dick discovers after she has fled how much she means to him and he sets out to make her vision settlement come true. The rest of the story tells of his efforts to do this, of how he moves an entire village from England to Vision, of the failure of the settlement and of its re-birth."

The novel was submitted to the Bulletin novel competition in 1928 or 1929. See 'The Australian Bookman' The Daily News (Perth, WA : 1882 - 1950) 9 July 1932: 13. It didn't win but did receive publication.