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).
Kain
Australia
:
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Australian Broadcasting Commission
,
1967
8140398
1967
single work
film/TV
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.
Australia : British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Australian Broadcasting Commission , 1967
The Swallow's Nest
London
:
BBC TV
,
1968
Z1517549
1968
single work
film/TV
Based on Robert Wales's play The Cell, The Swallow's Nest is set in the convent of an order that cares for girls whom the court and welfare authorities consider redeemable. Although the girls are released into the bond of the nuns rather than being jailed, in appearance the convent is little different from a prison. It too is a place of high walls, shadows, locked doors, and carried keys.
London
:
BBC TV
,
1968
