The Remittance Man (radio play)

The Remittance Man is a 1939 Australian radio play by Richard Lane. It was one of the most acclaimed Australian radio plays of the 1930s.[1]

The Remittance Man
Wireless Weekly 23 June 1939
Genredrama
Running time60 mins (8:00 pm – 9:00 pm)
Country of originAustralia
Language(s)English
SyndicatesABC
Written byRichard Lane
Recording studioMelbourne
Original release23 June 1939

According to one reviewer for the Wireless Weekly, "The Remittance Man was a great joy to me, but I think the playwright came dangerously close to home. The background is radio— ambitions, disappointments and jealousies. The plot is incidental. The substance of the play lies in the cruelly penetrating characterisations... [It[ isn't a play for mass consumption. It has too many shades of radio. But to those who can fully appreciate it, it is real meat."[2]

The play was revived in 1941.[3] Leslie Rees called it "a mordant work... but one charged with a considerable understanding and sympathy" elaborating that:

So many of our Australian writers, when they come to write a realistic play about theatre or radio or film life, write it about London or New York. Not because they have ever been there and seen that life for themselves, but because it is the usual thing for such plays to be set in such cities and it is much easier to follow a stock fictional example than to interpret life seen directly and at close quarters... It takes imaginative courage for an Australian writer to perceive that the life under his nose is the much more interesting material for a book or play — merely because he knows it better. But Richard Lane... knew... the Australian Theatre has its special problems, its own peculiar pathos of ambition and its perennial nostalgia for the great overseas, its young actors yearning for tn chance to take London, its re-patriates disillusioned by failure abroad, its old pros who lived the life (or say they did) in tne theatre of the world, who now find this country an “actor’s grave,” but never leave it.[4]

The play was published in a 1946 collection of radio scripts along with George Farwell's Portrait of a Gentleman, M Eldershaw's The Watch on the Headland, Edmund Barclay's Spoiled Darlings, Great Inheritance by Gwen Meredith, The Path of the Eagle by Catherine Duncan, The Bride of Gospel Place and The Southern Cross by Louis Esson, Conglomerate by Alexander Turner and Santa Claus of Christmas Creek by Ernestine Hill.[5][6][7] Reviewing it, The Bulletin said the play had "some insight and a good deal of ready-made characterisation." [8]

Premise

According to Wireless Weekly, the play "is an ironical study of an old-fashioned actor who comes to Australia. The triumphs he claims to have known as a matinee idol in London have ended with the drastic change in English theatrical taste after the war. In Australia, he gets work on the radio, but even there —or perhaps particularly there —his technique seems to creak, and he cannot stay the course. It is a sad end to a career that has been accustomed to footlight glamor. But “The Remittance Man” gives expression not merely to the characteristic nostalgia of the exiled Englishman for his distant home, but to two other real facets of Australian “professional” life —the embittered cynicism of an Australian author who has failed in London and returned disconsolate to his native shore; and. the dreams of a young Australian actor to whom the words “Piccadilly” and “Shaftesbury-avenue” are unutterable magic."[9]

References
  1. "VARIETY OF PLAYS ON THE AIR". Sunday Mail. No. 477. Queensland, Australia. 11 June 1939. p. 29. Retrieved 24 August 2023 – via National Library of Australia.
  2. Australasian Radio Relay League., "Human Radio Drama On People In Radio", The wireless weekly : the hundred per cent Australian radio journal, Sydney: Wireless Press (Vol. 34 No. 15 (July 5, 1939)), nla.obj-725861955, retrieved 24 August 2023 – via Trove
  3. Australian Broadcasting Commission. (1939), "Plays Of the Air— Deads on the Radio", ABC weekly, Sydney: ABC (Vol. 3 No. 20 (17 May 1941)), nla.obj-1312125686, retrieved 24 August 2023 – via Trove
  4. Australian Broadcasting Commission. (1939), "Plays Of the Air— Deads on the Radio", ABC weekly, Sydney: ABC (Vol. 3 No. 20 (17 May 1941)), nla.obj-1312125686, retrieved 27 October 2023 – via Trove
  5. Australian Radio Plays Leslie Rees (editor), Sydney : Angus and Robertson , 1946 anthology radio play pg. 29-54
  6. "Drama On The Radio". The Argus (Melbourne). No. 31, 238. Victoria, Australia. 12 October 1946. p. 14. Retrieved 24 August 2023 – via National Library of Australia.
  7. "Australian Plays For The Air". The Sun. No. 11, 481. New South Wales, Australia. 9 November 1946. p. 4 (STUMPS EDITION). Retrieved 24 August 2023 – via National Library of Australia.
  8. "Some Radio Plays.", The bulletin., John Ryan Comic Collection (Specific issues)., Sydney, N.S.W: John Haynes and J.F. Archibald (Vol. 67 No. 3483 (13 Nov 1946)), 1880, ISSN 0007-4039, nla.obj-551016592, retrieved 27 October 2023 – via Trove
  9. Australasian Radio Relay League., "FRIDAY ..... JUNE 23", The wireless weekly : the hundred per cent Australian radio journal, Sydney: Wireless Press (Vol. 34 No. 13 (June 21, 1939)), nla.obj-725842898, retrieved 24 August 2023 – via Trove
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