Episode no. Season 2
Episode 2 Teleplay by Barry Pree Running time 90 mins | Directed by Rod Kinnear Original air date 5 August 1961 | |
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab is a 1961 Australian TV drama play based on Barry Pree's 1961 play adaptation of the novel by Fergus Hume.
Contents
The play had just completed a 12-week run in Melbourne.
Cast
Production
Actor-writer Barry Pree had adapted the novel into a stage play. It was the first commissioned play for the Union Theatre Repertory Company, later the Melbourne Theatre Company by its first writer in residence. Pree took a farcical approach to the material, turning it into a spoof of old time melodramas. It debuted at the Union Theatre in Parkville on 9 January 1961 and ran until 4 February, then had a run at Russell Street Theatre from March until May.
The TV adaptation was basically a filmed version of the stage performance. It was filmed in a theatre and included the reactions of the audience applauding the hero and booing the villain, with occasional cutaways to a pianist playing "mood music". The Sydney Morning Herald said Barry Pree played "a personably virtuous hero with a variable Irish accent, cheerfully mixed top-hatted histrionics with music-hall singing and and dancing, a barrow-load of deliberate anachronisms, and some mockery of modern Melbourne in the style of intimate revue."
Reception
The TV critic for the Sydney Morning Herald called it "an interesting experiment... only partially successful in terms of the special techniques of television. There were too many long-distance shots, of doll-like .figures on stage; not enough of the searching intimacy of expression on which television thrives."