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Oriel Gray
Oriel Gray
Oriel Gray
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Oriel Holland Bennett (26 March 1920 – 30 June 2003) known by pen name Oriel Gray, was an Australian dramatist, playwright and screenwriter who wrote from the 1940s to 1990s.[1][2] The major themes of her work were gender equality and "social and political issues such as the environment, Aborigines, assimilation and bush life".[3]

Key Information

Early life

[edit]

Gray was born Oriel Holland Bennett in Sydney, New South Wales. Her father and grandfather owned a newspaper in Young, New South Wales.[4] With the death of her mother in 1926, her older sister Grayce became the guiding female presence of her formative years. Gray came from a politically active family, her father briefly held the seat of Werriwa for the Australian Labor Party.[2] Gray was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1942 to 1950.[5] She remained active in the peace movement until the dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.[2]

Personal life

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She married John Gray in 1940, an actor whom she met while at the Sydney New Theatre and they had a son, Stephen. By 1947 her marriage had broken down[6] and she moved on to a long-term relationship with writer John Hepworth, with whom she had two more sons, Peter and Nicholas.[3] Gray died from a heart attack, aged 83 in Heidelberg West, on 30 June 2003.[3]

Career

[edit]

From 1937 to 1949, Gray wrote and acted for the Sydney New Theatre which had the reputation of being left wing and avant-garde, being modelled on the new radical and political theatre movement blossoming in the United States.[7] In 1942, Gray was appointed as the first paid Australian playwright-in-residence.[8] She was commissioned to write a weekly radio segment for the New Theatre on 2KY[6] and her first stage play, based on the short stories of Henry Lawson, was performed at New Theatre in 1943.[8]

In reviewing plays, L. L. Woolacott, critic and editor of the Sydney Triad magazine, described Gray as "one of the most significant and talented Australian playwrights whose work has so far been produced here".[6]

Over her stage-writing career, she wrote two political revues, six one act and eight full length stage plays, plus several plays for young adults.

The 1955 award by the Playwrights' Advisory Board for best play was given jointly to Gray's play The Torrents and to Ray Lawler's play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. This has been called "one of the great “compare and contrast” moments in the history of female Australian playwriting."[9]

Gray's play, with its themes of "feminism and the saving of the environment",[10] did not have popular appeal in a very conservative era with only one amateur performance recorded (New Theatre, Adelaide 1957).[2] It was not published until 1988[8] and did not have a professional production until 1996 by the State Theatre Company of South Australia at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. In 2019 The Torrents was produced jointly by the Sydney Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre Company under Clare Watson's direction, starring Celia Pacquola in the leading role.[11] In the eighties the play was turned into a light-hearted musical, called A Bit O' Petticoat (1982), with music composed by Peter Pinne.[10]

Gray's play Burst of Summer won the 1959 J. C. Williamson Theatre Guild Competition.[6] The play explores the racial tensions that erupt in a small town when a young Aboriginal girl gains brief notability as a film actress. The plot is not based on real events, rather being inspired by the release of Charles Chauvel's film Jedda which made known the Aboriginal actors Ngarla Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. Tudawali played the role of Don in the television version of the play for ABC TV (1961). Despite a poor critical reception at the time, this production is noted as a cultural landmark, having three First Nations' performers in major roles.[12]

Major stage plays

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Library resources about
Oriel Gray
By Oriel Gray

Screen writing

[edit]

Gray adapted Sheridan's The Rivals as a television play for ABC-TV and her stage plays Burst of Summer and The Torrents. She wrote six original television plays for ABC-TV, also working as a team member on the television serial Bellbird for nearly a decade. In 1970 she co-wrote the feature film script for Beyond Reason, directed by Giorgio Mangiamele.[2]

Her original screen writing includes:

Radio plays

[edit]

Beginning with the serialised version of her play Western Limit. Gray wrote radio adaptations of several of her major stage plays, many educational radio dramas for the Victorian Education Department and original plays for ABC Radio including:

  • Philip of Australia (1944)
  • The Ghosts in My Family (1982)
  • The Man Who Wanted to Murder Sherlock Holmes (1987)

Other writing

[edit]

In 1985, her memoir Exit Left was published, detailing her life in New Theatre, personal relationships and growing unease with the leadership direction of the Australian Communist Party.[2] It was republished in 2020.

Gray published one novel, The Animal Shop (1990).

Her last work for the stage, Joan and The Errant Soul, A Moment in the Permanent War, was written for and produced by Sydney's Belmore Theatre in 1997.

Notes

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References

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[edit]
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Oriel Gray

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''Oriel Gray'' is an Australian playwright known for her pioneering contributions to mid-20th century Australian theatre, particularly through her work with the New Theatre movement and her award-winning play ''The Torrents''. Born Oriel Holland Bennett on 26 March 1920 in Sydney, she adopted the pen name Oriel Gray and became a prominent figure in the city's radical literary and political scene during the 1940s and beyond. Serving as the resident playwright for the left-wing New Theatre from 1942 for a decade, she crafted socially engaged works that addressed contemporary issues and helped define independent Australian drama. Her play ''The Torrents'', a comedy-drama set in a mining town newspaper office, shared the 1955 Playwrights Advisory Board award with Ray Lawler's ''Summer of the Seventeenth Doll'', a landmark achievement that highlighted emerging Australian playwriting talent. Although some of her contributions were overlooked in later decades, Gray wrote more than a dozen produced plays, along with screenplays for film and television, leaving a legacy in Australian cultural history. She passed away on 30 June 2003.

Early life

Family background and childhood

Oriel Gray was born Oriel Holland Bennett on 26 March 1920 in Belmore, Sydney, New South Wales. She was the younger daughter of Benjamin Bennett, a journalist who worked as editor of The Young Witness newspaper in rural New South Wales and briefly served as the Australian Labor Party member for the Werriwa electorate. Her father's commitment to traditional Labor values and social justice strongly influenced her outlook. Her mother, Ida May Sheehan, died of pneumonia in 1926 when Oriel was six years old. Following her mother's death, Oriel was primarily raised by her older sister Grayce, who was nine years her senior. Grayce pursued elocution lessons and acted in theatre, including performances at the Kursaal Theatre, exposing Oriel to the world of performance from an early age. The family's journalistic heritage also played a formative role; Oriel's paternal grandfather owned rural New South Wales newspapers, including The Burragong Argus and The Young Witness, while her paternal grandmother remained active in their publication after her husband's death. On her maternal side, Oriel descended from Irish convict John Sheehan, who was transported to Australia in 1805 after his death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. The family had connections to the hotel trade, owning and frequenting establishments. These elements of her background—combined with her sister's theatrical pursuits and the family's newspaper tradition—nurtured Oriel's early interest in writing and performance. She wrote her first play at age 12, a story about a fairy and a demon. In her late teens, she began to develop an attraction to radical politics and theatre.

New Theatre years

Joining New Theatre and resident playwright role

Oriel Gray joined the New Theatre League in 1938 after attending a performance of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead in 1937 with her sister Grayce, an experience that proved transformative and drew her into the group's left-wing theatrical activities. She joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1939 and left in 1949. New Theatre served as a cultural arm of the party during this era, promoting plays with explicit political purpose, and Gray quickly immersed herself in its operations. She initially contributed in multiple capacities, working as crew, front-of-house staff, and actor. In 1942, Gray was appointed the first writer-in-residence at New Theatre, a pioneering role she held for approximately a decade. During this time, she produced political revues including Marx of Time (1942) and Let’s Be Offensive (1943), while also writing weekly radio segments for the Communist Party-affiliated station 2KY. Gray's relationship with the party grew strained, with conflicts emerging with CPA leadership as early as 1942 and deepening disillusionment with its rigid dogma over subsequent years. Her final submission to New Theatre, the play Burst of Summer, was rejected in 1959. Early plays written during her residency, such as Lawson in 1943, are discussed in the Major stage plays section.

Major stage plays

Early plays and political works

Oriel Gray's early playwriting was deeply intertwined with her work at the New Theatre in Sydney, where she produced a series of politically engaged works during the 1940s and early 1950s that addressed pressing social and economic issues of postwar Australia. Her plays from this period often reflected left-wing concerns, including labor struggles, environmental degradation, gender dynamics, and racial inequality, aligning with the New Theatre's commitment to progressive and activist drama. Gray's first major success came with Lawson (1943), an adaptation of short stories and poems by Henry Lawson that became an enduring staple in the New Theatre's repertoire and exemplified her early skill in dramatizing Australian working-class experiences. She followed this with other works including Hewers of Coal, Milestones (1944), and Sur Le Pont (1945), which continued her focus on social themes. Western Limit (1946) explored dust bowl conditions and soil erosion in rural Australia, highlighting environmental and economic hardships faced by farming communities. My Life is My Affair (1947) examined the emotional complexities of a returned soldier's relationships with his wife and another woman. In the following years, Gray produced Had We But World Enough (1950), written while she lived in Lismore and later in a Housing Commission Nissan hut at Herne Bay, which confronted racial injustice toward Aboriginal people. Sky without Birds (1952) was set in a Nullarbor railway town and dealt with anti-Semitism, while also functioning as a critique of certain ideological positions she had begun to question. Other early works included The King Who Wouldn't (1953). Across this period, Gray authored six one-act plays, eight full-length stage plays, plays for young adults, and political revues, demonstrating her prolific output and versatility within the New Theatre's framework.

Award-winning plays and themes

Oriel Gray gained significant recognition in the mid-1950s with her play The Torrents, which jointly won the 1955 Playwrights' Advisory Board award for best Australian play alongside Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Set in an 1890s goldfields town, the comedy centers on a female journalist who challenges patriarchal chauvinism, irresponsible journalism, and political opportunism in a male-dominated newspaper office. The work addresses themes of gender equality and women's capability in traditionally male workplaces, highlighting sexist attitudes of the era. Despite the award, The Torrents received no professional production for decades, with its first such staging occurring in 1996 and a major revival in 2019. It was later adapted into the musical A Bit O' Petticoat. In 1959 Gray won the J. C. Williamson Play Competition for Burst of Summer, a study of race relations first produced by the Melbourne Little Theatre in 1960. The play explores racial tensions and prejudice in a small country town, inspired by the experiences of Indigenous actress Ngarla Kunoth after her starring role in the film Jedda, while also touching on relations between the sexes and the challenges faced by immigrants. Its 1961 ABC television adaptation featured prominent First Nations performers in major roles, marking a landmark in Australian television for its inclusion of three significant Aboriginal characters and scenes addressing violent and paternalistic racism. Gray's work from this period also included Drive a Hard Bargain (1957), a one-act play that reflected her ongoing interest in social issues. Her award-winning plays frequently examined gender equality, racial prejudice, and individual morality over rigid ideology, contributing to her status as one of Australia's notable mid-twentieth-century playwrights despite limited professional recognition at the time.

Screenwriting career

Television serials and original plays

Oriel Gray transitioned to television writing in the 1960s, becoming a key contributor to ABC-TV through both ongoing serial work and standalone original plays. Her most extended engagement was with the pioneering Australian soap opera Bellbird, where she served as a member of the writing team from 1967 to 1976, receiving credits on 1506 episodes during that nearly decade-long period. This rural drama, which explored the everyday lives and relationships of residents in a small country town, marked one of the ABC's early successes in primetime serial format. Gray also authored six original television plays for ABC-TV: Antarctic Four (1966), an Australian Playhouse episode depicting tensions among stranded Antarctic researchers; The Brass Guitar (1967), another Australian Playhouse comedy; The Man Upon the Stair (1972), an installment of the anthology A Time for Love; The Dancing Star (1972); Frank and Francesca (1973); and We Should Have Had a Uniform (1975). She contributed an episode to the period drama series Rush in 1974. Gray adapted her own earlier stage plays Burst of Summer and The Torrents for television presentation, as well as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's classic The Rivals for ABC-TV.

Film contributions

Oriel Gray's contributions to feature film are limited to a single credit. She co-wrote the screenplay for the 1970 Australian science fiction film Beyond Reason, directed by Giorgio Mangiamele. The film explores the interactions between staff and patients in a mental institution who become trapped in an underground bunker following the outbreak of atomic warfare, leading to tensions and power struggles as the inmates attempt to seize control. As Mangiamele's final feature film, Beyond Reason faced challenges in finding a distributor, and the director himself expressed dissatisfaction with the completed work.

Personal life

Marriages, relationships, and family

Oriel Gray married actor John Gray in 1940, having met him through their shared involvement in the Sydney New Theatre. The couple had one son, Stephen, born in 1945, but their marriage broke down by 1947. Following the end of her first marriage, Gray entered into a long-term life partnership with writer John Hepworth, despite disapproval from the Communist Party of Australia. The couple had two sons, Peter and Nicholas. They lived together in Lismore, where Peter was born in 1948, before moving to Newcastle, then Melbourne, and later residing in Housing Commission accommodation in West Heidelberg.

Memoir and later works

Autobiography, novel, and final productions

Oriel Gray published her memoir, Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman, in 1985. The book reflects on her formative years as the resident playwright at Sydney's New Theatre during the 1940s, her involvement with the Communist Party of Australia, her eventual disillusionment with the party, and her personal relationships, including those with John Gray and John Hepworth. It was republished in 2020 by HonourBright Books, featuring an introduction by Michelle Arrow to mark the centenary of Gray's birth. In 1990, Gray released her only novel, The Animal Shop, which centers on the lives and struggles of women residing in a Housing Commission estate. Her final stage production was Joan and The Errant Soul, A Moment in the Permanent War, presented at the Belvoir Theatre in Sydney in 1997.

Death and legacy

Later years and recognition

Oriel Gray resided in Heidelberg West, Victoria, during her later years. She died on 30 June 2003 at the age of 83 following a heart attack that had led to her hospitalization the previous week. Gray is regarded as one of Australia's pioneering women playwrights, whose work helped shape the New Theatre movement as its resident dramatist for a decade from 1942. She engaged with social and political issues through her plays, including gender equality, racial injustice toward Aboriginal people and immigrants, and environmental concerns such as resource sustainability and land degradation. Described as a "playwright of ideas," she contributed to the emergence of Australian drama during a period dominated by overseas productions, though structural barriers limited wider recognition during her lifetime. Posthumously, Gray's legacy has gained renewed attention in Australian theatre history. A major revival of her play The Torrents in 2019 by Black Swan State Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company highlighted her forward-thinking themes and marked a significant step toward acknowledging her contributions, which had long been overlooked. This production underscored her importance as a trailblazing figure whose work continues to resonate with contemporary issues.

References

  1. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/after-63-years-oriel-gray-finally-gets-the-production-she-deserved-20190708-p525a6.html
  2. https://insidestory.org.au/oriel-gray-makes-her-mark/
  3. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/verbatim/oriel-gray/3678820
  4. http://newtheatrehistory.org.au/wiki/index.php/Person_-_Oriel_Gray
  5. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.150776447646951
  6. https://honourbrightbooks.com.au/index.php/oriel-gray-1920-2003/
  7. https://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsG/gray-oriel.php
  8. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228911829/oriel-holland-gray
  9. https://www.smh.com.au/national/scarlet-woman-put-us-centre-stage-20030724-gdh5ep.html
  10. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/17881355
  11. https://playlabtheatre.com.au/shop-publications/indigenous-themes/had-we-but-world-enough-by-oriel-gray/
  12. http://ccc-canberracriticscircle.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-torrents.html
  13. https://agentmysterycase.com/2019/06/theatre-review-the-torrents.html
  14. https://www.filmink.com.au/the-flawed-landmark-burst-of-summer/
  15. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166034/fullcredits/
  16. https://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/bellbird/
  17. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12095548/
  18. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12100876/
  19. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10319666/
  20. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3740070/
  21. https://mubi.com/en/us/films/beyond-reason-1970
  22. https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/7882728
  23. http://newtheatrehistory.org.au/wiki/index.php/Person_-_John_Hepworth
  24. https://books.google.com/books/about/Exit_Left.html?id=zJwnAAAAMAAJ
  25. https://honourbrightbooks.com.au/index.php/product/exit-left-oriel-gray/
  26. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/8415093
  27. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Animal_Shop.html?id=WMZHAAAAYAAJ
  28. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/256076
  29. https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/oriel-gray-playwright-of-ideas-dies-aged-83-20030703-gdvz7o.html
  30. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2019/08/10/oriel-grays-the-torrents/15653592008591
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