REVIEW: The Salt Land

Broadcast: Tuesday, 8th November 1955

Character: Arich

In the mid-50s, Independent Television was still in its infancy, and was seen as a threat to the old guard of the BBC. And while it would be met with a peculiar mixture of groans and cheers according to taste, the new kid on the block was determined that it was here to stay. The highlight of ITV programming on Tuesday, 8^th November 1955, however, was a play lasting 90 minutes. under news flash of about as many seconds! The play was Peter Shaffer’s The Salt Land – the land in question being Israel.

It opened on a boat carrying a variety of immigrants to mandated Palestine. Within a few minutes, viewers were introduced to most of the cast and had received an uncomfortable impression that they were about to be led on a guided tour of the Jewish people – from the aged rabbi, who has come to die and be buried in the land of his faith, to the arch rouge who had made his fortune through deals with the Nazis, and whose only interest in the ‘homeland’ is to make himself even richer.

There is the simple man with his two sons; the older – a wastrel and petty criminal (Peter Wyngarde), the younger, a selfless idealist who is stirred by the fierce fanatical passions of the Old Testament. There is the ship’s captain, intent only on doing his job and getting the boat to the proper place at the proper time, and the faithful girl who loved the petty criminal and will follow him wherever he goes. And with them is an assortment of other ‘Jewish types’, most of them made of cardboard.

Right: Peter as Arich, with Clare Austin as Kulli

Long before they arrive there is quarrelling – personally and politically – and with a brilliant touch of irony, they are at each other’s throats when the promised land homes into view over the horizon.

Once there, the feeling of dramatic compression dissolves to some extent in the stresses of the war for independence, in which the bat brother tempts the good one with offers of arms, and the even greater stresses of the following piece. In which the bad brother then tempts the good one with offers of agricultural machinery. Eventually, in a paradoxical twist, it is able who kills Kane.

As a play, The Salt Land was never one of Shaffer’s best. The great flood of tediously pedantic messages which rolled out of the screen must have become wearisome before long to all but the most passionate supporters of the author’s case. They must have been asking themselves as I did, how many more times must we have proof that sincerity and righteousness are not of the slightest use in the construction of a work of good television?

Of the characters, only the two brothers had any real depth, and this may have been due in no small part to the burning sincerity of David Peel’s ‘Able’ and the understudied casualness of Peter’s ‘Caine’. Otherwise, the dialogue had a flatness about it that was, unfortunately, emphasised by the endless questions from the Old Testament that was scattered throughout.

Regardless its shortcomings, The Salt Land was exactly suited to its medium; certainly it could not have been done so stirringly on radio or as vividly in print. It could not have been done in the theatre, or indeed on the big screen without losing a great deal. The production and director were designed to make the maximum possible effect in the medium that had been chosen, and at that rate it unquestionably succeeded.

Suitable for television then, but something else, too. I suggest it was a sense of purpose. There was a point and I feel that it mattered; somebody was saying something and it had meaning. The play, then, was an exercise in sincerity rather than a work of real dramatic value. It might also be noted that the opening and closing narration was not just the filtered voice of an announcer, but by the director himself, John Clements. His clipped tones set the play afire, a coupled with Peter’s masterful performance, made what might have been a failure into a worthwhile experience. This was one of Peter’s first venture into the realms and television; the first step on a memorable and magical journey.