The Casualties
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A one-off play for Rediffusion, Play of the Week presented Ruth Dunning and Wensley Pithey in The Casualties by Edmund Ward, produced by Michael Currer Briggs, directed by Quentin Lawrence, fight arranged by Peter Diamond.
Arnold Cutforth has fought all his life for the betterment of his fellow workers. Have the members of his own family become the casualties of his bitter and fanatical sincerity?
Review: Clash of Sons and Father
The Times, 22/08/1962
The Nottingham of Mr. Edmund Ward's play The Casualties, seen last night on Independent Television, is not that of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Mr. Ward's working class is not restricted to the younger generation born into a world which offers no cause to serve. His play rises from the clash of personal with political principles, represented by the struggle of Sons against a dominating father.
If the lives of the respectable and hardworking are usually less sensationally dramatic than those of the tough and thoughtless, Mr. Ward nevertheless finds a good deal of tension and viour in the situation he explores. Arnold Cutforth is an imposing monolith surviving from the heroic days of the Labour movement but soured by years of poverty; he resents the new values and standards that his children naturally adopt in the different social circumstances of the 1960s.
This was presented with entire conviction by Mr. Wensley Pithey. Mr. Jack Smethurst made a good thing of the elder son, already driven from the house and injured by expulsion from the close family circle, as did Mr. Murray Evans with the part of the second rebel. Miss Ruth Dunning, the stoical, neglected wife, did all that could be done with a role that Mr. Ward tried with little success to rescue from the stereotyped.