Oriel Gray was an Australian dramatist, playwright and screenwriter who wrote from the 1940s to 1960s. The major themes of her work were "social and political issues such as the environment, Aborigines, assimilation and bush life".
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 and she moved on to a long term relationship with John Hepworth with whom she had two more sons, Peter and Nicholas. Gray died from a heart attack, aged 83 in Heidelberg, Victoria, on 30 June 2003.
Career
From 1937 to 1949 Gray wrote and acted for the SydneyNew Theatre, and it was here that her first play Lawson, a play based on the short stories of Henry Lawson, was performed in 1943. The Sydney New Theatre had the reputation of being left wing and avant garde and was modeled on the new radical and political theatre movement in the United States. In 1942 Gray was appointed as the first paid Australian playwright-in-residence. She was commissioned to write a weekly radio segment for the New Theatre on 2KY. 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". 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. Gray's play, with its themes of "feminism and the saving of the environment", did not have popular appeal in a very conservative era, and there was only one amateur performance recorded. It was not published until 1988 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. In the sixties the play was turned into a light-hearted musical, called A Bit O' Petticoat, with music composed by Peter Pinne. Gray's play Burst of Summer won the 1959 J. C. Williamson Theatre Guild Competition. The play explores the racial tensions that erupt in a small town when a young Aboriginal girl gains brief notability as a film actress. This story is based on real events when Charles Chauvel's film Jedda made known the Aboriginal actor Ngarla Kunoth, who played the title role.
Plays
Lawson
Westernlimit
My Life is my Affair
Had We But World Enough – first performed 1950
Sky without Birds in Plays of the 50s – first performed in 1950
The Belle and the Bushranger
Hewers of Coal
The King Who Wouldn't – first performed 1952
Marx of Time
Milestones
Royal Tour
The Torrents – first performed in 1954
Drive a Hard Bargain – first performed in Ballarat, October 1957
Burst of Summer in Plays of the 60's, Vol. 1 – first performed in 1960
The Man who Wanted to Murder Sherlock Holmes: A Play for Radio
Television writing
In 1975 a television series was proposed to be written by Australian woman writers. Grey wrote one episode of this television drama series: Quality of Mercy: We Should Have Had a Uniform Gray wrote scripts for children's shows for the ABC. She was also one of the early writers for Bellbird, a long running Australian television soap opera along with Peter Pinne and Don Battye.
Other writing
Gray published one novel: The Animal Shop In 1985 Gray published her memoirs: Exit left: memoirs of a scarlet woman
