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Alan Hopgood, AM, is both a writer and an actor. He is one of the most significant stage playwrights of the 1960s, and has contributed scripts to numerous Australian television series and feature films over many years. Hopgood has appeared in plays on stage, television and in feature film from the 1950’s until the present. More recently he has developed a genre of short plays based on health issues called HealthPlay, that are performed around Australia especially for the medical profession.
Hopgood’s early plays were amongst the most successful Australian plays of the 1960s. They were adapted for television and film, and prefigure the transformation of the theatre in Australia that we call the New Wave. Hopgood’s contribution to Australian theatre as a writer and as an actor is significant and ongoing, but it has never been fully acknowledged. Hopgood is probably best known for writing the controversial screenplay for the satirical comedy Alvin Purple (1973), a controversial film that broke box office records and celebrated Australian irreverence, anarchic sexual politics and the breaking down of sexual taboos in the early 1970s. The adaptation of Hopgood’s first popular stage play And the Big Men Fly in 1974 was a landmark in Australian television history.
For more than 60 years Hopgood has contributed to Australian theatre as an actor. His career began when he was six years old. Sent with his two older sisters to an Australian Broadcasting Commission revue at the Playhouse in Hobart where both of them were performing, he was called out of the audience to assist a comedian with one of his elaborate tricks. For the next five years the young Hopgood solved the problem for touring shows whenever they rolled into Hobart. As they were unable to bring children on tour, Hopgood picked up small roles.
The Winslow Boy: Hobart
Alan Hopgood, affectionately known as ‘Hoppy’ to his friends, was born in 1934 in the Tasmanian town of Launceston to Herbert Hopgood and Ella Palamountain, the youngest of their four children. The family moved to Hobart when Alan was five. His father, a woodwork teacher, died that year, 1939. Fortunately for the family, they lived in a magnificent house with 11 rooms, overlooking the harbour in Mount Stuart Road, Hobart, and Alan’s mother took in boarders. Alan attended Hobart High School. His family were church-going Methodists but when Alan was 11 he started attending evangelical Christian meetings. He took to preaching in the street and helping to pick up alcoholic men from the gutters in the evenings; he renounced the theatre, as any such activity, even going to the cinema, was regarded by his church associates as sinful.
A few years later Hopgood heard that Terrence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy would be staged in Hobart. He was offered the title role as Ronnie, and struggled with his conscience. His mother knew of the pleasure that acting gave her son and encouraged him to participate in the play. After praying for guidance, he decided to join the production. It meant breaking with his church. Not one of the friends from the evangelical congregation across the road from the Playhouse where he was performing, came to see him perform. Shortly after the production Hopgood left Hobart to board at Wesley College in Melbourne. For the teenager it was a brutal upheaval, leaving his family and friends behind: ‘All I had was acting’, he recalled for me in an interview. Hopgood’s English teacher A.A. Phillips took the young man under his wing and had a lasting influence on him in terms of his writing and thinking about Australian literature and theatre more generally. In 1950, when Hopgood was a pupil at Wesley, Angell Arthur Phillips published a significant essay on Australian cultural subservience, coining the phrase ‘the cultural cringe’.(1)
At the end of his school years Hopgood secured a scholarship to Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. For the next five years he threw himself into drama. He studied English and History and the Union Theatre became his second home. It was an extraordinary woman called Hana Pravda, an actress of Czech origins who gave Hopgood his first professional role at the Union Theatre Repertory Company (UTRC) a few years later. With no training as an actor Pravda put him through six weeks of private tuition at her home: ‘I did everything she said to do’, Alan recalls. Hana Pravda had studied with the Russian director Alexei Diki, had survived Auschwitz and escaped Bergen-Belsen, and made her way to Australia with her husband, actor George Pravda.(2)
Hana Pravda directed Hopgood in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1956. In offering him the role of George she displaced a professional actor who was indignant. In this production he played alongside George Pravda, Noel Ferrier, Barry Humphries, Frederick Parslow and others. Hopgood was lean and agile with an open, warm and friendly face. He had a prominent, sculpted nose and a mass of thick black hair and thick jet-black eyebrows. Hopgood played the harlequin in Thieves Carnival and appeared in Arsenic and Old Lace alongside George Ogilvie, Ron Pinnell and Robyn Ramsey. By this time Hopgood was working in the daytime as a high school English teacher.
In 1958 Hopgood appeared in the premiere of the Australian musical Lola Montez set on the Ballarat goldfields, under the direction of John Sumner and the writer of the musical play, Alan Burke. The contralto Justine Rettick played the leading lady and Neil Fitzpatrick played the smitten young gold miner. Critics welcomed the musical for its warmth and vibrant music, but criticised the dancing, sets and costumes. Hopgood played the role of a young gold prospector called Smith, and sang a solo called ‘Til Summer’s Been and Gone’ in a rich, deep and resonant voice. He travelled to Brisbane with a new cast later in the year, with Betty Pounder as choreographer and Hermia Boyd in charge of costume design. The play was recorded for ABC television in 1962 with Hopgood in his original role of Smith.
It was during the next production at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne that Hopgood’s career as a playwright began in earnest. George Kaufmann’s comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner ran for 14 weeks in 1963. The cast included Hopgood as Banjo, the Harpo Marx character, and Frank Thring as the old bully Sheridan Whiteside, as well as a large and talented cast that included Elspeth Ballantyne, Michael Duffield, Carmel Dunn, Marion Edward, a newcomer called Simon Chilvers and six choirboys. Its success meant that Sumner could take a holiday. But Sumner had nothing planned for the next production and appealed to Hopgood for anything he might have in draft. Hopgood had an idea for a play that he had been tossing around with Oscar Whitbread at the ABC. When Hopgood told Sumner about his play, he said ‘You wouldn’t understand it John because it’s about Australian Rules Football’. Sumner was an Englishman and unfamiliar with the code of football played in Melbourne but quick as a flash, thinking of the box office, and hearing the words ‘Australian Rules Football’, he said ‘When can I see the script?’ Hopgood spent a frantic week writing the play and the next time they spoke, Sumner announced: ‘We open in three weeks’.
Finding a Home in the Theatre: Melbourne
At the end of his school years Hopgood secured a scholarship to Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. For the next five years he threw himself into drama. He studied English and History and the Union Theatre became his second home. It was an extraordinary woman called Hana Pravda, an actress of Czech origins who gave Hopgood his first professional role at the Union Theatre Repertory Company (UTRC) a few years later. With no training as an actor Pravda put him through six weeks of private tuition at her home: ‘I did everything she said to do’, Alan recalls. Hana Pravda had studied with the Russian director Alexei Diki, had survived Auschwitz and escaped Bergen-Belsen, and made her way to Australia with her husband, actor George Pravda.(2)
Hana Pravda directed Hopgood in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1956. In offering him the role of George she displaced a professional actor who was indignant. In this production he played alongside George Pravda, Noel Ferrier, Barry Humphries, Frederick Parslow and others. Hopgood was lean and agile with an open, warm and friendly face. He had a prominent, sculpted nose and a mass of thick black hair and thick jet-black eyebrows. Hopgood played the harlequin in Thieves Carnival and appeared in Arsenic and Old Lace alongside George Ogilvie, Ron Pinnell and Robyn Ramsey. By this time Hopgood was working in the daytime as a high school English teacher.
In 1958 Hopgood appeared in the premiere of the Australian musical Lola Montez set on the Ballarat goldfields, under the direction of John Sumner and the writer of the musical play, Alan Burke. The contralto Justine Rettick played the leading lady and Neil Fitzpatrick played the smitten young gold miner. Critics welcomed the musical for its warmth and vibrant music, but criticised the dancing, sets and costumes. Hopgood played the role of a young gold prospector called Smith, and sang a solo called ‘Til Summer’s Been and Gone’ in a rich, deep and resonant voice. He travelled to Brisbane with a new cast later in the year, with Betty Pounder as choreographer and Hermia Boyd in charge of costume design. The play was recorded for ABC television in 1962 with Hopgood in his original role of Smith.
It was during the next production at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne that Hopgood’s career as a playwright began in earnest. George Kaufmann’s comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner ran for 14 weeks in 1963. The cast included Hopgood as Banjo, the Harpo Marx character, and Frank Thring as the old bully Sheridan Whiteside, as well as a large and talented cast that included Elspeth Ballantyne, Michael Duffield, Carmel Dunn, Marion Edward, a newcomer called Simon Chilvers and six choirboys. Its success meant that Sumner could take a holiday. But Sumner had nothing planned for the next production and appealed to Hopgood for anything he might have in draft. Hopgood had an idea for a play that he had been tossing around with Oscar Whitbread at the ABC. When Hopgood told Sumner about his play, he said ‘You wouldn’t understand it John because it’s about Australian Rules Football’. Sumner was an Englishman and unfamiliar with the code of football played in Melbourne but quick as a flash, thinking of the box office, and hearing the words ‘Australian Rules Football’, he said ‘When can I see the script?’ Hopgood spent a frantic week writing the play and the next time they spoke, Sumner announced: ‘We open in three weeks’.
Hopgood pioneered Australian comic play writing at a critical period in Australian theatrical history. And the Big Men Fly opened in June 1963 and was a huge box office success. The play premiered at a time when there was not very much local contemporary material available to directors. It was some 14 years before the premiere of David Williamson’s play The Club, in which some of the same satirical impulses found expression around a football club setting. Similarly The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in which the hero or anti-hero of the satire is a tall and comical ingénue abroad appeared in its initial comic strip incarnation in 1965 and the popular film in 1972.
The play builds on the tall story in Australian culture. As Katharine Brisbane notes, the play had its origin in the 'old style of comedy characterised by radio serials like Mrs 'Obbs and Dad and Dave'. (3) It is a bit like a yarn about Australian Rules Football, the code that was played in Victoria at the time and now played all over Australia. Sumner was hooked when he read the play and after Hopgood took him to see Melbourne playing during the rehearsal period. The gentle satire on the excesses of football culture presents an amusing story of a tall, gangly, laconic farmer called Achilles Jones, who is seen by a scout carrying his pet horse Millie across a paddock and dropkicking enormous bails of wheat. ‘Acky’ is an ingénue, a puritanical innocent. Reluctantly he agrees to join the Crows although he has never played football.
Hopgood’s acute observations of the extreme emotions expressed in football culture infuse the play and propel its comic energy and anarchic action. When Wally describes Achilles kicking a massive wheat bail he says ‘Honest! I saw him, with my own eyes. Oh. Those ankles, tough as Mallee roots. The boy’s sheer poetry’.(4) The play celebrates the Australian vernacular, the absurd behaviour of club officials in pursuit of victory, and pokes fun at so much of what drives the culture more generally. In some of the lines there is a more biting satire. For example when the play opens, the Club President JJ Forbes is on the phone berating the Club lawyer because he can’t extricate a player from another team: ‘Don’t talk ethics to me, you’re a lawyer arent’ you?... I don’t care if you have to rewrite the law books. That’s what we put you through University for!’ When Lil laments Achilles’ lack of interest in anything but ‘eatin’ and sleepin’ and his obsessive indulgence of his horse, Hopgood deftly satirises the limitations of life for young women. Hoping to do more than stay home cooking for Achilles she is disappointed when he suggests: ‘Ya can cook me some more of this, if ya like. It’s good. Lil’. She replies ‘Yeah, I know. My Mum taught me to cook, see. (pointedly) So I could take me place in the world, see’.(5)
Alan Hopgood as JJ Forbes in Hopgood's play And the Big Men Fly, Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne, 1963. Photograph by Fanfare Films. MTC copyright
Another tall story formed the plot of Hopgood’s next play commissioned by John Sumner for the Russell Street Theatre, called The Golden Legion of Cleaning Women, in which a group of office cleaners use information they piece together from waste paper baskets and overheard telephone calls to establish a business empire. It was another box office hit and ran for ten weeks. Apart from its satirical humour and intricate plot the play was significant because it focused on poorly paid workers and offered seven key roles for women.
Alan Hopgood’s next play Private Yuk Objects (1966) portrayed a family thrown into crisis when the younger son protests the draft and the older son is fighting in Vietnam. It was the first Australian play to dramatise the conflict around conscription of young men to serve in Vietnam and quite radically it attempted to capture the perspective of the Vietnamese and Vietcong.(6)
Hopgood conducted extensive research for the play, receiving some tuition in Vietnamese from a visiting student. It was an ambitious and risky play that mixes comic and straight modes. Various characters presented arguments for and against conscription, in support of and against Australian involvement in the war. In the autumn of 1966, 100,000 people protested in Melbourne against conscription. Private Yuk Objects opened on 6 September 1966 and shortly afterwards the Liberal Government (under Menzies the draft had been introduced) was returned with a new leader in Harold Holt and a huge margin of seats.
The critical reception for the play at the time was mixed. Reviewers praised the production and strong cast that included Julia Blake, Graeme Blundell, John Derum, Michael Duffield, Dennis Miller, George Whaley and Hopgood himself. But the houses were small, denting Sumner’s confidence in Hopgood as a writer and leaving Hopgood in limbo just two years after the success of his comic play And the Big Men Fly. The experience of acting in the play strengthened the resolve of actor Graeme Blundell to continue with political theatre in what was to become the rival camp: the Pram Factory. When John Sumner saw the success of David Williamson’s plays several years later at the Pram Factory he convinced Williamson to come over to Russell Street, commissioning Williamson’s play Jugglers Three, in which he presented the experience of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War.(7) Clearly Hopgood’s plays were ahead of their time.
Hopgood wrote for television early on in his career. He was one of a forward-thinking group of pioneers who experimented with writing for the new medium. For a short period he unhappily wrote for Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight, frustrated that his material was not often used. Later he was asked to ‘Australianise’ the scripts for the first Australian situation comedy, Barley Charley (1964) that had been written by two English writers, Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe. The two men had enjoyed huge success with On the Buses and Channel 9 brought them to Australia specifically to write the series.(8) Hopgood developed the script for the lavish production featuring Sheila Bradley, Robina Beard and Ted Hepple. Despite its popularity only one series was made.
Hopgood’s television play The Cheerful Cuckold was broadcast on the ABC in 1969. It presents a wry comedy about an ambitious university lecturer who worries about the effect his sexually demanding wife will have on his ability to finish his work on Tacitus. Hopgood played the ponderous, bespectacled lecturer and Sue Donovan played his young, frisky wife. It is a daring and hilarious play and won the first major Australian Writers Guild Award for a television play in 1969.
Alan Hopgood as the cuckold in Hopgood's ABC television play, The Cheerful Cuckold, 1969, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Tim Burstall instantly recognised the cinematic potential of Hopgood’s play Alvin Purple but the writer was shocked by the extent to which the production company ‘played merry hell with it’, making extensive changes to the story and the characters. For Hopgood it was a baptism of fire for a man used to the theatrical ‘triumverate: the director, the actors and the playwright. Sacrosanct. Not in film’, he recalls. In spite of his reservations about the changes to his original screenplay Hopgood could see the ingenious elements of the film: the casting of the skinny and googly-eyed actor Graeme Blundell rather than a brawny, macho actor in the role of the anti-hero and ‘sex symbol’ Alvin, the bicycle chases by school girls, the casting and direction of the many women actors, including Lynnette Curran and Jacki Weaver, and the performances of the actors Frederick Parslow and Dennis Miller. The film was a box office smash hit.
Hopgood was relieved to see that the television adaptation of his play And the Big Men Fly (1974) for the ABC remained more faithful to his original play. The series was a major success on television. John Hargreaves played Achilles Jones and Diane Craig played Lil. Hargreaves was a tall, athletic looking and conventionally handsome Sydney-based actor, who had never played Australian Rules Football. Hargreaves’ quiet approach to the role made some of the scenes particularly memorable. For example his gentle petting of his horse Millie as he kept up a conversation with the ageing quadruped brought both humour, warmth and whimsicality to the character. In the second series entitled And Here Comes Bucknuckle (1981), made in colour, Acky and Lil were played by Peter Curtin and Noni Hazlehurst.
Hopgood continued to write episodes of various television series such as Prisoner, The Flying Doctors, Pugwall, Blue Heelers and Neighbours and films such as The True Story of Eskimo Nell, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow and Pacific Banana. Throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s Hopgood appeared in numerous Australian television series, telemovies and feature films. His television credits include Matlock Police, Homicide, Skyways, All the Green Years, Prisoner, Neighbours, The Flying Doctors, The Petrov Affair and A Country Practice. He appeared in the feature films My Brilliant Career (1979), The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Evil Angels (1988).
Hopgood’s two-week stint playing a guest role in Bellbird in 1971 as Doctor Reed turned into six years in the popular series. He enjoyed this role partly because of the rapport he developed with his on-screen wife Maggie Millar: ‘It got to the point where we didn’t need a script … we’d do it in an off the cuff way … we had an amazing relationship and an understanding’ Hopgood recalls.
In 1993 at the age of 59 Hopgood was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hopgood had lost his father at five, his grandfather when he was seven and his mother when he was 17. Acting had always provided escape, nourishment and release for him. From his teenage years he had always been able to ‘lift and perform, as support for whatever lies ahead’.(9) He found the cat scans excruciating as he hates confined spaces, but recalls that his discipline as an actor saved him. Hopgood would shut his eyes and silently recite lines from The Emperor of the Ghetto, the moving monodrama by Avraham Cykiert that he had performed 150 times and for which he won the award of Best Actor at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in 1994.(10) Little did Hopgood know, as he performed the play about the Lodz Ghetto in Poland, that his acting mentor, Hana Pravda, all those years before, had been a survivor of Auschwitz.
Hopgood recovered and published a full and frank account of his illness, surgery and the psychological struggle he endured in accepting his cancer and facing the treatment. It is a compelling and candid work, in which he draws on his diary entries to recount the impact of the experience on his life.
In addition to the memoir Hopgood wrote a play about his experience of prostate cancer entitled For Better, For Worse. The play focuses on a central character called Des who opts for surgery to treat his cancer and is left impotent. Ingeniously Hopgood wrote the play in comic mode as a way of confronting the issues. The play is written for seven actors and premiered in Melbourne in 1997. For Hopgood the experience of cancer and the play he wrote about it marked a major transformation in his career as a writer and actor. The Cancer Council sponsored Hopgood to produce the play in a shortened form in a range of venues. Each staging of the play was followed by a question and answer session led by a General Practitioner or a medical specialist.
Hopgood went on to write ten plays about a range of health matters that have been performed in thousands of venues for specialist and for mixed audiences. The model of sponsored productions that Hopgood has created through his company, HealthPlay, is a highly innovative and effective theatre in education project, and offers an interesting form of verbatim theatre as well. Maggie Millar saw the first play and suggested that Hopgood write one about diabetes with the focus on women. A Pill, a Pump and a Needle is that play.
Each health play relies on first hand accounts and true stories. The scripts are checked by medical specialists for accuracy and cover a wide range of health issues such as the experiences of carers of alzheimers sufferers in The Carer (1999), death and bereavement in Wicked Widows (2006), men’s experience of aging in Never Too Old (2006), euthanasia and palliative care in Four Funerals in One Day (2007), men’s experience of diabetes in Six Degrees of Diabetes (2005), depression in My Dog has Stripes (2009), dementia in The Empty Chair (2011), the tragic repercussions of doctors bullying junior medical staff in Hear Me (2012) and Do You Know Me (2014) about aged care. Each play runs for 40 minutes and can be performed in any venue with a stage or raised dais. Hopgood has established an ensemble of professional actors including himself, who perform regularly in the plays.
The Carer is perhaps the best known of the health plays. It premiered in 1999 with Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell performing the monologue of George Parker, a recently widowed elderly man talking about the years he spent looking after his alzheimers-afflicted wife Josie. Over the next four years ‘Bud’ performed the role, giving 261 performances of the play throughout Australia. After ‘Bud’s death, Hopgood took over the role, which he originally wrote for himself.
Hopgood is a leading playwright, actor and health advocate in Australia who has contributed to the stage, television and film. Over the last ten years in addition to writing, directing and performing in his health plays, he has written other plays including Weary: The Story of Sir Edward Dunlop (2005), that toured to many theatres across Australia.
Alan Hopgood lives in Melbourne with his wife, Gay, of 50 years. They have two children, Fincina and Sam, and four grandchildren: Jackson, Harrison, Ashwyn and Darcy. Hopgood was made a member of the Order of Australia in 2005 for services to the performing arts as a playwright, actor, producer and for services to the community with regard to extending public understanding of health issues.
Hopgood as Rumkowski in Avraham Cykiert's play, The Emperor of the Ghetto, Fairfax Studio, Melb. 1993.
Footnotes
(1) A.A. Phillips ‘The Cultural Cringe’, Meanjin, vol. 9, no. 4, Summer 1950, 299-302.
(2) Diana Quay, ‘Hana Pravda’, Obituary, The Guardian, 18 July 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/jul/18/theatre
(3) Katharine Brisbane, 'Introduction' in Plays of the '60s, Sydney: Currency Press, 1999, p. vi.
(4)Alan Hopgood, And the Big Men Fly, Richmond Vic: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1978, 2.
(5) And the Big Men Fly, 8.
(6) Elizabeth Perkins points out that Alan Seymour’s play The Gaiety of Nations, staged in London in 1965, addressed ‘Australian involvement in Vietnam allegorically’. Her essay discusses a range of Australian plays that deal with the Vietnam war, beginning with Hopgood’s play: ‘Plays about the Vietnam War: the agon of the young’ in Veronica Kelly (ed.), Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 38-52.
(7) John Sumner, Recollections at Play: A Life in Australian Theatre, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993, 237.
(8) Technically the first Australian situation comedy was broadcast on HSV-7 in a live to air 15-minute per episode series called Take That in 1957, broadcast in Melbourne.
(9) Hopgood, Surviving Prostate Cancer: One Man’s Journey, Milson’s Point NSW: Random House, 2001, 7.
(10) Surviving Prostate Cancer, 21.
Image Credits
Header image: Alan Hopgood as JJ Forbes in Hopgood's play And the Big Men Fly, Russell Street Theatre, Melbourne, 1963. Photograph by Fanfare Films. MTC copyright.
Image one: Alan Hopgood with Anne Charleston in the ABC series Bellbird, 1971, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Courtesy of the ABC.
Image two: as header.
Image three: Alan Hopgood as the cuckold in Hopgood's ABC television play, The Cheerful Cuckold, 1969, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Courtesy of the ABC.
Image four: Hopgood as Rumkowski in Avraham Cykiert's play, The Emperor of the Ghetto, Fairfax Studio, Melb. 1993.
Finding a Home in the Theatre
At the end of his school years Hopgood secured a scholarship to Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. For the next five years he threw himself into drama. He studied English and History and the Union Theatre became his second home. It was an extraordinary woman called Hana Pravda, an actress of Czech origins who gave Hopgood his first professional role at the Union Theatre Repertory Company (UTRC) a few years later. With no training as an actor Pravda put him through six weeks of private tuition at her home: ‘I did everything she said to do’, Alan recalls. Hana Pravda had studied with the Russian director Alexei Diki, had survived Auschwitz and escaped Bergen-Belsen, and made her way to Australia with her husband, actor George Pravda.(2)
Hana Pravda directed Hopgood in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1956. In offering him the role of George she displaced a professional actor who was indignant. In this production he played alongside George Pravda, Noel Ferrier, Barry Humphries, Frederick Parslow and others. Hopgood was lean and agile with an open, warm and friendly face. He had a prominent, sculpted nose and a mass of thick black hair and thick jet-black eyebrows. Hopgood played the harlequin in Thieves Carnival and appeared in Arsenic and Old Lace alongside George Ogilvie, Ron Pinnell and Robyn Ramsey. By this time Hopgood was working in the daytime as a high school English teacher.
In 1958 Hopgood appeared in the premiere of the Australian musical Lola Montez set on the Ballarat goldfields, under the direction of John Sumner and the writer of the musical play, Alan Burke. The contralto Justine Rettick played the leading lady and Neil Fitzpatrick played the smitten young gold miner. Critics welcomed the musical for its warmth and vibrant music, but criticised the dancing, sets and costumes. Hopgood played the role of a young gold prospector called Smith, and sang a solo called ‘Til Summer’s Been and Gone’ in a rich, deep and resonant voice. He travelled to Brisbane with a new cast later in the year, with Betty Pounder as choreographer and Hermia Boyd in charge of costume design. The play was recorded for ABC television in 1962 with Hopgood in his original role of Smith.
It was during the next production at the Russell Street Theatre in Melbourne that Hopgood’s career as a playwright began in earnest. George Kaufmann’s comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner ran for 14 weeks in 1963. The cast included Hopgood as Banjo, the Harpo Marx character, and Frank Thring as the old bully Sheridan Whiteside, as well as a large and talented cast that included Elspeth Ballantyne, Michael Duffield, Carmel Dunn, Marion Edward, a newcomer called Simon Chilvers and six choirboys. Its success meant that Sumner could take a holiday. But Sumner had nothing planned for the next production and appealed to Hopgood for anything he might have in draft. Hopgood had an idea for a play that he had been tossing around with Oscar Whitbread at the ABC. When Hopgood told Sumner about his play, he said ‘You wouldn’t understand it John because it’s about Australian Rules Football’. Sumner was an Englishman and unfamiliar with the code of football played in Melbourne but quick as a flash, thinking of the box office, and hearing the words ‘Australian Rules Football’, he said ‘When can I see the script?’ Hopgood spent a frantic week writing the play and the next time they spoke, Sumner announced: ‘We open in three weeks’.
With Anne Charleston in the ABC series Bellbird