I set out, from the ideas these things gave me to write a play which would give audiences an exciting theatrical experience even if they didn't get any deeper message.” Seymour claims this message was "that the scientific world is creating monsters to destroy itself.
"[2] In 1956 Swamp Creatures was highly commended in a competition for the best new Australian play held by the Journalists' Club and judged by the Playwrights' Advisory Board.
[5][6][7] Reviewing this production Lindsey Browne of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote play "packs more horrible fancies into four scenes than in any other horror show in recent memory...
"[8] Browne later wrote a profile on Seymour where he called Swamp Creatures a "nightmare play in the mood of slimy macabre" in which "there is a distinction of vision and writing for all of his failure to give taut order, meaning and design to horribleness.
"[12] Geoffrey Dutton wrote, "The play retains some interest as a product of the cold war period of the fifties, compounding fear by postulating that science could control life.
"[13] Leslie Rees, in his history of Australian playwriting, called the play: A hauntingly explorative drama with two separate compulsions—one as a bald but nightmarish thriller, the other as a symbol-drama warning with slow driving force against the impact of bizarrely experimental modern science on normal emotions, behaviour, and happiness... the play had a true theatrical interest in developing macabre situations and a slow-creeping miasma of fear.
There were ten initial members: Alan Seymour, Jeff Underhill, Richard Lane, Barbara Vernon, D'arcy Niland and Ruth Park, Gwen Meredith, Kay Keaveny, Peter Kenna and Coral Lansbury.
[24] Early Australian TV drama production was dominated by using imported scripts but in 1960 the ABC was undertaking what has been described as "an Australiana drive" of producing local stories.
"[28] Another Herald critic said the production "was at least successful in showing how a handful of characters can be marshalled to produce gripping theatre" but thought "the central issues are somewhat cloudily expressed.