The Weekly Play

A weekly classic TV play. Used to be every Wednesdays, but now could be any time, any place and anywhere

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (1970)

26 November 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Anthony Hopkins in The Three Sisters

Although Chekhov’s slightly fallen out of favour these days, his work has featured in several TV productions over the years. One of the most notable versions of the 1900 play The Three Sisters was the BBC Play of the Month videotaped television production of 1970, directed by Cedric Messina.

The Three Sisters describes the lives and aspirations of the Prozorov family: sisters Olga (Eileen Atkins), Masha (Janet Suzman) and Irina (Michele Dotrice), and their brother Andrei (Anthony Hopkins). Brought up in Moscow but living in a provincial town for the past 11 years, the sisters dream of returning to the big city. However, the move never happens and the sisters are forced to find meaning in their current home.

Also starring Joss Ackland, the play is available on DVD but you can watch it below as it’s this week’s Wednesday Play.

The Wednesday Play: John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil (1974)

12 November 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

The economic history of Scotland since the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries may seem like a less than promising subject for a drama, but in the 1970s, anything went.

In 1973, John McGrath wrote the play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil, a touring production that went around Scotland explaining to the Scottish how they’d been oppressed and exploited from the 18th century all the way through to the discovery of and drilling for oil in the 1960s. Through a series of sketches, overlaid with a presentation of facts and statistics, and even interviews with workers and owners of oil rigs, the play presents the case that the current exploitation of Scottish natural resources is perhaps even worse than the brutal clearances of Patrick Sellar and that the Scottish people should resist it. 

Obviously, that didn’t happen and Scottish ownership of oil became a vital factor for both sides of the Scottish independence referendum this year. But in terms of interesting and innovative approach to storytelling, this piece of 70s agitprop, which went on to become a 1974 BBC Play For Today, is hard to beat. 

The Wednesday Play: William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1976)

5 November 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

It has to be said that as a rule, even when broadcasters had regular TV slots dedicated to plays, they had their biases: modern plays, often by ‘angry young men’ or left-wing progressives; Shakespeare; the occasional bit of Ibsen or Greek tragedy – these were all grist to the mill. Anything else? Somewhere between nothing and ‘once in a blue moon’. 

Restoration comedy falls into the last category. Although it did pop up once in a while – as a recent season at the BFI showed – the most people usually saw of it on TV was whenever John Sessions got asked to do it on Whose Line Is It Anyway? 

All the same, if you look hard enough, you’ll find the occasional example. In 1976, the BBC Play of the Month slot aired a production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. As you can probably guess from the slightly dodgy title – it’s a pun… – the original play was quite a lewd affair based on several plays by Molière, but adapted for London audiences. So outrageous did later generations find it that other than a later, 18th century sanitised version, it was kept off stage and out of print between 1753 and 1924.

The story has two main plot strands: a rake, who pretends to be impotent so he can have clandestine affairs with married women; and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young ‘country wife’, who discovers the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men. The 1976 version starred Helen Mirren, Anthony Andrews, Bernard Cribbins, Amanda Barrie, Ciaran Madden, Michael Cochrane, Jeremy Clyde, John Nettleton, Ann Beach and Sarah Porter – quite a cast for quite a play, and you can watch it below. Trivia fans might like to know that the play was also the inspiration for the movie Shampoo – bet you never knew that.

 

The Wednesday Play: Nigel Kneale’s The Road (1963)

29 October 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

The work of Nigel Kneale is some of the finest and most prophetic to have appeared on British TV. It was sufficiently good that he has been elevated to God-like status on this ‘ere blog.

However, for a large part of his career, television was regarded as an ephemeral medium, one that would be watched and then forgotten about, never to be revisited. Indeed, had his pioneering 1953 adaptation of 1984 not proven so controversial, its second performance would never have been telecorded and the whole thing would have been lost forever, rather than released on DVD to be enjoyed by subsequent generations.

Even once telerecording and then prerecording and filming, rather than live performance, became standard, broadcasters’ attitudes towards archive material was variable, with the BBC famously purging its archives in the 60s and 70s, bar ‘representative examples’ of particular shows.

Naturally, many of the corporation’s play strands were among the purges, which meant that several Nigel Kneale productions were ‘disappeared’. Among these is perhaps one of his best: The Road. His first piece for the BBC since Quatermass and the Pit, it is set in an 18th century village, whose inhabitants are haunted by visions and sounds along a nearby road. Are they ghosts, demons or something else? All is revealed at the end, in one of the most troubling revelations of Kneale’s entire body work.

The original, which starred Norman Kaye, Joy Mitchell, Alexander Archdale and others, is with us no more, unless somebody, somewhere has managed to save a copy that hasn’t yet been returned. But that doesn’t mean the script has gone. And if you have the script for a play, it can be re-performed, which is precisely what some fans of the original have done. And you can watch it below in this week’s Wednesday Play.

Enjoy!

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Psy Warriors (1981)

24 September 2014 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The war in Northern Ireland sparked much creativity from all sides of the conflict, including many famous plays. Perhaps one of the most interesting but also more generally targeted was Play For Today‘s Psy Warriors, written by David Leland and directed by Alan Clarke.

Originally written in 1978 for the theatre, it was inspired by Peter Watson’s book War on the Mind: the Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, and looks at the ethics of torture, asking how far society can torture and degrade prisoners in the name of democracy and freedom, flipping the situation somewhat by having a group of soldiers captured by terrorists. As well as the Northern Ireland issue, the play also considers Palestine and equally controversially included footage of an actual killing, as well as drawing from official reports and research into the physical and mental treatment of terrorist suspects.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it was broadcast on May 12 1981, the night that hunger striker Francis Hughes died and one week after the death of Bobby Sands.

Naturally, the play was of practically radioactive toxicity and getting it made was as much a matter of luck as anything else. According to Leland, “We only got it done because [producer] June Roberts had a slot and the money and the bottle to do it; everybody else bottled out.”

The TV version features a heavyweight cast including John Duttine, Derrick O’Connor, Warren Clarke and Colin Blakely (who was, of course, the interrogator in one of the most famous episodes of The Champions, The Interrogation). As well as Leland’s surprisingly witty script, the play is also particularly notable for Clarke’s direction, which uses space in disconcerting and unnaturalistic ways, showing off just how much is possible with a few interior, minimalist sets.