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: The Woman in Black (1989)

19 February 2014 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

Okay, technically this is more a movie than a play, but given it’s an adaptation by Nigel Kneale, I’m going to let it off.

A 1983 horror novella written in gothic style by Susan Hill, The Woman in Black concerns a mysterious ghost that haunts an English seaside town, heralding the death of children. Largely an investigation by solicitor Arthur Kipps, it follows his attempts to discover who the mysterious woman he sees around town is. Let’s just say he’s not pleased by the discovery.

Adapted more recently by Hammer Horror with Daniel Radcliffe in the starring role and more famously as a play in the West End, where it’s the longest running show after The Mousetrap, it was adapted for television by Nigel Kneale back in 1989. Despite featuring Adrian Rawlins as an ‘Arthur Kidd’ (sic), it was a considerably more faithful adaptation than the movie or the play. And you can watch it below, preferably in the dark.

Enjoy!

The Wednesday Play: Headmaster (1974)

5 February 2014 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Nowadays, with such a rich past to look back on, most people assume you had to be a famous playwright to get a play produced by the BBC’s Play For Today strand. However, John Challen proved that a first attempt by an unknown writer could still make it to the screen. A teacher at an education college in Lincoln, Challen wrote Headmaster, addressed it to BBC Plays Department, and carried on teaching. Director Anthony Page read it, liked it, and asked to direct it.

That “modest achievement”, a result of what Challen called “the hurly burly” of teaching for over 20 years, sees Frank Windsor play the titular head of a school with an increasingly tenuous grip on his position. Intriguingly, given that that it was made 40 years ago, Headnaster shows how little has changed in teaching, given its focus on the conflict between old and modern teaching methods, as well as the eternal jockeying for position amongst teaching staff.

The play was popular enough to merit a six-part series in 1977, written by Challen and with Windsor and other cast members retained. You can watch it below. Enjoy!

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play: Land of Green Ginger (1973)

29 January 2014 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Hull’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The northern city, best known for fishing, has consistently been voted one of the worst places in Britain. Indeed, it was voted number 1 in the original ‘crap towns‘ survey. 

Not everyone thinks that, though (indeed, it’s going to be 2017’s City of Culture). Rather fabulous UK playwright Alan Plater (The Beiderbecke Affair et al) wrote a typically wry and semi-loving look at Hull in the 1973 Play for Today Land of Green Ginger. Named after a street in Hull, the play sees its heroine Sally Brown (Gwen Taylor) having to deal with the prospect of being sent abroad to work. So she returns home from London to Hull to see if she still feels the same attachment for her home town – and for her old boyfriend. Will she decide to take the job abroad or return to live with Mike in Hull?

The play shows us Hull through Sally’s eyes, giving us the good and the bad, just as she sees both the good and the bad in the city. It also gives us folk music from The Watersons. Whether that’s your cup of tea might well determine what you think of the play. Enjoy!

The Weekly Play

The Wednesday Play (on Thursday): Fable (1965)

23 January 2014 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Sometimes, plays can be used to illustrate a societal or political problem, through allegory or even fable. Sometimes, though, they can be too subtle for their own.

Fable, John Hopkins’ 1965 The Wednesday Play, was actually a rather daring piece – a commentary on race relations in the UK and South Africa that inverts the two countries’ societies to imagine a British racial apartheid, but one in which whites are the brutally oppressed, blacks the authoritarians running the system. Narrated by Keith Barron, the play contrasts the experiences of an oppressed white couple, Joan (Eileen Atkins) and Len (Ronald Lacey), with the middle-class, black, liberal writer Mark (Thomas Baptiste) living under house arrest with his wife Francesca (Barbara Assoon). As well as showing by analogy just how poorly black people were then treated by white people, it also castigated the efforts of white liberals in South Africa to challenge the regime, arguing that they showed little interest in doing anything except being self-righteous.

The play, which was also interspersed with stills and documentary footage of conflicts in South Africa, Vietnam and elsewhere, was powerful enough that its broadcast was initially postponed by several weeks because of fears that it would raise racial tensions in a forthcoming by-election in Leyton, East London, that involved a candidate who had previously lost his seat following a notoriously racist campaign in Birmingham. 

Disappointingly, however, the audience at the time didn’t quite understand Hopkins’ message. “I got a letter from a viewer which said ‘I really enjoyed that play. Boy, you showed them what would happen if they came to power, if they had the authority.’ He didn’t even need to specify who ‘they’ were.”

You can watch the play below, although unfortunately, this copy is from BBC4’s 2005 ‘TV on trial’ season, so involves a certain amount of on-screen ‘grafitti’. 

The Wednesday Christmas Play: A Warning To The Curious (1972)

18 December 2013 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

You’ve seen it recreated with PlayMobil figures, but with Christmas fast approaching, it’s time for the real thing: the BBC adaptation of MR James’ classic ghost story, A Warning To The Curious. Airing in 1972, it was the second of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas and was adapted by the marvellous Lawrence Gordon Clark. In it, Peter Vaughan is an amateur archaeologist looking for a particularly important English treasure. Unfortunately for him, he finds it and discovers it has a guardian…

With its marvellous atmosphere and stark seaside location, I think it’s the best of all the MR James adaptations that the BBC did and you can watch it below, you lucky people*. Enjoy!

* There is, apparently, a minor edit in this version. For the full version, there’s the marvellous BFI DVD, which includes Robert Hardy in The Stalls of Barchester.