Secrets and truths

How TV screenwriter Dennis Potter created a career of controversy

by Steve Vineberg

"DENNIS POTTER: THE SINGING SCREENWRITER." At the Museum of Fine Arts, through March 1.

Dennis Potter, who wrote his first scripts in the mid '60s and died of cancer in 1994, spent most of his career creating plays for television. But, God, he thought big. The remarkable retrospective of his BBC work that's being shown over the next month at the Museum of Fine Arts includes six miniseries, including two, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, that he tossed off in the final months before his death; two are period pieces, one is set three centuries in the future, and all of them are intricately -- you might say compulsively -- multi-plotted. The collection also includes nine single-episode TV plays ranging in length from 50 to 80 minutes. And though the MFA has gathered most of his output, there's actually even more. (A Life in Television, the hour-long obituary the BBC ran on Potter, which is being screened on February 14, has excerpts from two others.) And that doesn't take into account his screenplays, which include adaptations of two of his TV dramas, Pennies from Heaven and Brimstone and Treacle, and the haunting 1985 Dreamchild, a study of the relationship between Lewis Carroll and the child on whom he modeled Alice in Wonderland.

The series is invaluable for American admirers of Potter, who have had to catch his work in glimpses. Pennies from Heaven was televised here in 1979, two years before Herbert Ross's spectacular movie version came out (with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in roles originated by Bob Hoskins and Cheryl Campbell), and has shown up occasionally since, though never nationwide. (The MFA screens all six parts on February 1.) Cream in My Coffee (March 1), with its amazing performances by Peggy Ashcroft and Lionel Jeffries as an aging couple revisiting the scene of their first holiday together, has been seen here only briefly. Mostly Potter is known in this country for his most splendiferous achievement, 1986's The Singing Detective (February 8). All the other offerings in the series will be new to local viewers.

His techniques and obsessions won't be. What's most fascinating about seeing so much of Potter's work together is discovering how much of a piece it is. He rethought the same themes and dramatic ideas over and over; the posthumously produced Karaoke (January 31 and again February 22) is a compendium of them, with Albert Finney playing a dying TV writer in the style of Michael Gambon's Philip Marlow, the ailing, tormented mystery author who doubles as his own favorite hero, the Singing Detective. Early Potters are blueprints for later ones. The ferocious schoolteacher who terrorizes young Philip in The Singing Detective is already present in his first, impressive teleplay, Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965) -- where she's even played by the same actress, Janet Henfrey. The miners' children -- from the Forest of Dean, like Potter himself -- whom she bullies in Stand Up, Nigel Barton surface again in Blue Remembered Hills (February 17) before making their final appearance in The Singing Detective. David Peters (played by Ian Holm in a tour de force performance in the compelling Moonlight on the Highway, on February 21), the profoundly damaged young man who uses the ballads of the bland-faced '30s crooner Al Bowlly to tamp down the memories of his childhood sexual abuse, is the origin of both Arthur the hapless song salesman and his creepy alter ego, the Accordion Man, in Pennies from Heaven. (The TV Pennies makes the links between these two characters frighteningly clear -- and you're not likely to forget Kenneth Colley, with his pale, stricken face, his stringy hair, and his cruel stutter, as the Accordion Man.)

Potter's most celebrated theme is emotional displacement and the role popular song plays in that process. As well as Moonlight on the Highway, Pennies, and The Singing Detective, the Suez-set Lipstick on Your Collar (February 15) mines this territory -- though not well. (Except for the futuristic Cold Lazarus, which screens February 7 and 22, it's the most dislikable entry in the series.) And then, of course, he treats the tyranny of childhood repeatedly (giving it a somewhat different twist in Where Adam Stood, which is based on Edmund Gosse's memoir and screens February 17). He also loves to explore the concept of life review (which we get in Cream in My Coffee and his Dreamchild film, and again, in a different key, in Karaoke) and the inescapable claims of class: Cream in My Coffee, The Singing Detective, and the Nigel Barton plays. (The sequel, Vote, Vote, Vote, for Nigel Barton, will be screened with the first on February 14.)

Although you can hear, in the early plays, the echoes you might expect in a young writer starting out in the '60s -- the influences of John Osborne (in the Nigel Barton dramas) and Harold Pinter (Double Dare, February 28) -- Potter's distinctive dramaturgical approach draws on Brechtian techniques. The performers lip-synch to pop songs, adult actors take child roles, characters and situations double each other, commenting on each other and on the theatrical process. The paranoiac heroes of Double Dare, The Singing Detective, and Karaoke are all writers; the hero of Follow the Yellow Brick Road (February 21), like the character Kika Markham plays in Double Dare, is a TV actor who's appeared in a famous commercial. It's amusing to think how much Brecht would have despised Potter's aims, though. Potter's a committed Freudian, and the subject of his ongoing psychoanalysis is himself -- a TV writer like Martin Ellis, the character Alan Dobie plays in Double Dare, a willing but rueful refugee from the Forest of Dean like Nigel Barton and Philip Marlow, a sometime sufferer from psoriatric arthritis like Marlow, and finally a cancer casualty like Daniel Feeld in Karaoke.

Americans are mostly so blithely unaware of screen and television writers -- unless, like Woody Allen, they write for and direct themselves -- that the concept of a TV author who played his whole life out on the small screen is weird to us, maybe even a little baffling. But though that genre of writing is much higher profile in Britain, the nakedness of Potter's autobiographical pieces must have been a rude jolt for his BBC audiences, because there's no legacy of confessionals in English letters as there is in ours. (That may partly explain the excitement that a small but persistent American audience felt in The Singing Detective.) In fact, Potter was controversial in England throughout his career, for a variety of reasons. His tactics were often assaultive -- to both good effect (The Singing Detective) and bad (Blue Remembered Hills, a repugnant and monotonous little play that recycles ideas any high-schooler knows from Lord of the Flies). He was relentless: the marital tensions and the horrors of aging telescoped in Cream in My Coffee are barely mitigated by the flashback scenes, to the couple in their youth in the '30s, and though the writing is beautifully detailed, it's so close up that you may feel pinioned by it. Of course, Cream in My Coffee isn't the first or the last time Potter trained his eye on the intricacies of subject matter audiences would probably have preferred not to think about -- like Marlow's skin disease and David Peters's sexual abuse. You could say his work isn't for the squeamish: in Moonlight on the Highway, the leering, mustachio'd face of David's assailant comes into close-up to the strains of Lover, Come Back to Me.

One time his taste for the outré got his work shelved for a decade. Brimstone and Treacle was produced in 1976 but not shown until 1987 -- several years after the movie version had opened and closed. Since I was familiar only with the film -- which I hated -- the original teleplay was a surprise to me: it's a black comedy so audacious it makes you gasp. Denholm Elliott (whose fine work opposite Billie Whitelaw in the otherwise forgettable Follow the Yellow Brick Road is also worth checking out) and Patricia Lawrence play the parents of a young woman (Michelle Newell) who's been injured in a car accident and left babbling and incompetent, to all effects a vegetable. Michael Kitchen, giving a brilliant performance, is the young man who worms his way into their home, claiming to be an art-school suitor of their daughter's, recently returned from America and so devoted to his former sweetheart that he's willing to become her full-time nurse.

The play begins in the realm of Peter Nichols's A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and then adds a supernatural element: the Kitchen character, who goes by the name Martin Taylor, is actually a demon, down to his clawed toes. (He chews mints to cover the smell of sulfur.) Brimstone and Treacle is a cockeyed Faust story in which the middle-class couple make their separate pacts with the devil without even realizing they're doing it: he flatters Mrs. Bates's sentimentality and Mr. Bates's racism, fanning the flames as they turn their daughter over to him. (The mysterious conclusion suggests Potter has been up to something else too, but I'm not sure exactly what.) This play, directed with tonal precision by Barry Davis, is astonishingly good -- hilarious and unsettling. It shows Dennis Potter at his stinging, outrageous best.