In Potter’s parallel world

Press, 9 May 1980, Page 11

In Potter’s parallel world

‘‘Blue Remembered Hills,” this evening’s play on Television One, is a story of childhood pain. It emerged from the pain of an adult.

Written by Dennis Potter, the play has the sort of characteristic twist that has lifted Potter’s reputation beyond those of Alun Plater,' Colin Welland, Alan Ayckbourn, and a host of other talented writers, to the point where he is regarded as Britain’s leading television playwright. As in his acclaimed “Pennies from Heaven,” a bold dramatic device jolts the viewer into a new perspective. The characters in “Blue Remembered Hills” are all children; but they are played by adults. According to Potter, using children for the play might allow audiences “to dismiss them as just children. But using an adult body as a focus is like using a magnifying glass for certain behaviour patterns. When you dream of your childhood you are an adult in the dream. If children played the parts, the effect would be to distance the action. I wanted the immediacy and the vi-.

vacity of a dream in which you are as your are now,’

Potter’s point in the play is: “In childhood as in adulthood it is the innocent who get the bad deal; the weak are made weaker,” Potter’s lot in adulthood has been far from easy. The pen that produced “Stand Up for Nigel Barton,” “Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton,” “Son of Man,” and “Pennies from Heaven” writes wedged between crooked fingers and swollen knuckles.. Mentally, he has often been deeply depressed, as much from the side-effects of the drugs used to treat his illness as from the illness itself. He has long periods of nausea. Potter suffers from psoriatic arthropathy, a rare hereditary disease that attacks the joints and skin simultaneously, causing the joints to swell up, the skin to shed scales, to crack and bleed. He is to some extent ambivalent; towards it, clearly a scourge, but at the same time his “strange shadowy ally.” It set him. writing plays, _ , When the disease first;

struck, in 1964, it left him crushed, mentally and physically. Too weak to work, he resigned his job as a. journalist on the London "Sun,” forestalling the sack.

“I was depressed and ill and in pain. I found that my writing was a pass out of it. It was my way of maintaining my dignity. I didn’t want to' be an observer. 1 wanted to make my own things happen. The writing was a way of digging into myself. I was able to use the machinery of it to explore a different path, into myself and into the world I was trying to respond to.” The British Broadcasting Corporation bought his first play, “The Confidence Course,” and he then turned his experiences as a wor k i n g-class undergraduate at Oxford and as an unsuccessful Labour Parliamentary candidate to good use by writing two plays that established him as an important television dramatist, “Stand Up for Nigel Barton” and “Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton." ■ His illness continued to cripple him, but rather

than use it as an excuse to stop work, Potter turned it into an inspiration.

“Things. were frequently very difficult for me. I would just retire to a room and stay there. Writing was becoming increasingly painful I was very prickly and I didn’t want to be intruded upon.” He says this enforced loneliness, this turning inwards, brought him face to face, as it often does with people in hospital, with his spiritual, heroic side.

“My illness made me work for my pay cheque in the only way I could, by writing, so that is why I say that my illness chose me.

“The plays are nearly always abvout the same things. They are recognisably the same brain at work, I hope that they are about what goes on inside people’s heads. The trick is getting that out without actually saying that is what the characters are thinking. I am happy to break the naturalist mode, I don’t want to show life exactly as it is. I hope to show what life is about.”

By 1972 the disease which was incarcerating him in his rapidly deteriorating body reached a trough, He regularly missed the deadlines for his weekly television column in the “Newstatesman. ” He was placed on a course of steroids. “The skin closed around my fist, I could only move my left arm. I was clad in clothes which continually itched. I had gone into a fever and was suffering from a steroid reaction. I was under the illusion that there was a cat in the bed and that it was eating my ankles, I thought, it can’t be, you silly bugger, but I still believed it. I was in such hellish pain that I couldn’t tell which limb was which, ■ “The doctor came in the middle of the night and called an ambulance. I was taken, via a hospital in Cheltenham, to London where they gave me Misotrexic. It was a drug used for containing cancer. It was so toxic that I used to vomit two days of the week. I suffered total

nausea. diarrhoea and headaches.” After reading a profile of Pcrtter in “The Sunday Tunes,” published in 1976, a doctor contacted him. and recommended Razoxin, a later vintage of Misotrexic which had fewer and less severe side effects. The Dunlop Committee on Safety of Medicine deemed it unsafe to use except for cases of terminal cancer. Potter just managed to become a subject for the clinical trials.

“I experienced a state of total euphoria. There is damage done. My knees, hands and toes will never return to normal. But I felt as if the whole world had been washed clean, There was one side effect They make me infertile. At first I thought I was going to be impotent. I said, oh no, I would rather be sick, I also bruise very easily, But the ’ relief is marvellous. Since .then I have been going up to London much more. I am convivial again, I want to be much more concerned with my work.”

Within two weeks of using Razoxin. Potter had written “Pennies From Heaven,” a series of six musical plays which were both a critical and popular success. Building on this achievement he decided to take control of the production of his plays. He broke from the 8.8. C. after “Blue Remembered Hills,” which, despite its recent British Academy Award of Film and Television Arts Award, has still not been scheduled for repeat And he formed PFH, Ltd — the initials stand for Pennies From Heaven — with his regular producer, Kenith Trodd, and started filming an eight-play contract for London Weekend Television.

‘‘Blue Remembered Hills,” TVI tonight