Dennis Potter

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Stirrings in Sheffield

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SOURCE: "Stirrings in Sheffield," in Plays and Players, Vol. 25, No. 3, Issue # 290, December, 1977, pp. 36-7.

[In the follwoing excerpt, Allen reviews a stage production of Brimstone and Treacle, examining the play's premise, its characters and the production itself.]

Brimstone and treacle is apparently what the Victorians, stern administrators of all kinds of purgative, dosed themselves with in cases of constipation: the brimstone to do the job, the treacle to make the medicine go down. What if, so far as the swallower is concerned, they become as one? The medicine in Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (much publicised on account of its having been commissioned then rejected by BBC TV) comes in the form of a young man smelling faintly of sulphur, rather given to 'tempting' talk, quite capable of delivering the goodies of the kingdoms of the earth, and with the unctuous air of a curate who has caught his bishop fiddling the tax returns. Treacly.

Is he the devil? The stage direction says: Martin is, or imagines himself to be, a demon. It is more helpful than it seems: Potter's concern is with good and evil—larger concepts than a generation which limits itself to talk of lifestyle, situational ethics and social progress is comfortable with—and in particular with the ambiguities in the relationship between good and evil.

Thus Martin, having got himself into a house where Mr and Mrs Bates are slowly being driven mad by the strain of looking after a daughter turned into a vegetable by a car accident, takes the pressure off them at once; but when he has got them out of the house he rapes the paralysed and gibbering victim: surely an act of extreme evil? Yes, but. When he does it again her brain is restored: it was shock, not physical injury, which kept her prisoner. So, a happy ending? Again, yes but. As she comes round she sees her father and remembers his part in her accident—she dashed out into the street after seeing him with her girlfriend, a girl we have just heard him describe as a slut. The moral complexity goes further. The father is, apparently, a puritan of sorts, suspicious of Martin at once (and in a sense rightly so). He flirts with the National Front, but it is Martin's relish for the destructive and hate-filled logic of NF policies that pulls him back from it. Mumsie is an apparently silly suburban housewife at the end of her tether. But she has faith and trust and a kind of simple goodness that are in fact repaid. Who is the stronger?

David Leland's production of this deep and complicated (though sometimes sloppily written) play gives the Crucible Studio's New Play Festival an impressive start. Where Potter's effects are betrayed they are by his own obsession with forging a sense of complicity between Martin and the audience, and by the furore which was attached to the play's history: we needed to be shocked, badly, by the central rape scene and we knew too much about it. But there are four very good performances from Sean Scanlan (Martin), Christopher Hancock and Ann Windsor (the parents) and Adrienne Byrne as the girl. Adrienne Byrne is required to spend the play writhing and moaning, but both moves and sounds are very specifically scripted and for good reasons and the performance is a very strange kind of tour de force.

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