When A Writer Has Condemned His Characters...
Watching PLAY FOR TODAY fifty years on
You may enjoy, as have I, PLAY FOR TODAY, the theatrical film series that ran on British television fifty years ago. The British Film Institute devotes this page to its fiftieth commemoration.
I've now watched perhaps 30 of them. Always superbly acted, any of these 300 plays are worth watching for that reason alone. The writing is generally worthwhile, certainly of a literate quality of construction far surpassing the drivel being filmed as television drama today; which is not, as a rule, theatrical, but rather filmic and rife with gimmickry designed to mask over the absence of theatrical depth. Americans last attempted one-off theatrical TV plays in the 1950s, but these were usually live performances in front of a camera and before an audience.
One can extract a lot of value from the watching of these filmed plays, even fifty years on. This film is a case in point. Here's what I took from watching one last night.
When a writer has condemned his characters to the personalities he has himself invested in them, there is no chance for expositional development that can enlighten his audience. I explain this below.
The depth of theatrical talent, actors especially, in the UK never ceases to amaze me. Americans have not had a live professional theater culture for at least fifty years. Those few theaters claiming to be professional that survive today do so only by the grace of government handouts redistributed from unwilling taxpayers compelled to pay or go to jail and in college theater programs (a cruel hoax on children who might think a theatrical career is possible and incur debt they struggle to repay). Without live theater in which to train and develop, it is no wonder that American films are populated by UK actors, even playing Americans. Why? Because they have the talent, the training and the experience. I wish I were wrong, but I can't think of an American actress on camera today capable of enacting a role such as that of Jean, as Lois Daines did so fluently and fetchingly in the TV play below. Perhaps you can think of one and, if you do, please let me know.
WEDNESDAY LOVE
Season 5, Episode 18 (1975)
In this play, two contemptible people each find in the other the mirror of themselves. The likeness so enamors them that they join in a union that solves or seems to solve for them all the problems that friendship and family somehow burden them with and which they, at heart, scorn. Fidelity is found only in each's unfaithfulness to others; and the selfishness of each is the most remarkable quality of otherwise bland and insignificant personalities. (The writer has made them so.) Each is joyless, heartless and very cruel, except to one another, in which they seem to delight, primarily sexually, but even more so ideationally -- because they have finally encountered their doppelganger. Each confirms the other.
The lines and the acting are immensely believable and very capably presented. Lois Daine has somehow made an unlikable character seem attractive and thoughtful until the very end, when the ugliness hidden deep in this woman's soul, briefly alluded to in scenes of disdain for her husband, comes out into the sunlight where it can be plainly witnessed. Quite a feat. I have never seen her before. Marvelous diction, entirely natural delivery and with facial expressiveness, especially in the eyes (which are stunningly beautiful) second to none. I'd watch her in anything.
But I'm afraid that the ideas in the script never get beyond the sordid awfulness of these fictional characters. Neither of the two discovers his or her true nature. There is no revelation, no opportunity for character growth; events do not precipitate a development in their conception of themselves. Rather, the characters lack the introspection in themselves that the writer seems to have in them -- but which for some reason he has not given to his main characters. He avoids explaining why they do not care about the effect their abrupt actions are sure to have on others whom they have -- for some unstated reason -- all along pretended to be friendly and faithful to. Is it vanity? An emptiness within? How have these fictional people developed into such seemingly common on the face, but unusually malevolent vipers at heart?
One can only conclude that they were born that way and indeed they were. They are fictional characters, after all, created to a purpose: To represent aspects of the writer's own ideas of the world. The writer fixed his two featured characters with personalities incapable of self-knowledge. The writer seems to say that the only revelation one might have is none at all. Thus, there is no revelation for the audience to discover in themselves. That makes this work a theatrical failure, an opportunity missed, for it can't possibly be theatrical to merely regurgitate the dross and dirt of real life without saving it by an intentional re-purposing for the better.
This dull ache is all rather dreary, a lot like the play's drab setting, and not something, at least from the perspective of ideas, I'd care to watch twice. One might claim that there are people just like this, but that is never a theatrical matter. Theater is fiction, after all, and none of its characters has ever been alive.
That said, you might watch Lois Daine just to see how she does it. Hers is a face with a silent film star quality that speaks in expressiveness, which films of the last 50 years have entirely edited out, replaced by bland role players, hard bodies and camera trickery.