SPACES OF TELEVISION

The final play in our season, ‘Dramatic Spaces: The Imaginative World of the Television Studio’ is Desert of Lies, written by Howard Brenton for television. The play interweaves the narratives of two expeditions to the Kalahari, one historical and one contemporary.In 1848 a family of Christian missionaries travel to the desert to find and civilize a mythical tribe of savages whose heads are in their stomachs.  Over a century later, in 1984 an explorer, George (Tim Wylton), leads a journalist, Sue (Cherie Lunghi) and a young man, Jake (Mick Ford), recently unemployed and up for the adventure, in an attempt to follow in the missionaries footsteps, to find out what happened and seek out the tribe. Neither group is able to cope with the harsh reality of the desert conditions: The missionaries are driven mad by the heat and solitude, and slowly perish through hunger and, in the case of Uncle Abel (Tom Bell in a stunning performance), alcoholism. In the modern group, George is fatally wounded after their jeep overturns, Jake eventually dies of thirst, and Sue, the sole survivor, is rescued by bushmen and bears a child by one of them, eventually returning to England but refusing to tell her story.  Brenton cleverly weaves in moments of great humour through two bushmen who observe the struggling group with amusement,  cleverly inverting Western voyeurism and paternalistic attitudes while introducing a welcome relief from the scenes of suffering: (“Who are these idiots?”/ “We could leave them food.”/”No, they won’t know what it is.”)

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The ‘Dramatic Spaces’ BFI Season continues with a double-bill of television plays directed by Alan Bridges, Miss Julie and Let’s Murder Vivaldi demonstrating how successfully entrapment and confrontation could be expressed through and within the studio. As well as sharing a director, the plays compliment each other particularly well as dramas about couples’ intense and twisted power dynamics, and their propensity to violently destroy each other verbally and physically. Whilst the phrase ‘sexual politics’ feels incongruous in this context (particularly about Miss Julie, written by August Strindberg in 1888) the intersection of gender, power and social values are central to both, with class conflict especially crucial to Miss Julie. The dangerous and socially-taboo nature of the plays’ subject matter is suggested by the fact that both productions discussed here underwent cuts, about which I will say more below.

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