Tag: Alan Bridges

Ingmar Bergman’s The Lie (1970)

JOHN WHEATCROFT

Play for Today / The Largest Theatre in the World Writer: Ingmar Bergman; Translated by Paul Britten Austin; Producer: Graeme McDonald; Director: Alan Bridges

‘The truth will tear us apart’

BTVD_TheLie_promopic1

There has been much talk recently about contemporary television producing drama superior to anything that the cinema currently has to offer. Any vestiges of snobbery about the supposed inferiority of the small screen have been snuffed out with directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Fincher choosing to work in television. Jane Campion, the New Zealander who directed An Angel at my Table and The Piano, said in an interview for The Times that TV is now producing the more pioneering work. Campion, who has directed a six-part crime thriller for television which was launched at Sundance and received its European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, said after seeing HBO’s Deadwood: ‘Who is commissioning this stuff? This is a revolution, something is really happening in television.’1 It does not follow of course that revolutionary film directors will have a big impact (Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire had mixed reviews) when they transfer their attentions to TV.

Ingmar Bergman’s first British television play The Lie is a historically interesting but modest piece of work. Historically interesting because of the play’s genesis: it was commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation on behalf of European members participating in ‘The Largest Theatre in the World’. This, the Radio Times explained, was ‘a project which enabled a play to be broadcast simultaneously in several languages across Europe.’2 The UK Play For Today version was directed by Alan Bridges; an American version was put out on CBS, directed by Alex Segal.3

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  1. Kate Muir, The Times, 12 February 2013, Times2 supplement, p. 9. ↩

  2. ‘Bergman’s British debut on TV’, Uncredited, Radio Times, 25-31 October, 1970. ↩

  3. Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius, The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Taschen, 2008), p. 441. ↩

Traitor (1971)

DAVID ROLINSON

Play for Today Writer: Dennis Potter; Director: Alan Bridges; Producer: Graeme McDonald
John le Mesurier with Dennis Potter (photo © Radio Times)

“I had to turn my back on all that I had been brought up to love…”

Western journalists visit Moscow to interview Adrian Harris (John Le Mesurier), a former controller in British intelligence who was also a Soviet agent passing on vital information, and who has now defected. Harris believes in both Communism and Englishness – he believes that he has betrayed “my class, yes… my country, no” – but the press find these beliefs incompatible, and want to find out why he became a “traitor”. Harris is plagued by anxieties over his actions and his upper-class childhood, and drinks to a state of collapse. Describing Traitor by using a synopsis gives the misleading impression that the play has a straightforward attitude to Harris’s psychology, just as its staging can be too easily seen as conventional – apart from a few filmed scenes and flashbacks, much of the play is based around dialogue-heavy confrontation on one set, which led some reviewers to find it “heavy going”, a “static and verbose” piece “long on self-conscious speeches and dialogue tussles which depended for their effectiveness upon liberal use of literary quotations”.1 It is no surprise that it was later remade for radio.2 However, Traitor is one of the most thematically ambitious of Dennis Potter’s early plays, tackling family psychology, patriotism and, through nuanced use of literary quotation, the way culture and institutions reinforce political values.

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  1. John Lawrence, ‘Play for Today: Traitor’, The Stage and Television Today, 21 October 1971, p. 14.  ↩

  2. Afternoon Theatre: Traitor, BBC Radio 4, tx 20 May 1981. Adapted and directed by Derek Hoddinott, it starred regular Potter collaborator Denholm Elliott and Ian Ogilvy. ↩

James MacTaggart

OLIVER WAKE

As a producer, director and writer of British television drama, James MacTaggart (1928-1974) was responsible for numerous stylistic experiments and technical innovations in the medium from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s. In a 17 year television career, he was responsible for over 130 television plays or episodes, a number that would have been much greater had it not been for his premature death. This counts drama only, but he was also prolific in non-fiction programming for both radio and television.

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