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While Dennis Potter's final television drama, Cold Lazarus (Channel 4, 1996),
concluded with a traditional but very moving depiction of a heavenly afterlife,
his radical treatment of religious themes and symbols was a source of debate and
controversy throughout his career.
This is spectacularly true of Brimstone and Treacle (BBC, 1976; transmitted
1987), the first of three Potter plays scheduled for screening in April 1976.
Two weeks before transmission, however, Alasdair Milne, then Head of TV
Programmes, decided to withdraw and ultimately ban it, on the grounds that the
work was "brilliantly written and made, but nauseating". While the rape of a
mentally and physically handicapped woman remains inherently shocking, Potter's
darkly comic religious fable remains powerful without ever being gratuitous.
Although very compact (there are only three main speaking parts), Brimstone
is densely structured and at times wickedly funny. The title comes from an old
sulphur-based medicine, and likewise the play explores in religious terms how a
great, perhaps even demonic, evil can still bring about good. Through Martin
(Michael Kitchen, by turns impish and campy), the racist father (Denholm
Elliott) is confronted with the logical extension of his own reactionary beliefs
and finally recoils from them. The mother (Patricia Lawrence), despite the
ridiculing of her blind and naive religious beliefs, is apparently rewarded in
the end for her faith in her daughter's recuperative powers. The daughter,
through an appalling act, seems not so much 'cured' as forced to face the events
which led to her shock and subsequent retreat into catatonia.
This final aspect of the plot, revealed only in a split second at the play's
end, acts like the twist at the end of Potter's 'Traitor' (BBC, Play for Today, tx. 14/10/1971). More than just a final frisson, it obliges the viewer to
re-evaluate much of what has gone before, in this case linking a diabolical act
of rape to a paternal scene of infidelity; one with undeniable oedipal
overtones. Using Potter's recurring figure of an outsider or intruder as a
catalyst, the play leaves us wondering if one of the family was responsible for
conjuring up Martin. He is explicitly 'called' by both parents moments before
his arrival, while the ambiguous ending suggests that it might be the daughter's
own burgeoning recollection of her accident that we see build and develop in
detail and length throughout the play, Martin triggering its final and
devastatingly full revelation.
Sergio Angelini
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1. Which one? (3:07)
