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JOHN COOK: I can detect a clear shift in your work from the sixties and ... the early seventies and then there’s a shift. It’s detectable only if you read the script of Joe’s Ark and then in '76, that package of plays you did for the BBC, there is a certain optimism perhaps, progression, beginning to - ? DENNIS POTTER: I don’t know but '77, yes - February '77 I went into Guys and they put me on what then seemed then to be an absolute miracle drug, now withdrawn because it had all sorts of problems happened ... Razoxane - ICRF 159, part of that Imperial Cancer Research Fund Drug Programme. So I was admitted onto a clinical trial much to the resentment of the doctors at Guys because the Professor, whose name I have forgotten, Goldman or something like that, who had synthesised this drug had read something about me and he wrote to me and arranged for me to go and see the dermatologist at Guys, who, you know, whose programme was all set up and he didn’t actually want to let me in but because it was the guy who had invented the drug, I suppose, they were compelled to - but it did look a bit like queue-jumping or something, I think. But for a few years after that, I was virtually clear - no arthritic pains and my skin was clear - it was amazing ... but then all the complications started. JC: What, was it carcinogenic, was it? DP: No, well it’s used to treat ... what it did ... it started ... it actually grew something on - I mean I had to twice have something cut off - the worst possible place, right in the middle of my penis. It also took by white blood count down to nil - neutropaenia which means you’re walking around and just the smallest infection would knock you straight out, you. So they withdrew it and of course when they withdrew it I went into a cataclysmic eruption - everything - JC: When was this, roughly? DP: Em, '83. JC: '83 - so that was another low. DP: '83 through to the Spring of '84 when I went onto this other drug - combination of drugs, the basic one of which was etrethinate, which was another new drug. And that would hold it for six months and then I would have these three month attacks in which literally I would look like a monster when it happened - 100% psoriasis and you also lose control obviously of your temperature, halfway between hallucination and, and whatever. But also you simply can't operate, you cannot move, you cannot think, I mean you’re just like a monster there lying in the corner of the room. And so October of '88 I went back onto methotrexate which is the old cytotoxic drug and I’ve been on it ever since and that enabled me to direct Blackeyes. But now they’re telling me I’ve got to come off it ... because of the bone marrow damage and all those things. I’m going to try another one very shortly, within a month, hydroxyurea which is when you said about ‘you’re doing something at the BBC in October’ ... JC: If all goes well ... Well, anyway (enough of this looking at the life of an author), to look at the texts, the plays and to talk about them as divorced from the illness which may or may not have something to do with it, the progression that I see in the work from the seventies, now do you say aye or nay to this, that round about '72/ '73 seems to me the darkest period in your work in a sense - DP: What came out then? I don’t remember - JC: Only Make Believe, Hide and Seek, Follow The Yellow Brick Road and then '74 - you talk in the introduction in Waiting For The Boat of a movement in your work to a kind of ‘cheerful brutality’ (in quotes, your phrase) and then '76 it looks to me, you know that package of three plays, Brimstone and Treacle of course, there’s a movement and it carries through Pennies From Heaven, Blue Remembered Hills, a movement if you like from dark to light in a sense or to put it crudely from bad endings to happy endings. DP: Maybe, yeah. You see it more gradually than I do - I see it as - '77, um, as they were administering Razoxane and I was at Guys, I started Pennies. I see that as the change. Maybe you can see it changing before then but I don’t. JC: Well, maybe I should say what are my grounds for this. It looks to me that package of plays in 1976 is crucial because you said at the time and it was a justification against the banning of Brimstone and Treacle that they all ‘occupy the same territory’. DP: Well that’s me special pleading. What I believe .. I believe all of them, not just those, all of them occupy the same territory. But listen I will be a lawyer when I have to be. I will argue a case simply because the only way that I’ve been able to make sure that what I want to do happens is that I’ve been offensive to people, I’ve argued, I’ve punched on, I’ve argued on the balls of my feet as it were. I'd say anything, do anything in order to - so sometimes these things come back at me as quotes and I think, did I say that, torn out of the context in which I was arguing for my life, as it were. JC: But they do in a sense occupy the same territory and it’s this really that ... it’s a recognition perhaps that the writer is to blame instead of the world. DP: The visitor thing - no, the thing is they were as a trilogy, allegedly, and I was giving more specific reasons than actually existed for - it was another argument against banning one of the three, you know. It’s a method of polemic which I won’t hesitate to use and journalism and all those things ... I don’t have, I believe, the same constraints, the same necessities for truth as the plays do. What I say about them and what they are, are not necessarily the same thing. JC: But (that word 'but'), Where Adam Stood, it seems to me, the throwing off of a kind of puritanical thing which is life-threatening in a way. In order to survive, something has be to jettisoned - now that doesn’t mean you abandon religion completely but it does mean that you throw off that Puritanical - DP: Other people’s interpretation of it, yes. And that you have to assert something about yourself in order to be yourself and when the child put the chair against the door - that said what the whole book had said - I will be me, said the child. JC: And then Brimstone and Treacle, similar theme, that the holder of the puritanical beliefs, the Bates character, the Denholm Elliot character, is the one who’s to blame in a sense, if you read the play as a metaphor for incest. DP: Well I think Brimstone had more connections with that Schmoedipus, [coughs] the visitor outside who you know comes in and transforms. Brimstone and Treacle was my only explicitly, utterly religious play - I mean it was the only one where I dropped my guard. If, as I said, I think at the time, if it had been about an angel visiting the house nobody would, you would just have a piece of sentimentality so I thought well how do you make ... JC: You already did a play about an angel ... DP: Well, a sort of angel, yes. How do you flip that round, how do you make people see what people meant when they said, used the language ‘angels’ and ‘devils’. And there’s one person in that play who has total religious belief so I loaded the dice in exactly the same way as making it a devil instead of an angel and made her stupid. But she’s the only one whose prayer is answered - the mother, Mrs Bates. The puritanical - he’s puritanical not because of religious belief but because of sexual fear, his own, fear of his own sexuality - whereas she, Mrs Bates, is stupid and conventional and yet utterly believes. I mean, she falls for Martin, the devil, the visiting monster, because he speaks in terms of religious hope and she prays that Pattie will recover and speak. Pattie does recover and does speak, which is you know - JC: But what she speaks is ‘How could you?’ DP: What she speaks is an accusation, i.e. one miracle always leads to problems, you know, like Lazarus as I said had to die again. JC: Right. But the father ... it seems to me, I mean, we can read the play as a metaphor for incest, in a sense ... the father ... DP: Well, you could. You could if you were extraordinarily stupid. (laughter) You could. But I just believe it was an inverted parable, erm, ... It's the only time I've ever sat down and said to myself, "Right, I'm erm, round about page seventeen or so, knowing - not saying to myself as an instruction - knowing that I was writing a religious play. JC: - A morality play - DP: No, no, no - morality play says how to behave, which I wasn’t doing - a religious play, one using religion as the wound, one using religion as, you know, that world behind the world that these forces - Evil, Good - contend. And they don’t contend where ‘the Good’ has all the good lines and ‘the Bad’ is the sort of - it was a mix which is what I believe it is like, occupying a religious sensibility, it is like that. You know, contending forces fight within and they’re not recognisable, you don’t know which is which. Except she knew, Mrs Bates knew, in some odd way. You know, the weakness of the play was maybe that I caricatured her too much. But I knew what I was trying to do which was to make the one genuinely good person in it a fool. So you couldn’t get a handle on it. Just like with religion, you can’t a handle on it, you just have to know or not know, people either believe or they don’t believe. So that was a sort of experiment, a parable if you like. JC: And then of course Double Dare as well. Again it seems to me to occupy a similar territory - DP: How do you reckon that fits in then? (Sorry I’ve got a split lip) JC: Well, the writer in a sense is to blame. I’m thinking about the very end where it turns out - DP: No, that character, why is the writer - oh, he is a writer, yeah, that’s true. JC: He’s a writer of television plays. Called Martin. DP: Is he called Martin? JC: I think so yes. DP: Really? God, I’m such a lazy writer - I can’t even think up new names. JC: Well, there’s quite a few Martins ... DP: Are there?
DP: Well, that’s two. JC: Three. DP: Three? [...] JC: I think there's a Martin character in Ticket to Ride as well. [...] Now, you can see why people like John Wyver might start to engage in reductionist criticism. Whereas you say it's simply a case of being a lazy writer ... DP: It's just that when I think of names ... when I think of names, usually from ...the landlord of the Globe Inn at Berry Hill - his surname was Martin. And it's as simple as that. JC: Some people might think of significances like ... DP: Well, there aren't any. JC: - Martin, martian - look it up in the dictionary - erm Martin is ... DP: Yeah ...Well there's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Usually because they can't write fiction ... because they can't write creatively, as I would put it, they put their impulse into their analysis of work ... JC: And compensate for it? DP: Mmm. JC: So there's Double Dare, to come back to the play, the writer is ..... discovers that he has murdered the actress ... DP: Yeah. JC: - and it’s not going on in the next room. So once more you have a package of three plays, each - DP: Well, it is going on and it isn’t going on - the thing is about the imagination is that by the very act of putting it down, of getting it out of yourself, there must be something of that in you ... and that creating monsters and villains and obsessed and tormented people must in some sense come out of, there must be some truth in one’s own imagination that is complicit with that and that interests me. I mean the whole non-naturalistic, no, the whole way in which we create metaphors, stories, images, parables, it interests me in that it isn’t, shouldn’t be seen as, the God-like Author laying down quote ‘the Truth’ unquote, it’s very much more complicated than that and very much more interesting than that. And it’s also, the whole of postmodernism, the whole sensibility of the way we receive works of fiction has changed anyway so whether through pyschoanalysis, whether through, you know, the things that actually destroyed the novel, the advances that the novel made - Joyce, Virginia Woolf and so on - has made the whole idea of the nineteenth century novelist producing the nineteenth century novel separate from himself or herself (himself usually, leaving aside George Eliot) is critically impossible, psychologically impossible, socially impossible to receive now. There has to be an interplay between the two - that interplay I have chosen to use in a sort of quasi-autobiographical mode in order to ram it home about responsibility. JC: So in a sense it’s children’s games is it? Double Dare is a child’s game ... Hide and Seek? DP: Yeah, I suppose that’s true too, yeah. I hadn’t thought of that, yeah. JC: Haven’t thought of that? You see in a sense you’re fictionalising - DP: Heh, heh - well, the thing is, the work is the work is the work. Sooner or later I’m going to disappear behind it and be elusive about it because I’m not in the business of explaining myself as a person to anyone, you know. JC: So the work is a personal act, then in that sense? DP: Well, of course it is - ... JC: ... because if I try and look at the work, then you feel - DP: I’m sorry, you’re so Scottish I could smash your face in! You see, what you’re saying is true and not true - it’s like getting hold of, it’s nuances, it’s half-emphases, it’s half, it’s, it’s too plodding, heavy footed to say ‘Ah!’ Also it’s extremely dangerous to me because if I start thinking like that (and I don't think like that) then I'll start being conscious of it when I’m writing. Whereas I’d rather be conscious of it after I’ve finished a piece and say ‘Oh yes, I see, I see those connections, I see that’, you know, those personal connections I mean. The connections I’m always aware of, as I said some time ago - that is what I set out to do. I believed it possible to do that. That may have been just sort of sheer bravado or absolute, you know, economic, I mean just sort of suicidally foolish thing to believe but somehow or other I’ve managed to keep that going. JC: I do get a sense, from certainly some of your recent interviews and even the John Wyver one that was in The New Statesman, that there is a slight fear of going into, I think this is your phrase, of digging up the soil, the roots of it - DP: Yeah, well I think that’s very dangerous - I also believe and I think it was in that Wyver, New Statesman interview ... think it was that, yeah ...saying that the closer writing approaches to therapy the worse it becomes. I believe that passionately. So you’ve got to have that ruthless discipline about whether you’re doing this to ease and soothe or as a balm to your own soul or not. I mean I’ve destroyed lots of things where I felt that was happening. But if I’m led by questions or collisions of coincidence, events and apparent similarities being drawn out too explicitly then my writing hand is going to seize up. Because the very delicacy of, the very danger, the delicate danger of both dealing and not dealing with what are certainly medically, geographically, age terms, socially, all those things true of myself and also some of my fantasies, some of my feelings which I believe every adult person has, which is a mix - your head is a kind of warring with and battling with, is open to all sorts of things that the normal social self represses, which a writer cannot, or can only do so at a great cost. On the other hand, ‘just letting it out’ is one of the definitions of bad art too. So there’s always that monitoring eye but I don’t want the monitoring eye clouded by too ready an acknowledgement of the things you’re asking ... which is probably why I didn’t respond when you said you wanted to, because I thought what’s this, people write to me all the time saying they’ve seen connections with this and that and can they come and see me - people from America, people from Holland, people God knows where and I don’t even answer the letters. I think, no, sorry - JC: You have spoken to some people, though, haven’t you? DP: Not many. Like who? JC: Well, all I’m going on is from hearsay - I know you’ve spoken to John Wyver and I’ve met - DP: Yeah, John Wyver, yeah - I had to, yeah. JC: Clare Douglas said you had spoken to someone from America, Holland or - No? DP: No. JC: So you haven’t spoken to anyone? DP: No. JC: So I'm privileged now. DP: Well no, it’s just ... I mean suddenly I see - you know, people said like Clare said to me and then somebody else ... oh yeah, I had a letter from Christopher Mayhew, Lord Mayhew which I didn’t answer, saying - JC: That was me - that was to do with me - DP: No, no, he, that’s right. And I thought Christ this little shit is burrowing here, there and everywhere. I better see him, you know. JC: However, I mean this is the nature of the game in a sense, as critics - I’m not a critic but - DP: Ah but you wanna be, don’t you? JC: No, I don't want to be ... DP: Something horrible is happening, burgeoning within you. Watch it. Cut it out, cut it out. JC: (laughter) I’ve been forced into this. No I mean you in a sense were a critic, a TV critic - DP: In a sense, Mmm. JC: - Although I know you talk about, go on about the nature of television criticism. Again, the critic has to play a game of hide and seek in that sense - DP: You’re obviously - I can see your opening sentence, I mean nothing I can say is going stop you, I mean even physical violence is not going to stop you, will it? All right, you’re attracted by this concept of hide and seek, all right that’s fair enough for a little way. It has some relevance. But to love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there. JC: Well, I’m sensitive to the fact that you are still a working writer and that long may you be - DP: Well, maybe, yes. JC: - And that there is an element of danger, I mean even in you speaking to me - DP: Mmm, there is, yes. JC: In that sense.
But I think you can do it, I think you can handle it.
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index Conceived, written, launched and maintained by Dave Evans.
Dave Evans 1997
John R. Cook 1990
