 |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
1983
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Sufficient Carbohydrate
|
|||||||||||||||||||
        |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Title: Sufficient Carbohydrate
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
Transmission Info: This was Potter's first original stage play and it received its premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, Swiss Cottage Centre, London on 7th December 1983. It transferred to the Albery Theatre on 31st January 1984. It has never been produced for television. It was, however, adapted by Potter and was broadcast as a Screen 2 film on BBC2 on 22 February 1987, under the title Visitors.
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
A
British businessman and his American counterpart take a holiday with
their wives on a Greek island.
They are both employed by the same multi-national food processing company.
The play explores the competitive relationship which develops between
the two men. Barker, the older man, has allowed his family business
to be taken over by the American-owned multi-national, Greenace. Vosper
is his senior colleague. Potter uses the scenario to express his long-standing
aversion to the inroads which global American commercial culture makes
on other cultures, England's in particular. (Compare this with Potter's
polemical writings in The Glittering Coffin and The Changing Forest.
In a typical outburst, Jack Barker sums this attitude up thus:
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
I have not been able to track any reviews of this play down so far.
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Although Potter had previously been approached to write material for the stage, he had been disinclined to do so as the theatre represented to him an arena which was not sufficiently accessible to all groups in society. Television, however, represented a more democratic "theatre of the people". According to Cook (1995:334) the National Theatre had commissioned a work in 1968 and the Oxford Playhouse had made a similar approach in 1976. As Cook points out, it was not until Potter's idealism about the role of television was diluted, and he began to diversify his work away from the medium, that Sufficient Carbohydrate appeared. Potter later adapted the play as the film produced by Piers Haggard for Screen Two transmission on BBC 2 Visitors. The script of the play was published by Faber and Faber in 1983 (ISBN 0 - 571 - 13261 - 8). The back cover blurb runs as follows: From the start the holiday seemed doomed to failure: two senior executives, at daggers drawn over company policy, are holidaying together with their families. Nobody, however, could have foreseen the eruptions that were to shatter the lives of the two families in the Greek idyll. ... The crisis in the play rests on a bitter conflict of wills between the two men, and yet there are episodes, too, of humour, with which the play is constantly jolted from its expected track.
The play was dedicated to Jane, Sarah and Robert, Potter's three children.
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Links | There is a plot summary of Visitors, written by Bhob Stewart, which appears on the Internet Movie Database here. | ||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
Dave Evans 1994 - 2005