Screenplays
[Where available, these are play scripts, not recordings.]
SS RESPONSIBILITY, 30 minute TV drama, 1969.
March 1943, North Atlantic, a merchantman undertaking naval transport duties. German U-boats are destroying our Merchant Fleet at will. The United States agree to lease us any old tubs they can spare. Engineer Officer Andrew Patterson has experience of coal-firing & is duly sent to pick up an ancient hulk laughably called a Liberty Ship. Three days out, he finds the on-deck officers have abandoned ship without informing the sweaty fellows in the Engine Room. Patterson mans the bridge & sails the vessel with the only crew left to him, a handful of polyglot stokers. In the dawn they pick up survivors - from their own ship.
(Based on a true story.)
In 1969 I was seeking the attention of BBC Two's Thirty Minute Theatre & had already tried them with THE WASHINGTON PLAY, of which they liked the quality but maybe not the challenge. Had I something else? Not at that length, but I remembered my cousin Tommy's scary North Atlantic incident & thought it would make good viewing, a telly short story.
Thiry Minute Theatre was always recorded 'live' in a small studio, & this lack of space I sought to exploit with a sense of dramatic claustrophobia. I had to make do with corners & sections of 'set', hence the detailed & repeating descriptions of surfaces.
I was at that time a militant if uneasy agnostic, & the play's ending reflects my own horror of the possibility of a cold empty Universe.
If cousin Tommy had such thoughts he never shared them with me. Only the terror of being abandoned below the water-line of a bolted & boiling, sinking iron box.
SS RESPONSIBILITY was not accepted for broadcasting, because it was technically too complex for a 'live' production. But it won me some brief good will.
TOLSTOI'S WEDDING NIGHT, 30 minute TV drama, 1969.
Draft synopsis from 1969.
(Square brackets indicate parts of the synopsis not enacted in the 30 minute script, but useful pointers to how the play could be expanded for a longer screen or stage version.)
Sonya has written a story about a Prince. He will have all the charm of experience, gained magically while remaining virgin. Count Tolstoi, her cousin, is seeing a great deal of her family this summer. She supposes that (according to Russian custom) he is courting her elder sister. He is not.
[In the guise of a word game he reveals his intentions concern herself.]
She shows him her story, but refuses him her Diary (which is less 'innocent') & he is impressed. He hopes for forgiveness for his own guilt, insists she read his Diary before they marry. It fascinates & yet disgusts her.
[Her impending marriage provokes tantrums, anxieties. Preparations are in (hasty) motion, & she makes no attempt to arrest them. Why? At the wedding, Tolstoi offers the agnostic's equivalent of a prayer for absolution of his dissolute past. His cousin will forgive & cleanse in human, personal terms, as no platitudes of the confessional can.
But] on their wedding night, Sophia taxes him with her fascination & revulsion. That part of her nature which she hides from him (& from herself) & which drew her to the wedding despite herself, chafes & frets - while the persona that was the attraction for Tolstoi, the 'innocence' she projects & sought for in Prince Charming, is jealously unforgiving with all the injustice of the young.
He is physically revolted by her view of himself. No cleansing. She is resentful & frightened at the depths she can plumb in herself & we sense will never face.
The indissoluble union hangs over them like the hangings of their bed, & we glimpse the slow beginnings of stealthy tragedy.
In Tolstoi's world there were two parallel realities. One was the official, novelettish view of sexuality, in which romantic love, marriage & above all female 'innocence' & naivety were central.
And central to that naivety was silence about sexual matters.
The other reality was a not-so-hidden world of sex as commerce, abuse & exploitation.
Many men in Tolstoi's time (& maybe some now) were able to live divided lives, not letting the two realities meet. Tolstoi's personal tragedy (& of course Sonya's too) was that he was not a hypocrite or self-deceiver, & couldn't separate his two worlds. The play portrays his fumbling (& destructive) attempt to bridge that gap in his society (& himself) & hints at its awful consequence. A lesser man might have kept his mouth shut & lived a possibly happier lie.
No one can know the true dynamics of someone else's relationship, but it's generally agreed that Leo & Sonya's marriage was a torture to them both, & the play shows the inevitability of their terrible future together.
There has been considerable interest recently in the Sixties, but mostly about its liberating aspects. I've seen little or nothing about the Sixties as a period of moral confusion as two (or more) ways of behaving tried to rub along together.
Tolstoi was one of two attempts I made at that time to explore earlier periods of moral confusion (the other being The Epiphany of Mrs Tilton, see RADIO PLAYS timeline).
In 1969, TV might yearn to be film-like, but tele-cine was the expensive exception & the limitations of a small TV studio made for scripts closer to Theatre than Cinema. Hence, few sets & the script now reads as stagey.
In a contemporary version, one would of course add movement & open up to the world outside. Some scenes could be broken up over several settings, to suit the present mode for swift cutting & (dare I say it?) suspicion of the spoken word.
Tolstoi's Wedding Night was considered too 'literary' for 30 Minute Theatre but won me the interview that led to my TV Play Laying it off for Spangle, BBC TWO, 7th February 1970.
NIETZSCHE AGONISTES, screen tragedy, 1971.
Nietzsche Agonistes is the First Part of a trilogy about Lou Andreas Salome's involvement with Great Men. Part 2 (barely begun) was to concern Lou & Rilke (whose name she changed from René to Reiner) & Part 3 (only researched) would focus on Lou, Sigmund Freud & Viktor Tausk.
This free-standing episode sets Nietzsche’s troubled love for outspoken elusive Lou against both his later lapses into insanity & the cut-&-paste perversion of his written legacy by fascist sister Elisabeth.
I offered the script to BBC TV Features & Norman Swallow showed interest, but only if I could involve German TV in a joint production. Since he was far better placed to make such overtures, I thought he was kidding me.
I never made the approaches, life intervened (heavy time for me) & the project foundered.
Years later, I met Norman Swallow's widow at a party, & she said he was utterly sincere: Features didn't have any money. But that didn't explain why he expected me to do the leg-work.
Nietzsche Agonistes was my penultimate quest for a drama that feels towards the ‘condition of music’, an incremental way of telling: enlarging, deepening & re-framing recurring moments, in a flow more like symphony than traditional drama.
(See also my Preface to The Epiphany of Mrs Tilton.)
THE RAILWAY HOTEL, two-part screenplay, 1994.
A love story set against the recession of the early 1990's.
Polly runs a novelty hotel, where you can sleep in the old signal box or the former booking office. The setting is therefore visually rich, even quirky, as befits a screenplay.
Polly's lover, potter Patrick, finds it hard to settle & his passing-trade business is failing. Must he go? In an attempt to bring them closer, Polly risks telling him her sinister secret. It touches something dark in Patrick & splits them apart.
We glimpse the deeper causes of their emotional yo-yo-ing & feel the self-inflicted pain of their separation.
The recession is a powerful factor riding beneath these events & thwarting easy answers. Mortgages & pay-slips figure more prominently than in many less worldly romances.
In the second half, focus shifts to the muddy dereliction of a small seaside port. More opportunity for atmospheric background. Humbler & wiser, Polly & Patrick find a way to redeem their love, but the solution is as much economic as emotional.
This is a more domestic drama than my other pieces from the 80's & 90's & therefore more immediately accessible. The screen format promotes a more detailed story-telling than the constraints of theatre permit. As such, The Railway Hotel is maybe a precursor of the audio-stories of the noughties.
(Perhaps too easy-paced & insufficiently brutal for contemporary editors? But tastes change, are changing. In an increasingly nasty world, when will nastiness no longer seem entertaining?)
The following Screenplay is available as HARD COPY:
Boswell & Zelide (1962)
Please apply to Alan via his e-mail on this website. Price on application.
All prefaces & blurbs: © Alan McMurtrie, 2021.