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BALL TRAP ON THE COTE SAUVAGE
Jack Gold, BBC TV, 1989
Thursday 25 December 2003 9.40pm-11.05pm (Christmas Day)
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The English abroad are good for a laugh in anyone's book, but in this extraordinary Screen One from 1989, Andrew Davies takes a Carry On concept and uses it as a vehicle for a savage scrutiny of human relationships, by turns hilarious, astute and ultimately disturbing.
The play is set in a tent holiday park in the French countryside, where Joe and Sarah Marriott have come for a break and some people-watching, and they have an absolute feast on their hands with the characters surrounding them.
Already the play is starting to sound like a continental variant on Nuts In May. But whereas Mike Leigh is fascinated by eccentric behaviour, and upsets the status quo through the arrival of a pair of Brummie bikers, Davies is fascinated by male insecurity and female domination, and so his cuckoo in the nest appears in the form of Early Bird, a free-spirited woman with a brutish husband.
The play is a typically perplexing Screen One, an anthology series of the late Eighties and early Nineties which was notable for subverting established genres and also for its sexual frankness and pessimistic outlook. Similar successes for the programme include The Police and Ghostwatch. Director Jack Gold steers the play to its unexpected ending by keeping a tight reign on its potentially alienating shifts in tone, aided by the magnificent cast who include Jack Shepherd and Zoë Wanamaker as the doomed Marriotts, and Miranda Richardson as Early Bird.
As a Davies femme fatale, Early Bird's effect on the other characters reminds one also of the siren Hebe in his later dramatisation Harnessing Peacocks. What makes this play slightly unusual for Davies is its additional preoccupation with voyeurism and with questions of conventionality. As the Marriotts go from being the watchers to the watched, who is manipulating whom becomes a question, rather tellingly, for the viewer to decide.
Simon Farquhar
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Jack Gold previously directed Davies' 1981 comedy Bavarian Night, about saucy developments at a school parents evening.
