Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965) by Dennis Potter

Make sure you watch this in conjunction with Vote Vote Vote For Nigel Barton (), which aired just a week afterwards. Excellent work as ever from Potter, the man who made the television an artform. ((I own none of the rights. Both Nigel Barton plays can be found together on a DVD put out by 2 Entertain Video which is well worth picking up, as are all Potter works that are actually available). ’“Clever, ambitious and confident, miner’s son Nigel Barton seems to have escaped his working class straight-jacket by winning a place at Oxford University. While the pretentious undergraduates leave him with little illusion about his roots, Nigel, entangled in a web of memories, attempts to make sense of the class tensions and gain kudos from his experience. Starring Keith Barron with Jack Woolgar, Katerine Parr, Vickery Turner, Terence Soall, Janet Henfrey and Johnnie Wade. “Although this was the earlier of the two Barton plays to be transmitted, it was not, according to Potter, the earlier to have been completed. The earlier piece, Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, had been withdrawn by the BBC only seven hours before it was due to go out on the air. “It was, they said, ’not ready’ for transmission.“ Stand Up, Nigel Barton was, thought Potter, “a much better play although, perhaps, just a trifle too confusing in structure.“ “In this introduction to the Nigel Barton plays which Penguin published the scripts of in their Modern Playwrights series (No. 6), Potter tells us how he “wanted, needed“ to be able to dramatize “the whole trajectory of a young man who, by accident and examination, had been dragged so far up the educational ladder that he fetched up in that medieval enclave called Oxford“, as, indeed, Potter had done himself - and described his own experience in much the same words on several occasions. For Potter the themes which run through the play are memory and class. A third, perhaps unconfessed, theme which dominates the piece is, in Gilbert’s phrase “the intertwining of betrayal and guilt“. “Potter says of Stand Up, Nigel Barton, “It was built that way in order to illustrate the difficulties and complexities which can beset anyone moving across the minefields of class in this country. ’Environment’ is here the crucial factor, but where the central character (Nigel Barton) has moved on and ’up’, this becomes translated into ’memory’.“ He addresses the difficulty of representing memory in convincing televisual terms and explains that, in spite of its degeneration into mere stylistic cliché, the flashback technique had to be made to work. He “chipp(ed) the play up into swiftly moving fragments so that the ’present’ was not the norm out of which one lurched cumbersomely back into previous times.“ But Potter is also swift to point out that memory is not an objective recalling of events but rather the construction of the ’remembering’ subject in making choices and interpretations to represent his past. “For this reason, Potter deploys the device which he returns to par excellence in Blue Remembered Hills, of using adult actors to play the parts of children, emphasizing the connexions between what had happened to him and what he now was. The question remains as to what part of Nigel’s memories are indeed derived from Potter’s own memories; the biographical parallels between the two are close indeed. In Potter’s own words, “I had been placed in circumstances which meant that I had thought a lot about television drama and I had a ’story’ to tell in which personal experiences could obviously hone the cutting edge.“ “Potter’s main justification for working within the medium of television in order that this ’story’ be told relates to what he saw as the democratic and openly accessible and intimate nature of television. “With Stand Up, Nigel Barton I knew that in small family groupings - that is, at their most vulnerable - both coalminers and Oxford dons would probably see the play. This could add enormously to the potency of a story which attempted to use the specially English embarrassment about class in a deliberately embarrassing series of confrontations. In the theatre - or, at least, in the West End - the audience would have been largely only on one side of this particular fence. There is no other medium which could virtually guarantee an audience of millions with a full quota of manual workers and stockbrokers for a ’serious’ play about class.“ Other Potter works I’ve uploaded: Vote Vote Vote For Nigel Barton (1965): Son of Man (1969): Brimstone & Treacle (1976) : Where Adam Stood (1976): Blade on the Feather (1980):