Double Dare (play)
Encyclopedia
Double Dare is a television play
by Dennis Potter
, first broadcast on BBC1
on 6 April 1976 as part of the Play for Today
series. The play explores the link between author and viewer, one of Potter's major themes, and is referenced several times in his later work. The play's title is taken from the 1938 Al Bowlly
song "I Double Dare You", which is featured in both the opening and closing credits.
screenwriter who invites Helen, an actress (Markham), to a hotel in central London to discuss an idea for a play he is writing with her in mind. As he waits for her to arrive he picks up the telephone in his room and considers calling an escort agency. Thinking better of it, he decides to call his wife instead. He goes to meet Helen at the hotel bar and they start discussing his project. He explains that the play he intends to write involves a meeting between a businessman and a call girl
at a hotel; Martin's intention is to explore the tension this scenario would create by talking to Helen about how far she would go for the sake of her profession. As they discuss the play, Martin discovers that a businessman and an escort named Carol are sat at a nearby table and appear to be speaking lines from the as yet unwritten piece. Martin becomes anxious at what will eventually become of the girl, already knowing that the play will not have a happy resolution. As Helen becomes uncomfortable and is about to leave, Martin's agent
Benn (Melia) arrives to make sure that the meeting is going as planned. Angry at having been set up for Martin to seduce her, Helen calls Ben a pimp, which leads him to reveal that Martin is actually in love with her. After Ben leaves, Helen informs Martin that there is no possibility of a romantic attachment happening between them and asks to collect her belongings from his room; all the while Martin remains fixated on the businessman and the call girl on the other table. When they head up to Martin's room, so do the characters who appear to have escaped from Martin's play. As Helen bids Martin goodnight he claims to hear shouting from next door: the businessman is in there with the escort girl and has become violent at her sexual taunting. Martin stands against the wall and describes the businessman raping and murdering her. When it is over he turns to face Helen on the bed, only to find that she has been sexually assaulted and strangled — seemingly at his hand. There is a knock at the door. Martin answers it only to be confronted by the businessman, who it is revealed is actually a mild-mannered and married man concerned by the noise coming from Martin's room. Martin tells him to mind his own business and slams the door. He walks over to the bedside table, picks up the telephone and calls the escort agency. When there is no reply, he lies back on the bed next to Helen's body and weeps.
to arrange a meeting with actress Kika Markham, hoping to cast her in one of his own television productions. The two met in a hotel at The Strand and began discussing their relative professions. Markham claims that much of the dialogue featured in the play was a faithful transcript of their meeting.
According to Markham, early rehearsals were spent trying to "wring the giggles" out of the material; Potter's very specific stage directions appearing overwrought compared to the 'clipped-down' style of other writers. Having broken this barrier, the performers were able to explore the darker context of the play through close reading of the text and various theatrical exercises. As the production would be shot on location, director John Mackenzie was granted the opportunity of using film stock rather than video.
of Helen and the call girl, and to a lesser extent the comparisons between Martin and the businessman, are "Potteresque" tropes that serve to challenge the audience's perspective on what they are seeing. Dialogue between Martin and Helen is often repeated verbatim in the fictional world of the businessman and the call girl (most notably the exchange about the automatic shoe polisher in the hallway outside Martin's room, which bookends Helen's arrival at the hotel and the escort heading to her client's room). Although containing very few of the non-naturalistic flourishes of his other plays, Double Dare does, however, contain one sequence where Potter deliberately breaks the artificial naturalism of the drama by having Martin question Helen if she would sleep with him if they were characters in a play before turning direct to camera and indicating an audience "somewhere out there". This question, and others like it, forms the basis of one of Potter's other major themes — individual choice in the face of an omniscient author. While Martin assumes responsibility for the eventual fate of the call girl, even going so far as attempting to warn her of the danger she faces, he ultimately resigns himself to the view that the act of writing is nothing more than a form of precognition
. Martin recites Dante Gabriel Rossetti
's poem "Sudden Light" (c.1853-4) to Helen in an attempt to woo her, but emphasises the subtext that all things, even human relationships, are mapped out in advance by unseen forces.
, also produced for the Play for Today slot, and Where Adam Stood
— a free adaptation of Edmund Gosse
's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907). The BBC's decision not to broadcast Brimstone caused some surprise from both Potter and Trodd, the latter assuming that if any of the trilogy would cause offence it would be Double Dare, citing its "ferocious" attitude towards women as a potential problem. When the play went out on BBC1
on 6 April 1976, it attracted very positive reviews stating that Potter was maturing as a playwright.
Reviewing the play for The Guardian
, Martin Amis
praised the drama's build-up of tension, its Russian doll effect and commented that it forced him to "increase [my] nicotene intake." The sex scenes between Markham and John Hamill
, included as a flashback from another play, intended to show the lengths to which Helen will go in the pursuit of her craft, were considered to be among the strongest shown on British television up to that point. The play would not be repeated until 2005, when it was shown on BBC Four
amongst a season of programming intended to mark the tenth anniversary of Potter's death.
was preparing a film version
of Pennies from Heaven for MGM, producer Rick McCallum
drew his attention to Double Dare as a potential project to adapt for the cinema. Potter told editor Graham Fuller in Potter on Potter that he had written a movie adaptation that transferred the action to Los Angeles, and featured an English screenwriter whose experiences in Hollywood are 'doubled up' with those back home in England. Potter described this new version of the play as "more sexually disturbing" than the original, but after the box office failure of the movie version of Pennies from Heaven the project was shelved. Ross claims, however, that he held a read-through with Robert De Niro
and Al Pacino
.
) who starts to hear lines from his latest screenplay coming from the mouths of total strangers and those closest to him. The centrepiece of the serial involves a sequence in a brasserie
where Feeld, meeting with his producer (Anna Chancellor
), overhears a young woman on the next table arguing with her boyfriend. Their conversation appears to consist of Daniel's dialogue and the young girl ("Sandra", played by Saffron Burrows
) is being asked to have sex with one of her gangster boyfriend's business associates to broker a favour. The intercutting of the scene between Daniel and the girl's perspectives is largely identical to Double Dare, as is the suggestion that the girl will meet a horrible fate if Daniel does not intervene. A minor reference to Double Dare is the fact that Daniel's literary agent (Roy Hudd
) is also called Ben.
Double Dare is also a follow-on from an earlier Potter play, Follow the Yellow Brick Road
(1972), which features an embittered, cuckolded actor ('Jack Black', played by Denholm Elliot) who believes himself to be an actor trapped in a television play. Unlike Double Dare, however, the central protagonist is able to subvert the narrative by challenging its anonymous author.
Television play
From the 1950s until the early 1980s, the television play was a popular television programming genre in the United Kingdom, with a shorter span in the United States. The genre was often associated with the social realist-influenced British drama style known as "kitchen sink realism", which depicted...
by Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.-Biography:Dennis Potter was born...
, first broadcast on BBC1
BBC One
BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...
on 6 April 1976 as part of the Play for Today
Play for Today
Play for Today is a British television anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and transmitted on BBC1 from 1970 to 1984. During the run, more than three hundred programmes, featuring original television plays, and adaptations of stage plays and novels, were transmitted...
series. The play explores the link between author and viewer, one of Potter's major themes, and is referenced several times in his later work. The play's title is taken from the 1938 Al Bowlly
Al Bowlly
Albert Allick Bowlly was a Southern-African singer, songwriter, composer and band leader, who became a popular Jazz crooner during the 1930s in the United Kingdom and later, in the United States of America. He recorded more than 1,000 records between 1927 and 1941...
song "I Double Dare You", which is featured in both the opening and closing credits.
Synopsis
Martin Ellis (Dobie) is a blockedWriter's block
Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked"...
screenwriter who invites Helen, an actress (Markham), to a hotel in central London to discuss an idea for a play he is writing with her in mind. As he waits for her to arrive he picks up the telephone in his room and considers calling an escort agency. Thinking better of it, he decides to call his wife instead. He goes to meet Helen at the hotel bar and they start discussing his project. He explains that the play he intends to write involves a meeting between a businessman and a call girl
Call girl
A call girl or female escort is a sex worker who is not visible to the general public; nor does she usually work in an institution like a brothel, although she may be employed by an escort agency...
at a hotel; Martin's intention is to explore the tension this scenario would create by talking to Helen about how far she would go for the sake of her profession. As they discuss the play, Martin discovers that a businessman and an escort named Carol are sat at a nearby table and appear to be speaking lines from the as yet unwritten piece. Martin becomes anxious at what will eventually become of the girl, already knowing that the play will not have a happy resolution. As Helen becomes uncomfortable and is about to leave, Martin's agent
Literary agent
A literary agent is an agent who represents writers and their written works to publishers, theatrical producers and film producers and assists in the sale and deal negotiation of the same. Literary agents most often represent novelists, screenwriters and major non-fiction writers...
Benn (Melia) arrives to make sure that the meeting is going as planned. Angry at having been set up for Martin to seduce her, Helen calls Ben a pimp, which leads him to reveal that Martin is actually in love with her. After Ben leaves, Helen informs Martin that there is no possibility of a romantic attachment happening between them and asks to collect her belongings from his room; all the while Martin remains fixated on the businessman and the call girl on the other table. When they head up to Martin's room, so do the characters who appear to have escaped from Martin's play. As Helen bids Martin goodnight he claims to hear shouting from next door: the businessman is in there with the escort girl and has become violent at her sexual taunting. Martin stands against the wall and describes the businessman raping and murdering her. When it is over he turns to face Helen on the bed, only to find that she has been sexually assaulted and strangled — seemingly at his hand. There is a knock at the door. Martin answers it only to be confronted by the businessman, who it is revealed is actually a mild-mannered and married man concerned by the noise coming from Martin's room. Martin tells him to mind his own business and slams the door. He walks over to the bedside table, picks up the telephone and calls the escort agency. When there is no reply, he lies back on the bed next to Helen's body and weeps.
Principal cast
- Alan DobieAlan DobieAlan Russell Dobie , is a British actor.Dobie was born in Wombwell, Yorkshire, England, to George Russell and Sarah Kate Dobie. His father was a mining engineer and his mother's family were farmers. He was married to actress Rachel Roberts from 1955-61 then married Maureen Scott in 1963...
as Martin Ellis - Kika MarkhamKika MarkhamKika Markham is an English actress.Markham was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire. She is a daughter of actor David Markham and writer Olive Dehn . She has led a long career in the cinema, television, and theatre as an actress...
as Helen/Carol - Malcolm TerrisMalcolm TerrisMalcolm Terris is a British actor.He had a lengthy career in a large number of television programmes. Possibly his best known role was in When the Boat Comes In, a popular 1970s series, where he played the part of Matt Headley...
as Businessman - Joe MeliaJoe Melia-Films:* Too Many Crooks * Follow a Star * The Intelligence Men * Four in the Morning * Modesty Blaise * Oh! What a Lovely War * Antony and Cleopatra * Sweeney!...
as Ben - John HamillJohn HamillJohn Hamill is an English actor.He had previously been a bodybuilder and one of England's most popular "physique models" in the late 1960s before turning to acting, studying at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and appearing in the stage farce There's a Girl in My Soup.Hamill’s...
as Peter - Linda Beckett as the businessman's wife
Production
In 1974, Potter's father died, and this, coupled with a severe bout of psoriatic arthropathy, led to him developing writer's block. Having the bare bones of an idea about a meeting between a businessman and a prostitute for his next piece, Potter contacted producer Kenith TroddKenith Trodd
Kenith Trodd is a British television producer particularly noted for a long association with television playwright Dennis Potter.The son of a crane driver, Trodd was raised in the Christian fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren...
to arrange a meeting with actress Kika Markham, hoping to cast her in one of his own television productions. The two met in a hotel at The Strand and began discussing their relative professions. Markham claims that much of the dialogue featured in the play was a faithful transcript of their meeting.
According to Markham, early rehearsals were spent trying to "wring the giggles" out of the material; Potter's very specific stage directions appearing overwrought compared to the 'clipped-down' style of other writers. Having broken this barrier, the performers were able to explore the darker context of the play through close reading of the text and various theatrical exercises. As the production would be shot on location, director John Mackenzie was granted the opportunity of using film stock rather than video.
Themes
Double Dare explores the relationship between fact and fiction, as well as the connection between author and viewer. The doubling upDoppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
of Helen and the call girl, and to a lesser extent the comparisons between Martin and the businessman, are "Potteresque" tropes that serve to challenge the audience's perspective on what they are seeing. Dialogue between Martin and Helen is often repeated verbatim in the fictional world of the businessman and the call girl (most notably the exchange about the automatic shoe polisher in the hallway outside Martin's room, which bookends Helen's arrival at the hotel and the escort heading to her client's room). Although containing very few of the non-naturalistic flourishes of his other plays, Double Dare does, however, contain one sequence where Potter deliberately breaks the artificial naturalism of the drama by having Martin question Helen if she would sleep with him if they were characters in a play before turning direct to camera and indicating an audience "somewhere out there". This question, and others like it, forms the basis of one of Potter's other major themes — individual choice in the face of an omniscient author. While Martin assumes responsibility for the eventual fate of the call girl, even going so far as attempting to warn her of the danger she faces, he ultimately resigns himself to the view that the act of writing is nothing more than a form of precognition
Precognition
In parapsychology, precognition , also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information or laws of physics...
. Martin recites Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
's poem "Sudden Light" (c.1853-4) to Helen in an attempt to woo her, but emphasises the subtext that all things, even human relationships, are mapped out in advance by unseen forces.
Broadcast and reception
The play was originally intended to be part of a trilogy exploring an individual's choices (or rather, lack of them) in the face of an omniscient narrator; Double Dare was to form the first part, followed by Brimstone and TreacleBrimstone and Treacle
-Potter on Brimstone and Treacle:In 1978, Potter said:I had written Brimstone and Treacle in difficult personal circumstances. Years of acute psoriatic arthropathy—unpleasantly affecting skin and joints—had not only taken their toll in physical damage but had also, and perhaps inevitably, mediated...
, also produced for the Play for Today slot, and Where Adam Stood
Where Adam Stood
Where Adam Stood is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast on BBC2 in 1976. It is a free adaptation of Edmund Gosse's autobiographical book Father and Son .-Synopsis:...
— a free adaptation of Edmund Gosse
Edmund Gosse
Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...
's autobiographical book Father and Son (1907). The BBC's decision not to broadcast Brimstone caused some surprise from both Potter and Trodd, the latter assuming that if any of the trilogy would cause offence it would be Double Dare, citing its "ferocious" attitude towards women as a potential problem. When the play went out on BBC1
BBC One
BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...
on 6 April 1976, it attracted very positive reviews stating that Potter was maturing as a playwright.
Reviewing the play for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, Martin Amis
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...
praised the drama's build-up of tension, its Russian doll effect and commented that it forced him to "increase [my] nicotene intake." The sex scenes between Markham and John Hamill
John Hamill
John Hamill is an English actor.He had previously been a bodybuilder and one of England's most popular "physique models" in the late 1960s before turning to acting, studying at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and appearing in the stage farce There's a Girl in My Soup.Hamill’s...
, included as a flashback from another play, intended to show the lengths to which Helen will go in the pursuit of her craft, were considered to be among the strongest shown on British television up to that point. The play would not be repeated until 2005, when it was shown on BBC Four
BBC Four
BBC Four is a British television network operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation and available to digital television viewers on Freeview, IPTV, satellite and cable....
amongst a season of programming intended to mark the tenth anniversary of Potter's death.
Proposed film adaptation
When director Herbert RossHerbert Ross
Herbert Ross was an American film director, producer, choreographer and actor.-Early life and career:Born Herbert David Ross in Brooklyn, New York, he made his stage debut as Third Witch with a touring company of Macbeth in 1942...
was preparing a film version
Pennies from Heaven (1981 film)
Pennies from Heaven is a 1981 musical film. The film was based on a 1978 BBC television drama. In 1981, Dennis Potter adapted his own screenplay for a film of the same name for American audiences, with its setting changed to Depression era Chicago. Potter was nominated for the 1981 Academy Award...
of Pennies from Heaven for MGM, producer Rick McCallum
Rick McCallum
Richard "Rick" McCallum is a German-born American film producer mostly known for his work on the The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles as well as the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition and prequel trilogy...
drew his attention to Double Dare as a potential project to adapt for the cinema. Potter told editor Graham Fuller in Potter on Potter that he had written a movie adaptation that transferred the action to Los Angeles, and featured an English screenwriter whose experiences in Hollywood are 'doubled up' with those back home in England. Potter described this new version of the play as "more sexually disturbing" than the original, but after the box office failure of the movie version of Pennies from Heaven the project was shelved. Ross claims, however, that he held a read-through with Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro, Jr. is an American actor, director and producer. His first major film roles were in Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, both in 1973...
and Al Pacino
Al Pacino
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy, Tony Montana in Scarface, Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice in Dick Tracy and Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way, though he has also appeared...
.
Intertextuality
The central premise of Double Dare would be revisited in the serial Karaoke (1996), the first part of Potter's two last television works. Karaoke features a writer called Daniel Feeld (Albert FinneyAlbert Finney
Albert Finney is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television....
) who starts to hear lines from his latest screenplay coming from the mouths of total strangers and those closest to him. The centrepiece of the serial involves a sequence in a brasserie
Brasserie
In France and the Francophone world, a brasserie is a type of French restaurant with a relaxed, upscale setting, which serves single dishes and other meals. The word 'brasserie' is also French for "brewery" and, by extension, "the brewing business"...
where Feeld, meeting with his producer (Anna Chancellor
Anna Chancellor
-Family:Chancellor was born in Richmond, London, England, the daughter of the Hon. Mary Alice Jolliffe and John Paget Chancellor. Through her mother's mother, Lady Perdita Rose Mary Asquith, Chancellor is the great-granddaughter of The Hon. Raymond Aquith and the great-great-granddaughter of Prime...
), overhears a young woman on the next table arguing with her boyfriend. Their conversation appears to consist of Daniel's dialogue and the young girl ("Sandra", played by Saffron Burrows
Saffron Burrows
Saffron Dominique Burrows is an English actress and former fashion model, who starred as Det. Serena Stevens on Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Lorraine Weller on Boston Legal.-Early life:...
) is being asked to have sex with one of her gangster boyfriend's business associates to broker a favour. The intercutting of the scene between Daniel and the girl's perspectives is largely identical to Double Dare, as is the suggestion that the girl will meet a horrible fate if Daniel does not intervene. A minor reference to Double Dare is the fact that Daniel's literary agent (Roy Hudd
Roy Hudd
Roy Hudd, OBE is an English comedian, actor, radio host and author, and an authority on the history of music hall entertainment.- Early life :...
) is also called Ben.
Double Dare is also a follow-on from an earlier Potter play, Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Follow the Yellow Brick Road is a television play by Dennis Potter, first broadcast in 1972 as part of BBC Two's The Sextet series of eight plays featuring the same six actors. The play is notable for its central theme of popular culture becoming the inheritor of religious scripture, which...
(1972), which features an embittered, cuckolded actor ('Jack Black', played by Denholm Elliot) who believes himself to be an actor trapped in a television play. Unlike Double Dare, however, the central protagonist is able to subvert the narrative by challenging its anonymous author.
Sources
- Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: A Biography; 1998
- Graham Fuller (Ed.), Potter on Potter; 1993
- W.S. Gilbert, Fight and Kick and Bite: The Life and Work of Dennis Potter; 1995
- Nigel Williams (Ed.) ArenaArena (TV series)Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. It has run since 1 October 1975, and over five hundred episodes have been made. Arena covers all manner of subjects, from profiles of notable people such as Bob Dylan to the Ford Cortina car...
: Painting the Clouds; 2005