Debbie Tucker Green's poetic adaptation of her play on youth and violence offers TV time to an innovative voice
Channel 4's original dramas can be outstanding: Any Human Heart, This is England, The Promise. But in the past few months we've had the glossy import Camelot (not recommissioned), the comedy-drama Sirens and ? er ? have I forgotten something?
So Random is interesting for rarity value alone. But unlike the expensive showpieces, this is a low-budget affair adapted from a one-woman stage play, first performed at the Royal Court. With a joint commission from Channel 4 Drama and Film4, writer Debbie Tucker Green has adapted and directed it herself, with the original actor, Nadine Marshall in the lead role.
Turning stage plays into good TV drama is always challenging. Stars such as Ian McKellen (Lear), Patrick Stewart (Macbeth) and David Tennant (Hamlet) have carried Shakespeare productions restaged on studio sets. Sky Arts has shot performances of Chekhov. The BBC's ambitious 2008 TV adaptation of David Hare's My Zinc Bed with Uma Thurman was still accused of being stagey. Adapting Random has required particular inventiveness.
On stage Marshall assumed the voices of over 10 characters, following a day in the life of a black British family, thrown into turmoil by a "random" tragedy. The adaptation intercuts Marshall alone in a bare studio with location sequences using other actors. Dialogue is minimal. The story is told through interlocking interior monologues, almost like a series of Alan Bennett pieces. We hear their thoughts during action sequences, like a serious version of Peep Show.
"It creates a very intimate experience," says Katherine Butler, senior commissioner for Film4. "Debbie achieved something special, a theatrical way of speaking, yet not a flat theatre piece."
"I was worried about taking it from stage to TV,'" Nadine Marshall explains. "I didn't know how it would come together, but it flows so organically from studio to real life, to what's going on in my character's head that it doesn't jar at all. I expect some people not to get it in the first 10 minutes. You have to stick with it.'
It has almost become a received wisdom among press commentators that most great TV drama comes from America these days, and without HBO's big budgets and long runs, much of our mainstream drama has teetered between tired formulae and shallow gimmickry. Robert Wulff-Cochrane, who commissioned Random for Channel 4 Drama, insists that our best work is hugely admired in America, but both he and Butler see Random as part of an important ongoing process in which the theatre is used as a recruiting ground for original writing and aesthetic innovation.
"Both Robert and I spend a lot of time in the theatre," says Butler, "constantly looking at new writing and working with younger theatre writers." She mentions several possible collaborations currently under discussion with the National Theatre.
"There is far more crossover now than there was when I started 10 years ago," says Wulff-Cochrane. "There's a generation of playwrights who have grown up loving film and TV and don't have any snobbery about it. We've been working for a long time with Paines Plough theatre company and we have a project with Punchdrunk theatre at the moment. If we can find a way of making TV drama with a live element we would take a risk on that."
Both were particularly impressed with the way Tucker Green used direct marketing to bring new black audiences to her play. (Marshall tells me their reactions were so enthusiastic, 45-minute performances could be stretched by 10 minutes.) Channel 4 has followed through with a programme of "pop-up" public screenings.
As she segues from one character's voice to another, Marshall's performance is a tour de force. "Debbie writes a kind of poetry," says Butler. "It takes a while to tune in, but you don't have to get every word to understand the emotion and you get more and more of the detail as you watch." And as Marshall herself puts it: "It's not something we've seen on TV before."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/aug/23/random-channel-4
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