Peter Terson's Vale of Evesham

Peter Terson's Vale of Evesham GILLETTE ELVGREN JR. • PETER TERSON IS CERTAINLY one of the more significant playwrights being staged in Great Britain today. Since 1967 ten of Terson's plays have received West End showings. In 1967 he shared with Peter Nichols the John Whiting Award from the Arts Council; and in 1972 he received the British Writers Guild Award for the best radio play, The Fishing Party. Widely produced and written about in Europe, his almost total lack of recognition in North America remains a mystery. Since 1963 Peter Terson has written over sixty plays in addition to his radio and television dramas. Most ofhis produced stage work has been originally performed at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, a small Midlands theatre-in-the-round which has developed an international reputation for its support of new playwrights and for its innovative work in musical documentary drama. Terson was resident playwright at the Victoria under the director Peter Cheeseman from 1965-1967, and has been officially connected with the theatre as a writer-in-association ever SInce. The quality of Terson's plays varies widely. Of his voluminous outpourings perhaps one-third of his plays merit consideration for production. Some of his plays are so obviously and mercilessly autobiographic that stage renderings would prove to be painfully embarrassing to Terson and some of his close friends and relatives. Terson writes as much to purge himself offeelings, urges and emotions as to create serious art. He remarks on his creative process: I think anyone writing about my plays should see the paintings I do while I'm working on them. I just slosh the paint on, as boldly and simply as you 173 174 GILLETTE ELVGREN JR. like; and the subjects are all very simple and obvious: A Man, A Street, and so on. I don't know why I do them, and when I've done them I just chuck most of them away. I think my plays are very much like that. I suppose I must be some sort of crazy primitive or something.1 Terson's unstructured approach to the art of playwriting has resulted in much ofthe burden ofcutting, restructuring and prodding being placed on the directors with whom he works. Such talented and strong-willed men as Peter Cheeseman and Michael Croft (National Youth Theatre) have influenced Terson in both his style and the detailed shaping of his plays. The writing is always Terson's, but the play which emerges at the end of a rehearsal period often bears little resemblance to the raw script with which the company started. Terson excels in the creative environment of rehearsals: rethinking and rewriting phrases, clacking on his portable typewriter somewhere not far offstage, or talking it up with the actors at the local pub. He is a public rather than a private playwright, and the joy he gains from working in the theatre is in the human exchange with the artists who are helping him to create his play. However, the original writing of the plays has always been an ordeal for Terson. Perhaps this is why they are written at such a frantic pace, and then abandoned until picked up by a director. In Peter Cheeseman's second floor studio located in his home in Newcastle-under-Lyme there is considerable floor space devoted to nothing but discarded, halffinished , unacceptable, and a few brilliant plays by Peter Terson. In an early letter to Cheeseman, Terson gives a humorous and anguished account of the tribulations which he goes through in conceiving and writing a play. Although, actually, tonight, I've started a play. Much against my will. It seems to force its way out like dry sweat. I might see the doctor rather than finish it. Oh, it's agony. I was up there in the Rec, rolling the pitch, when all of a sudden I went quiet and tense, and my arse was grapped in a knot, and then I knew my whole world was gone. The sound ofleather on willow was repulsive, and a terrible voice said, "Failed again." I wandered back "as if in a daze," and the voices of the...