Play for Today: Psy-Warriors

Content warning: violence, terrorism, sado-masochism and nudity. This post also spoils a plot twist.

Now you may consider that offensive subject-matter and (partial) nudity are a normal day on this blog but here we're in completely different territory.

Psy-Warriors (1981) was broadcast in the BBC's Play for Today slot which ran from 1970 to 1984, and is definitely one on its own, having been described by The Listener as a 'sado-masochist's special'. The play, incredibly originally written as a stage play by David Leland, has as its subject matter a psychological experiment in interrogation of soldiers by terrorists and whether their approach can make a more resilient soldier. It was offered to Play for Today by (who else?) Alan Clarke and of course they didn't want it. It was purely chance that they had a slot that was empty and so made this play.

I think it would be fair to say that this is one of the dew TV programmes where there is genuinely something to offend everyone. Both extremes of the political spectrum have been very critical of it, seeing it as supportive of the other: it has been seen as supportive of the IRA and also supportive of state-sanctioned torture. Critically, it was broadcast in the middle of the IRA hunger strike, just as the strikers were beginning to die. I think we can truthfully say that this play was something of an explosion.

The academic cinema and theatre commentary about this play is hysterical, because it focuses on the way it is almost entirely filmed in a pared-down, closed set, and fails to mention that that's because it's depicting people being tortured in cages and doesn't mention the willies and bums in a way that suggests they're trying not to see them.

Since everything sensible has essentially already been said about this play I'm just going to focus on my own reaction to it, although I suspect that other viewers will have similar reactions to it.

My literal first reaction was that it was a load of relevant arty nonsense, taking advantage of people suffering by depicting real torture taking place in various parts of the world.

My second reaction was that it was a very important depiction of how the only difference between the state and the terrorists can be that the state have the letter heads.

My ongoing reaction naturally tended to revolve around the nudity. I don't have an objection to full nudity as such and don't consider it necessarily sexual. So initially I found myself thinking that it must have been seen as a necessary part of the shock of this play.

But then I thought the very uncharacteristic thought that the nudity might tend to make people who would otherwise be influenced by this play ignore it because they might be put off or think that it was looking for cheap thrills (remember it was described as a sado-masochists' special).

However I almost immediately thought that people who might react like that should definitely be shocked if they weren't otherwise willing to consider torture of concern, so I found myself thinking that this is an important play.

Then I found myself thinking almost immediately that the BBC was incredibly insensitive to broadcast this during the IRA hunger strikes, but dismissed that thought because I honestly don't think there's a right moment to broadcast this sort of thing.

Now I resisted thinking this thought for as long as possible because it sounded a bit pervy even to me, but I then thought that if they were going to depict the two men being interrogated naked it made no sense to have the only woman interrogee interrogated clothed, especially as we are supposed to understand at the beginning that they interrogators are terrorists rather than British army. I can see that there might be a problem with that because we later understand the interrogations to be an army 'psychological' experiment (of the sort that later ends up in the Hague).

In fact that is my only criticism of this that the naked men and clothed woman makes a nonsense of the whole thing. I wonder whether it was considered too sexual to the production team to have a nude woman but not sexual to have nude men? Even if they had her questioned by a woman? The aim of depicting degrading interrogation could surely have been depicted in some other way.

I think far from my original impression that this is a load of highbrow nonsense, this is actually the TV programme which has given me the most thought ever, so it probably has achieved its aim in part. Unfortunately being me, it hasn't made me think about its subject matter, although of course in my case it is largely performing to the choir and I'm very clear that my country is far from always right. Instead it made me think about the depiction of nudity. There are also a LOT of familiar faces from TV of the sixties and seventies, to the extent that they are distracting.

My personal conclusion is that while this play is thought-provoking, I am still not sure that its depiction of torture and nudity makes the viewer think about the questions of interrogation and the similarity between governments and terrorists, because it tends to make the viewer think about the nudity and other aspects of its presentation.

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