Play for Today: The Lie (Tony Wright Season)
The second Play for Today to appear here in a little over two months, this one is the third of series 1, broadcast in 1970, and is an adaptation into English of a play by Ingmar Bergman. I think we should probably have a minute’s silence or something at this point to mark that I am therefore punching well above my weight and am about to criticise a play by one of the great playwrights and directors. I have made the effort to at least have a glance around online for some academic writing on characteristics of his cinematic style, which I’m not sure has probably gone down that well with viewers.
In fact the play is historic because while the original was obviously written in Swedish and set in Sweden, adaptations were made into various European languages, apparently with the location moved into the relevant European country, and broadcast simultaneously. There is vanishingly little about it online, certainly in the TV blogosphere, and I think this play may have got itself a reputation for being difficult, because it is certainly a very uncomfortable view. But then it’s by Ingmar Bergman whose cinema was all about a stark portrayal of the human condition, often in brutal and intimate detail, so you get what you pay for.
The play is about Andrew and Anna Firth, and their loveless marriage, which through the action of the play falls apart. They become aware that they have both been deceiving the other, both been unfaithful to the other, and their marriage can’t take the truth.
There is strangely only one review of this play on IMDb and it makes the criticism that in the 90-minute long play very little happens for the first hour and then suddenly it really speeds up in the final part. I think this is probably deliberate, as one of the things I have learned is that Bergman liked to give an indepth psychological insight into his subjects and also tended to use very long scenes which gives an impression of nothing happening. And while the first hour is rather low-key there isn’t nothing going on; it’s giving the background to all the characters and the truths and falsehoods which go on in their lives.
One very strange thing is that several times Anna refers to ‘living’ with her lover, and talks in his flat as if she genuinely does live there. However her own husband at home thinks she is living with him and their children, and in fact we see her waking up in the house, so she is apparently not really living with her lover. This has been the cause of some criticism online, but I think I have found an explanation for it in Bergman’s style, which makes much use of doubles or duality. These are couples, or couples of characters, who overlap visually or metaphorically. In the case of The Lie I think this is the reason Anna keeps saying that she is living with her lover despite living with her husband and her children: the truth is that she is living with her lover while the lie is her marriage with her husband. The title of the play is all-encompassing.
Similarly Anna goes in to the college where she lectures, to do some work in the holidays when nobody is there. She has an encounter with another member of staff who is ruthlessly honest to her and tells her how much she hates her in very frank terms. Strangely, Anna doesn’t tell her to shut up or slap her, and this is another encounter of truth with falsehood. The other person actually tells Anna that she is telling lies. As a rule the other characters in the play are all lying to each other all the time (Anna is convinced even her lover isn’t telling her the truth and is holding something back from her), but she stands out as one of the few people telling the truth. Anna actually tells her father that she has been with her lover, as an excuse for her latenss for their meeting, and he just ignores the information, ironically on one of the few occasions in the earlier part of the play where she is telling the truth.
The other truth teller is Anna’s brother, who she goes to visit in the psychiatric hospital where he is an inpatient. He is wearing make-up and bangles, and of course the depiction of him is left unexplained because this is Bergman and we’re not supposed to come out of this with a nice simple explanation. Anna’s encounter with her brother is heavily symbolic because he literally begs her to tell him the truth as to how he actually got into hospital, because he can’t remember.
Anna encounters a series of truth-telling or truth-witholding doubles, but her husband Andrew, a much less sympathetic character, models a slightly different series of relationships, ones in which there is much less intimacy and nobody seems to meet each other on Martin Buber’s I and Thou level. He is simply horrible to his secretary. He has spent months working on some project which the government then rejects completely, and there is rather an uncertainty over him. While Anna’s relationships are marked by truth/falseness or artifice, Andrew’s relationships are marked by being cast aside, being wrong, blaming other people for your wrongness, things like that.
At one point he goes to see his doctor by just turning up at the office to find he isn’t there, so he has a talk with the nurse. Everyone in the play is ill in one way or another: nobody can sleep, the children are ill, Anna’s father visits and is suffering hugely from the transition to retired life and not being as young as he was. At the doctor’s office Andrew points out that there is a dead fish in the fish tank and the nurse tells him that all of the fish are dying, which may be one of the most Bergman moments imaginable. He reflects that nobody around him touches each other and there is no intimacy, in his moment of revelation.
I think if you wanted you could interpret this play in a very feminist way. Anna had clearly been brought up in a patriarchal way and initiated into society’s expected structures, most of which are lies. At the same time the artifice makes her completely dependant on the patriarchal structure and the men who surround her, even though she has a job as a lecturer and could presumably support herself. When her husband decides to confess that he has been unfaithful to her, and in a moment of honesty, she tells him that she has been living with a friend of his for the whole of their marriage, he is violently angry with her. Obviously what is good for the gander is definitely not good for the goose in this situation. While I think this interpretation is certainly possible it is not the one at the surface of the play, which is about lies and truth and the effect that lying has on you.
Tony Wright is in the play but his role is limited to being a ‘man from the ministry’ in a meeting in Andrew’s office, where he is second from the left. It even took me a couple of goes to spot him, it is such a small part. He does his role perfectly, in a meeting where (you guessed it) they all talk at once and don’t listen to each other, making no progress in the matter of the meeting at all.
While this is clearly an excellent play with layers of meaning, I do have one criticism. It’s taken me a few goes to get into it, and so I’m not sure it would be the obvious choice for an experiment in having multiple European countries broadcast the same play simultaneously, it’s far too difficult and too much hard work. The only other consciously ‘European’ work of cinema I can think of is far more likely: it’s that series starring Diana Rigg and a set of killer dolls called Mini Killers. It has no dialogue of any sort, doesn’t require any interpretation and was intended to be broadcast to the queues in petrol stations throughout Europe. I think that would be a much better idea than get involved in Ingmar Bergman.
My only other criticism (I’m criticising Ingmar Bergman here and am probably going to dissolve in a puddle) is the dinner party scene. It’s a device to bring Anna, her husband, and her lover together, but I think introduces too many other social elements than the simple convergence of the double couples, or perhaps the duplicity, which marks this play. There is also the slight problem that it is blatantly obvious which of the men at the dinner party Anna has been having sex with, and it isn’t her husband, but of course this may be intended to underscore that literally nobody is up for the truth in their circle. Andrew, of course, spends the party telling the woman next to him (who is Anna’s lover’s wife) how wonderful his wife and marriage are, before taking her home and beating her up because she is having an affair.
This is of course an excellent play, and while Play for Today’s plays are usually excellent, it is still head and shoulder above the others. It is quite hard work and requires attention, but the work required to watch it will pay off.
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