Recovery (BBC Drama)

2007-02-15T06:56:00.000-08:00

I was fortumate enough to be at a screening of Recovery, the new BBC one-off drama written by Tony Marchant and starring David Tennant and Sarah Parish. The screening took place at BAFTA on Valentine's day and I promised impressions to a couple of people so here it goes. I am not going to waste time with synopsis, if you want to learn more about the drama visit the BBC Press Release. As far as I know, Recovery will be broadcast on Sunday 25th February, 9pm at BBC1.

The question with a drama like this is whether it has more to say than this is a terrrible tragedy. And it does. The questions are both personal and cultural. Modern notions of love, success, identity, self-fulfilment are broken down and examined. The result is not cold and scientific but raw, specific to personal experience and unsentimental.

David Tennant has the thankless role of playing someone with no insight and no choices. Often the relationship the audience has with an actor becomes buggage and an obstacle when the actor tries new roles. In this instance, it is an advantage because in many ways it puts the audience in the same position as the character's wife: the audience has invensted in an intelligent vibrant presence and it's hard to accept the change. Tennant resists any temptation to make the character palatable, the character's lack of insight is in equal measures childlike and cold. He underplays many of his scenes but he is a haunting inescapable presence and his most moving moments come completely left field and smack you over the head.

Without a doubt Sarah Parish is the central character. You can't have drama without dilemmas and choices and she plays the character who has to make choices in every scene. It's great to see a female character who doesn't relish the carer's role. She manages to communicate confusion, ambivalence, disappointment, resentment and love, all at the same time, and it is a marvel to see. Both actors communicate an unquestionable intimacy with each other, extremely important since they spent so much time in different emotional worlds. It’s unquestionable that this separation is unnatural, and much of the drama is to accept that this might be their world from now on.

The script manages to revisit the same problems several times (central to the frustrations of people with brain injuries where the progress is uncertain since what is learned is often forgotten), but also maps a definite change for all characters (although this change doesn't guarantee a happy end). It poses a lot of questions, and answers a lot of them, but if there is a central premise is this: no answer is definite. The same questions, doubts and challenges will be answered again and again, and the same answer twice is not guaranteed.

As a post script, a couple of notes about the screening: it was introduced by Jane Tranter, Controller in BBC Fiction (responsible for all scripted content at the BBC). Her presence indicates that the BBC is very happy with how this project turned out and they are very keen on a high profile. In the Q&A that followed, we learned that Recovery was filmed in three weeks (a jaw dropping fact).

Day 1

2007-01-14T09:37:00.000-08:00

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Stop Me If You Heard It Before

Recovery (BBC Drama)

Day 1