Play for Today (TV Series) Plaintiffs and Defendants (1975) User Reviews

a compact and well-acted drama

[didi-5 · 7/10 · 15 July 2009]

'Plaintiffs and Defendants' was the first of a pair of plays written by Simon Gray for the Play for Today series in 1975. Both plays share the same casts but in different roles, some mirroring each other - a fascinating idea.

This play introduces us to Peter, a solicitor who is embroiled in a case of child custody. His wife Hilary is remote and irritated with him and their life together with teenage son Jeremy, while out of hours Peter has been carrying on with the unstable Joanna. The other characters are Charlie and Alison (who we don't actually see as such), friends of long-standing of Peter's, and Sallust, a quiet and dour legal pupil of Peter's who can easily beat him at squash.

In a wordy 60 minutes, we find out about the state of mind of Peter and about things in his past that have impacted on his life - it is one of those plays which includes the type of conversations you'd only ever find in plays and not in real life. This being so it still feels very real and the characters stand up as fully-rounded.

Alan Bates (Peter) and Joanna (Georgina Hale) are probably seen on screen the most, although Simon Cadell (Sallust) and Dinsdale Landen (Charlie) also make a memorable impact. This is a tale of lost opportunities, of giving up things and starting them again, of boredom and routine, and it is played extremely well.

Followed by 'Two Sundays' in the same series, although the two plays can stand as separate works as well as a linked pair.

A Death, Probably

[JamesHitchcock · 7/10 · 3 June 2021]

"Plaintiffs and Defendants" was part of the BBC's "Play for Today" series and has been described as a companion piece to the previous week's "Two Sundays", also written by Simon Gray and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. In both plays the main characters are named Charles and Peter. They are not the same individuals, although both characters named Charles are schoolteachers, both Peters are married to a woman named Hilary, and in both plays we learn that Charles and Peter were at public school together. In "Two Sundays" the character named Charles is played by Alan Bates and the one named Peter by Dinsdale Landen; in "Plaintiffs and Defendants" it's the other way around. In each play the character played by Alan Bates has a son named Jeremy. Simon Cadell, Rosemary Martin and Georgina Hale all appear in both plays.

In "Plaintiffs and Defendants", Peter is a barrister specialising in divorce cases. His current client, Mrs Sawsbury, is suing her ex-husband for custody of their children, although the play is as much about Peter's private life as it is about his work. He is married to a university lecturer named Hilary, but is caught up in an affair with a demanding mistress named Joanna. Although Hilary has not yet discovered the truth about her rival, it seems only a matter of time before she does. Peter is not in love with Joanna- quite the opposite- but is unable to give her up, partly because he knows she is infatuated with him and would not hesitate to inform Hilary in an attempt to bring matters to a head.

In "Two Sundays" the two main characters were roughly of equal importance, whereas in "Plaintiffs and Defendants" it is Peter who is the more important and Charles who effectively acts as his Father Confessor. He confesses to Charles not only his affair with Joanna but also all the vices- smoking, drinking, eating meat- which he wishes he could give up but finds himself unable to. (Charles, who is teetotal, non-smoking and vegetarian, seems happily married to his wife Rosemary). Although Hilary does not know about Joanna, she realises that something has gone out of their marriage, and has only a future of "Sunday lunches and monthly dinners" to happen to "until something happens to change them, a death probably".

The main theme of "Two Sundays" is the common one of the way in which youthful innocence gives way to middle-aged experience. Youthful innocence plays less of a role in "Plaintiffs and Defendants", which is more about the way in which middle-aged experience gives way to an acceptance of the inevitability of death. If the best performance in "Two Sundays" came from Landen as the cynical, disillusioned Peter, here it comes from Bates as another cynical, disillusioned character named Peter.

I would rank "Two Sundays" as the better of the two plays, largely because "Plaintiffs and Defendants" . Suffers, in my view, from a rather abrupt ending involving the death of a minor character with little connection to what has gone before. Nevertheless, both plays struck me as examples of the way in which British television in the seventies was able to produce intelligent, thoughtful drama (and not only as part of the "Play for Today" series), something increasingly rare in the more sensationalist television industry of today. 7/10.